I gotcha, I’m really just restating my question. No offense taken
I’m hearing that heavily hopped brett beers remain awesome for a long time, and actually develop some new and excellent hop flavors over time. Am I going to try it? Probably not. Hop forward beers are becoming my least favorite styles. I enjoy about two a month, so what would I do with five gallons?
I could be wrong, but I think Ron Pattinson covers this extensively in some of his posts at Shut up about Barclay Perkins. His notates his sources pretty well.
My recollection is that the aged ales were also frequently blended back with fresher ales to get the benefit of the aged flavors. But it’s been awhile since I’ve dug in on his blog. Good stuff over there.
EDIT: From a quick check over at Ron’s site, stock and keeping ales were aged before sale. Milds were sold unaged, “mild” having nothing to do with strength. Like I said, good stuff over there.
This, from an 1899 parliamentary investigation in to beer grists:
(a.) Stock ale, kept 4 to 12 months before delivery:—
Fine English malt - - 66 to 66
Fine foreign malt - - 25 to 34
No. 1 invert sugar or glucose - 9 to 0
100
(b.) Semi-stock pale bottling beers, kept about three months before delivery:-
Good to fine English malt - - -.,60
Good to fine foreign malt - - - 25
No. 2 invert sugar or glucose - - 15
100
(c.) Light pale ales (A.K.), kept about 2 to 4 weeks before delivery:—
Good to fine English malt - - -.,55
Good to fine foreign malt - - - 25
No. 2 invert sugar or glucose - - 20
100
(d.) Mild ale (X. or XX.—fourpenny) kept four to ten days before delivery :—
Good English malt - - - -50
Good ordinary foreign malt - - - 25
No. 2, invert or glucose - - - 25
100
The full post is here: Shut up about Barclay Perkins: Parliament investigates beer grists (1899)
Dammit! I’ve gone back down the rabbit hole.
I thought it was pretty well known that in the 18th & 19th centuries especially, well aged beers/ales/porters were generally considered to be superior and premium products (and priced accordingly). Old Ale or Burton Ale (arguably essentially the same as what came to be called Barleywine when Bass coined the term at the turn of the 20th century) and vatted Porter are prime examples. The Porter brewers especially brewed and bulk aged their products in huge quantities and aged them in enormous vessels for a year or even longer.
There has been quite a bit written about this, there are lots of sources to search but it has certainly been covered quite well (and probably best) by both Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson (both very dedicated and gifted researchers in addition to being two of the brewing world’s best “mythbusters”), as referenced by others who responded to your query.
Cornell’s writings about India Pale Ale are particularly compelling reading (and rather surprising).
Fantastic stuff! This kind of discussion is why I’m here. This collective research is how we broaden out knowledge of brewing. “The rabbit hole” is where we need to go to make the best beer we can, and that’s what it’s all about. To quote my brew club’s motto: “In Search of the Perfect Pint.”
You make a good point. For me, the taste of an aged IPA is what I like, tradition totally aside…probably because the IPA I drank a lot of in the late '60s/early-mid '70s despite it’s fairly high price (Ballantine India Pale) was aged for a full year before packaging and the resulting 70+ IBU bitterness was intense, but very crisp and clean. The aroma of that IPA was also intense, very probably more intense than the ‘authentic’ IPAs of the 1800’s since near the end of the 1 year bulk maturation, Ballantine dry hopped the product and at bottling, very generously dosed it with house-made aromatic fraction distilled hop oil. My source for that info is a series of chats with former Ballantine employees in the early '80s (which was around ten years after the Ballantine plant closed for good), If you have a bottle of the new Sierra Nevada Hop Hunter IPA handy (or better still, poured on draft), take a whiff of it and the imagine that hop aroma times three…and that will give you some idea of what the aroma of the original Ballantine IPA was like (the recently released re-creation, while quite good, lacks both the intense aroma and the long aged character of the original).
In any case, that’s what prompted me to age my own home brewed IPA for 6-12 months on average, and that’s how I’ve done it since the early-mid 1980s. The real trick (and not always an easy one) is brewing it often enough to allow that kind of aging. ;D
(late edits to clarify and correct spelling & grammar)
Mitch Steele stated that aging was necessary to tame the bitterness of IPA in his book.
I believe that Al is highlighting the difference between traditional East Coast IPA and modern American IPA. Traditional East Coast IPA was more in line with traditional British IPA than what is found west of the Appalachian mountain range today. Ballantine IPA was an aged product. American (West Coast) IPA is not as bitter as it is hoppy. I was a pre-teen when Ballantine shuttered it doors, but I remember my father, my uncles, and my grandfather being incredibly excited when they were able to secure bottles of Ballantine IPA. They would share the beer at Christmas. One would have thought that they were drinking a vintage bottle of Dom Perignon.
This is exactly what I was looking for. As usual, thank you guys for enlightening me. I love that this place is still a place to learn. 
Ron Pattinson states that British IPAs would age for up to a year in the brewery’s yard before they ever were placed on a ship for the 6 month trip to India.
Read “Amber, Gold, and Black” by Martyn Cornell, and also “Hops and Glory” by Pete Brown for more background.
I have nothing to offer here, but to comment that I’m enjoying this thread. Carry on!
I need to finish “Amber, Gold, and Black.” It has been a very informative read thus far. I particularly like the chapter on mild ale.
Mitch Steele mentioned some of this in his book, here is more about Ballantine IPA that was aged for a year.
http://hoptripper.com/the-return-of-ballantine-ipa/
There has been much written about how some beers like porter were aged for flavor development. This is good, and the historic incident is some good trivia. He covers the flavor development towards the end.
The interesting thing here is that Martyn Cornell writes that mild ale was a description for young beer, not a type of beer or an ABV level.
From my studies, it appears that single-strain pure culture ale fermentation did not come into being in the UK until around the 1950s. A ton of ground breaking research was conducted by British brewing scientists such as A. A. Eddy and J. S. Hough in the late forties through late fifties. Brewing cultures were most assuredly mixed cultures in the nineteenth century. Several of the remaining traditional British breweries still use mixed cultures. For example, Harveys has been re-pitching the same mixed culture for over fifty years. While we associate the Brettanomyces yeast genus with Belgian beer today, Brettanomyces is Latin for British fungus. Almost all non-mild beer in the nineteenth century would have exhibited Brett character after aging.
By mixed culture do you mean multiple strains of S. Cerevisiae or multiple genus of yeast? PS. I am not sure I am using the biology terms correctly here.
The idea of all ages British beer tasting of Brett sounds horrible to me.
It was probably Brett C, which is not as wild (so some say).
The cultures were more than likely a cocktail of multiple yeast genera (the plural form of the word genus), multiple strains within a genus, and bacteria. I believe I read somewhere that Jean DeClerck isolated the two yeast strains that are used by Duvel from a bottle of McEwan’s Scotch ale that contained more than ten different isolates.