What happens when you take micro-brewing to the extreme? You get extreme beer. It’s extreme! From It Ages Well, Is Kept in Cellars, Goes With a Good Cigar — Beer?:
At 24% alcohol by volume, Utopias is also one of the strongest beers ever brewed, though it has an extreme rival down in Delaware: World Wide Stout, produced by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, at slightly more than 23%.Extreme beer is being made with wine grapes and chili peppers. It is aged for years in barrels and put away in cellars. Blended in the tradition of Scotch whisky, it’s collected and resold for profit, like fine wine.
It’s also commanding extreme prices. Vermont’s Magic Hat Brewery, Washington State’s Fish Brewing Co., and several other U.S. brewers now make beers retailing at more than $20 a bottle. So do some beer-makers in Belgium, the European heart of extreme beer.
“To me, making extreme beer simply means pushing the boundaries of what people have always thought of as beer,” says Jim Koch, Boston Brewing’s founder and president — and the father of Utopias. One extreme example: Mr. Koch (pronounced Cook), following a medieval recipe, once made up a batch of beer by throwing a cooked chicken into the beer kettle.
“I’m not really so much about trying to sell ‘better beer’ to beer drinkers as I am about trying to win over the cognac and wine crowd,” says Sam Calagione, founder and owner of Dogfish Head in Milton, Del., whose motto is “off-centered ales for off-centered people.”
Besides the ultrastrong World Wide Stout, Dogfish Head sells a beer called Midas Touch. It is concocted from a 2,700-year-old-beer recipe reverse-engineered by a University of Pennsylvania molecular archaeologist; he took scrapings from a gold-filled tomb in Turkey, which some think was the burial place of King Midas. The ingredients, along with the usual beer components of hops, malt, water and yeast, include honey, white muscat grapes and saffron.