Beer.

I'm not a big beer drinker, but when I was renovating The Cave last year, especially the day I opened up that archway (see before and after), beer suddenly sounded good. Mmmm, beer, I thought every Friday. I tried some standard American big names but they were a lot like soda. I didn't want soda. Eventually I stuck with this one, as in, I love this stuff. Their whole line-up is good, but the Porter is just downright decadent.

If you walk through The Cave, you might notice this display on top of one of the lockers. Really? Beer in a wine storage facility? There is more than one collector here who cellars beer, and has been doing so for quite awhile. I mentioned this to a wine collector and he scoffed, "You can't age beer! It expires." Tell that to my beer-people.

Wait: tell it to me again, because skulking in our Cave-y bottle collection are a few little guys, easy to overlook in the dark. I had the pleasure of tasting all three of these aged selections, and not a-one of them was at all unpleasant. Just the opposite, each one was an other-beery sensation, smoother, softer, and more thoroughly incorporated. I've forgotten which was which, but one was like a floral champagne. Really, I thought, this is beer?

So when I stumbled onto this article recently from the LA Times talking about this new thing going on in Southern California where people are aging beer, I thought, well, not to my guys, ahead of the curve as usual.

Oh, say, you don't really need to crawl under your house for this sort of thing. We have lockers. They're dark, they're cold, and they'll save you a few loads of laundry.