I don’t have a lot of experience with barrel aged beers. But I bought a selection of some barrel aged stouts a few weeks ago and I am finding these beers are perfectly flat! No carbonation at all!! Is that normal or could these beers be old?
Edit: These beers are bottled.
No, not normal at all.
A couple of guesses: they were bottle conditioned and the yeast wasn;t helathy enough to survive the conditioning process. Or the caps were not secured properll and the Co2 leaked out.
Low carbonation is normal for barreled stouts; no carbonation is not.
Did you get them at the brewery or from a retailer?
Not normal and I wouldn’t expect it from commercial breweries because they usually force carbonate those beers. If this happened, it was either intentionally bottled flat and should say on the label or it’s severely flawed. (It’s pretty rare in my experience to find commercial barrel aged beers naturally carbonated, especially if we’re not talking sour beer.) If they are minimally carbonated, well that’s sometimes intentional to help the beer get that brownie batter texture.
I would reach out to the brewery and let them know.
This is starting to make sense. I got the quart bottles relatively cheap. So, I’m beginning to think they are old and lost any carbonation they may have had.
Thanks for the input!