A look down the near aisle

Guided Tour, June 2006

The shelving for the cellar utilizes four shelving units from Home Depot. These shelves are arranged to form two aisles, giving access to both the front and back of a pair of the shelves.
The left side of the second aisle is the back side of the first aisle. There is no backside to the right side of the second aisle as it is up against the wall.
Yes, that is a fluorescent light you see above the second aisle. Good thing the room stays in the dark most of the time.
The two aisles are divided up into six units. Each of these units focuses on a different style of beer. The bottom of the unit is case storage for the beers in the shelves above.
Below we'll take a closes look at each of the different units. Click on a unit to see a large resolution image.
Frequently you will see multiple rows the same beer stacked side by side. Each row is a different ventage of that beer.
A look down the far aisle
Belgians

Yes, that's horizontal storage on the top. The current school of thought is 50/50 on horizontal vs. vertical storage with no real strong argument on either side. So I use both. The horizontal storage helps putting more choices in a smaller space.
Otherwise, the top shelf is saisons and tripples and dark styles on the bottom.
American Style Barley Wines

The top shelf gets the 22oz bombers. The middle shelf has mostly East Coast and the bottom shelf is West coast. There are several vintages, especially many years of Bigfoot.
Oaked / English BW / Mead / Scotch

This one is a bit harder to see since it's hard to get a good angle for the picture. The top shelf features various oaked aged and conditioned beers. The middle features English style barleywines, with an ungodly number of vintages of the Thomas Hardy's. The bottom shelf features meads, old ales, and scotch ales.
Big Malt Styles / Homebrew

The top and bottom shelves have lots of different homebrew. Some Stones are squeezed in on the bottom shelf. A few years of cellering has helped my few attempts at homebrewing a few years ago. The middle shelf features what I call the big malt beers - bocks, dopplebocks, eisbocks, samiclaus and such.
Smoked / Winter / Spiced

The top shelp is mostly smoked beers with a few Baltic porters sneaking in on the far right. The middle shelf are the non-spiced winter beers. Most of these really fit in other categories, but this is a good place for now. The bottom shelf has the spiced winter beers, featuring lots of Anchor OSA - a favorite vertical of mine.
Stout / Imperial Stout

A mixture of regular and imperials stouts on the top. The middle shelf are all imperials. The bottom shelf is taken up mostly by a few verticals. Regular stouts are not good candidates for cellaring, but imperial stouts, like BBCS, turn to velvet after a few years.

The wall of swag

Funny how this stuff seams to collect of the years.
The top shelf has a lot of pint glasses. We'll see much more glassware as we continue. Next we have many different rogue bottles. Luckily I've only collected silkscreened bottles otherwise I'd be overrun with way too many bottles. A few Stone bottles are creeping in from the left. Note the wallpaper behind the shelves - it's made from six-pack cartons. The bottom two shelves house a bunch of POS items as well as the Rogue Shrine highlighted below.
Rogue Shrine
The wall of swag
To the right we see a storage cabinet with more glassware suitable for display behind a fancy glass door.
The bottles on this cabinet are beers waiting to be rated. The box to the right in the foreground and beers that need to be rerated.
Under the rerate box, is one of two freezers that have been converted with an external thermostat to be an auxillery keg storage for the bar. Below is the inside of one of the keg coolers.

Cold Keg Storage
Glasses / On Deck Circle
Staging Area

Above we see the staging area.

This was temporary storage for sorting incoming beers until they are filed away. It has been taken over with beers that are put aside to be taken to various tastings. I also have a box of bonus beers that I like to throw in when doing trades. I need to find a space for the tasting/bonus beers so that I can get my staging area back.

The wall of storage

This wall features three more storage containers - a chest full of swag, a refrigerator full of cold beer, and a cabinet full of glassware - and another wall papered with empty six-packs. There's a place to sit in the middle of it all.
On top of the refrigerator is a stereo connected to a DISH receiver tuned to Sirius Satelite Radio.
Below we see details of each of the storage containers.
The chest houses coasters or other freebies that seams to fill up drawer after drawer.
The contents of the fridge varies from time to time. I keep a lot of stuff cold that I'll give to less beer aware visitors. I have moved all of the IPAs and IIPAs into the fridge for storage. I still don't keep them around for too long. I also have a pitcher of beer that I use to soak rawhide bones for the dog.
More Storage
A chest of swag
Cold Beer
This cabinet houses liter mugs, ceramic steins, and taster glasses.

Would you believe all of the glass storage in the cellar is overflow storage from upstairs? The cellar now has more glassware than upstairs. Some of the glassware has been moved to the bar, but most of it remains here.
More glassware
Have a seat

Sit a spell

Of course, you have to have a place to sit while hanging out in the cellar. Crank up some tunes, grab a cold one, have a seat, and kick back and commune with the beer for an hour or two while the wife thinks you are out back doing yard work.
Empty boxes, coolers, and kegs
stacking up outside the cellar door
Or the other seat