Changes

There haven't been many studies on the aging of beer packaged in corked bottles. There have been quite a few studies on Champagne and sparkling wine that have looked at various aspects of aging in corked bottles, and these studies might help us understand some aspects of beer stored in bottles that are corked.

Young finished champagne and sparkling wines produced according to the ''méthode traditionnelle'' process, which involves carbonating the champagne with sugar for 15 months and then disgorging them and corking them, begin with a CO² concentration of around 11-12 g/L (~6 volumes), while sparkling wines that are 5 years old and 10 years old have been found to have a much lower concentration of CO² at around 6-8 g/L (~3-4 volumes) <ref>[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000326700901349X?via%3Dihub Gérard Liger-Belair, Sandra Villaume, Clara Cilindre, Philippe Jeandet. 2010.]</ref><ref name="Liger-Belair_2011">[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf104675s Losses of Dissolved CO2 Through the Cork Stopper during Champagne Aging: Toward a Multiparameter Modeling. Gérard Liger-Belair and Sandra Villaume. 2011.]</ref>. The gradual loss of carbonation in sparkling wines has been attributed to the porous nature of corks allowing for the slow diffusion of gasses through them, which is highly variable based on the density of the cork <ref>[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19215133 Kinetics of CO(2) fluxes outgassing from champagne glasses in tasting conditions: the role of temperature. Liger-Belair G1, Villaume S, Cilindre C, Jeandet P. 2009.]</ref><ref>[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003267009013981?via%3Dihub#tbl1 Foaming properties of various Champagne wines depending on several parameters: Grape variety, aging, protein and CO2 content. Clara Cilindrea, Gérard Liger-Belair, Sandra Villaume, Philippe Jeandet, Richard Marchal. 2010.]</ref>, as well as the interface between the cork and the neck of the bottle <ref name="Liger-Belair_2011" />. An interesting observation is that there wasn't a large difference in carbonation loss between 5-year-old sparkling wines and 10-year-old sparkling wines, indicating that the loss of carbonation could greatly slow down once the liquid inside reaches around 3-4 volumes of CO².