2 year old Porter (Can it still be good?)

2 years ago (today) I brewed a basic Robust Porter recipe. It was going to be the starting point for some attempts at toasting my own malts…in particular a smoked brown malt. After reading Ray Daniels descriptions of original porter, I’d decided I wanted to try and figure it out. Anyway, I’d made this batch of modern porter to set a few aside for comparison as I worked on the recipe. Long story, shorter….life happened and I ended up leaving the porter in the secondary for the last two years. I’m getting back into brewing now, and I just knew this beer was a goner. I just hadn’t gotten around to dumping the carboy.
So, its porter season again…a couple weeks ago I brewed the same porter recipe…this time with the intent to split the batch into secondaries and add chocolate/vanilla to one, coffee to the other, and a small but un-doctored. Last night I transferred the new porter into carboys with the secondary ingredients. While I had all the racking / cleaning equipment out, I figured it was a good time to finally get rid of the old Porter.
As I pulled the airlock off the carboy, I decided, “Well, I might as well take a gravity reading, just to see where it finished.”
Then it was, “Huh…now I’ve got a thief full of beer. It can’t hurt to take a small sip, right?”
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