Whether you’re sequestering a supply of seasonal brews for an off-season sip or your company is stocking up for a highly anticipated can release, storing fermented products properly is crucial when maintaining their unique flavor and ensuring quality.
From transit corner boards to machine shrink wrapping, there are many available technologies to keep your beverages bubbly and in-tact during storage and transportation.
In this guide, we’ll break down the six key elements to ace when it comes to ways to store alcohol and explain why proper alcohol storage is essential when it comes to temperature, carbonation, and fermentation.
Why is Proper Storage Important?
As a crafter of canned cocktails, wine spritzers, or brews, you’re looking to produce your products quickly and efficiently and then provide adequate storage while you wait for them to ship to markets and stores around the country.
Proper liquor storage is crucial to any canning operation—it can safeguard canned products, prevent possible damage, and ensure the longevity of your product. Finding adequate storage can also benefit those wanting to experiment with “cellaring,” the process of home-aging high-ABV, unpasteurized brews to encourage additional flavor development and fermentation.
Peanut Butter: The Canary in the Tap Room
Regardless of the reason, using improper or sub-optimal storage may result in downright undrinkable beverages. To envision why alcohol storage is so important, take a look at another shelf-stable, sealed product—peanut butter.
While peanut butter isn’t fermented or pasteurized, it’s generally safe to sit on a shelf for as long as you need it to—just like alcohol—as long as you maintain appropriate conditions.
Would you leave an opened jar of peanut butter out in the summer sun, keep it in a deep freezer, or expose the container to unpredictable conditions and expect the product to taste the same? Of course not!
Just like every shelf-stable product, alcohol must be treated with care to maintain its unique flavor, texture, carbonation, and container efficacy.
How to Safely Store and Transport Alcohol
We know that proper alcohol storage matters, but how do we make it happen in our warehouses, storerooms, or home garages? Let’s explore some critical elements—packing and sealing, safe handling, temperature maintenance, light, expiration dates, and upright storage.
Responsible Packaging
If you plan on storing a large quantity of alcoholic beverages for a long time, think carefully about your packaging plan. When you imagine a pallet of canned alcohol sitting in your storage space, what do you see?
Ideally, long-term alcohol storage should mirror that at Wildpack and include:
- Well-sealed cans or bottles – Professionally-sealed cans are often difficult to puncture or damage. To return to the peanut butter analogy, store-bought peanut butter comes in a well-sealed package with a tamper-evident foil for freshness. If you made homemade peanut butter and stored it in unsealed mason jars, it certainly wouldn’t last as long as its store-bought alternative, and alcohol is the same.
- Shrink-wrapping – Shrink-wrapping can protect cans from damage and temperature fluctuation by slightly insulating the cans against high heat and freezing temperatures.
- Pallets with corner boards – Arguably most important, pallets with corner boards help to keep canned alcohol solidly stacked to prevent them from falling over. If your alcohol storage space doubles as a two-car garage, a home office, or a copacker’s workshop, your cans are likely to take a bump or two during their time in storage. Pallets with corners help keep your cans steady, preventing toppling piles and container damage.
At Wildpack, these three elements of proper packaging are crucial to our storage operations, so we take extra care to ensure that our cans are properly sealed, shrink-wrapped, and loaded on pallets with corner boards for extra stability.
Safe Handling
While you won’t be able to hop on the truck and babysit your canned beverages throughout their journey, focus on the things you can control or influence, like safe handling before and after your cans reach their destination.
While team-lifting a whole pallet of alcohol and gently placing it on a pillowy surface isn’t feasible, consider employing more realistic best practices when handling canned alcohol:
- Assign or hire strong and organized people to move the beer to and from the truck.
- Move and store pallets on furniture blankets to prevent further bumps and shakes.
- Handle smaller packaging—like six- or twelve-packs—with equal care, making sure not to carry more than you can handle or stack boxes high enough to topple.
At Wildpack, our designated shipping and receiving team has never met a delivery they couldn’t move and handle safely. We take every precaution possible to avoid packaging damage and ship your brews like the prized possessions they are.
Climate Control
While you want to avoid freezing temperatures and sweltering storage spaces, cold-to-moderate temperatures are best for storing alcohol long-term. Let’s explore two scenarios:
- You’re crafting a large quantity of pasteurized, canned beer. Since flavor development is complete—or nearly complete—as soon as the cans are processed through the pasteurization equipment, you want to prioritize freshness over aging potential. Keep temperatures as cold as possible without freezing the beverage—ideally under 45°F.
- You’re experimenting with cellaring, and you order a pallet of unpasteurized cans to test. If you expect further flavor development, but don’t want to sacrifice freshness or create a stale beverage, aim for temperatures between 44 and 55°F.
While you can experiment with temperatures (especially for cellaring purposes), the most important climate control element is consistency. Alcohol doesn’t respond well to large temperature fluctuations, whether you’re cellaring or not, and beer, spritzes, and cocktails may go stale or lose carbonation when stored in a place with fluctuating temperatures.
Limited Light
Alcohol, like beer, generally doesn’t respond well to light either—that’s why beer bottles are usually dark brown or green.
Why is beer so sensitive to light, and how does it affect its shelf life? Hops are to blame. When brewers boil hops before fermentation, the hops produce isomerized alpha acids. When visible or ultraviolet light hits these acids, they break down into free radicals, which, when they react with sulfuric proteins, create 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol—the same chemical found in skunk spray.
While the phenomenon isn’t well-studied, “skunking” has been in the brewers’ parlance for years.
To avoid turning a palette of perfectly-flavored beer into a “skunky” nightmare, keep it in a low-lit area. While cans aren’t as susceptible to light damage as bottles, you should still make an effort to keep your alcohol out of the sunlight during storage. Excessive light can also cause the alcohol content to heat, which can also wreak havoc on the quality of your product.
Date Tracking
Just like our trusty peanut butter, alcohol has an expiration date. While expired alcohol won’t cause sickness, it can disrupt the quality of your product. For example, liquor loses flavor, and beer goes flat (and wine manufacturers know that wine only gets better with age).
However, alcohol should always be stored, shipped, and consumed in relation to its expiration date.
Let’s take a look at beer.
While expired pasteurized beers aren’t a big health risk, unpasteurized products may be. That’s because pasteurization eliminates detrimental microorganisms after packaging, and these products are less likely to develop harmful bacteria.
However, unpasteurized beer has a higher likelihood of developing colonies of gut-wrenching bacteria, and aging only gives microbiomes time to develop to infectious concentrations.
When choosing a brew for long-term storage, consider how the expiration date will impact your plans. Unless you think you can drink—or distribute—five pallets of beer within the brew’s expiration date, consider ordering a smaller quantity or choosing a type of alcohol with a longer shelf life.
Upright Storage
While it might seem arbitrary, storage orientation is important for any alcohol storage plan. Let’s compare beer and wine:
- Wine is typically corked using organic or synthetic materials that dry out over time. Thus, wine and beer bottles with corks should be stored on their sides to keep the cork hydrated during storage. Dried-out corks will shrink, leading to leakage and spoiling.
- Beer is normally bottled or canned, and bottled beers typically have metal caps. Since beer packaging generally requires metals, long-term beer storage must prevent rust as much as possible, so keeping caps dry is ideal. Thus, beers should be stored upright.
While bottle caps can rust on the inside, so can alcohol cans. There’s at least a little bit of air in every alcohol can, and when cans are turned on their sides, a larger surface area of metal is exposed to that air, which can lead to oxidation—rust.
Storing alcohol isn’t the only process you have to figure out. You also have to consider how to ship beverages and the food and beverage quality control standards it has to pass.
Wildpack: Storing, Transporting, and Handling Beverages Responsibly Since 2017
Appropriately storing alcohol products like beer, wine, and cocktails is crucial for long-term enjoyment, especially if you’re planning to stockpile a favorite brew or keep lots of cans on hand for an upcoming release.
At Wildpack, we’re not just packaging experts—we’re also masters of long- and short-term alcohol storage. Our packaging, handling, climate control, light reduction, and expiration date efforts are second-to-none, and we’ve been keeping cans safe and sound since 2017.
Whether you’re a homebrewer investing in your first canned batch or a large company preparing an ambitious new distribution campaign, Wildpack can handle the storage logistics, so you don’t have to. Our passion for packaging is just as strong as our penchant for responsible storage.
Sources:
Wine Enthusiast Magazine. How and When to Cellar Beer, Explained. https://www.winemag.com/2020/07/21/cellar-beer-temperature-guide/
Food and Wine Magazine. The Best Way to Store and Age Beer. https://www.foodandwine.com/beer/how-store-age-beer-best-practices
The Washington Post. When Beer Meets Light. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/2007/02/28/when-light-meets-beer/dc5d7dcc-8ad1-4327-b1da-c9fdd6a4352f/
