Good article in the Los Angeles Times today by Evan George on the hobby of the beer stash. The hero of the story is Mr. Arrieta:

To grab a beer, Israel Arrieta doesn't just stroll to the fridge; he has to walk out his back door to the side of the house, where he pries a chicken-wire screen off a basement window and scrambles, crab position, down a wooden ladder. Several minutes later, he emerges cradling half a dozen cool, dusty bottles of beer. Arrieta, 27, keeps his beer in the closest thing to a cave: the crawl space under his parents' North Pasadena house.

We also read about a 55-year-old who writes for the film industry, a retired medic, a Raytheon engineer from Glendale but it's Arrieta, the guy who keeps his beer in a dirt crawl space behind chicken wire, who makes the story. He sums up the hobby as "not drinking everything just because you have it" and I suppose that is why I do it, too, as well as simply because I have to hunt out my beer an buy in mass purchases living, as I do behind the great mapled curtain of national denial.

One of the other stash nerds also pointed out that "If you just age all the bottles for 10 years and drink them in a month, that doesn't make sense." I don't know if I necessarily agree with that as I am quite comfortable with the idea that a beer like a wine can be on point or past it. I want it when its best because who really needs to be exposed to a beer that is "cloyingly salty, more like Kikkoman than a Boston lager"? Gak.