Record Breaking Beer

While my single friends hit the bars last night, wearing halter tops and hopeful smiles, my husband and I headed home together wearing wrinkled work clothes and weary expressions. In one of those strange NY coincidences--though really not all that surprising, given we both work at magazines--our offices are located across the street from one another. The stranger coincidence was that we were both able to get out of work by 6:30 on a Friday night, a rarity for either of us, much less both. Home by 7:15, after a brief stop at a gourmet deli for a chicken wrap and three boxes of chocolate panda face cookies (I basically bought out the stock--and I'd give you the proper name, but it's written in Kanji), I headed straight for the shower to wash away any lingering residue from work. My husband, Victor, headed straight to the bar, where he removed the strangest shaped beer bottle I have ever seen and put it in the freezer to chill. The Samuel Adams Utopias "extreme" brew is distinctive not just for its packaging--it comes in a commemorative copper-colored, brew kettle-shaped bottle--but for its alcohol content and its price tag, both of which are the highest of any beer in the world. My husband got #1090 of 8,000 limited edition bottles of the 2005 re-issue Utopias at work, where it had arrived along with a folder full of press material in the hopes of a magazine mention. He brought it home ostensibly to see if it tasted good enough to write about.
So how does a $100 bottle of 25% alcohol-by-volume beer taste?
Well I'll tell you this, it does not taste like any beer I've ever had. And I like malty, high-alcohol beers like the Brooklyn Brewery's Monster Ale (11.8% ABV), Canada's Fin du Monde (9% ABV), and strong Belgian beers like Duval (8.5% ABV) and Chimay Blue (9% ABV). Utopias, according to the Samuel Adams press release, is brewed with a "fine selection of Bavarian Noble hops" and different types of malts and yeast (including, surprisingly, a variety normally used in champagne) in oak barrels aged up to 11 years. The complicated process sounded to me a little like that used for making scotch, which should have clued me in to the fact that this was no ordinary beer. That and the pungent aroma that escaped when Victor poured the honey-colored brew into the special snifter that Sam Adams had kindly provided, along with instructions to "savor slowly in a two-ounce portion." This is definitely a sipping beer. Sweeter and stronger, and more complex, than I'd imagined, it tasted like a combination of plum wine (which is too syrupy sweet for my tastes) and a good scotch. And that isn't an entirely bad thing. It's just unusual. And definitely not something you'll want to sip too fast--and not just because of the intensity of the flavors, but because you'll be smashed before you know it. After one snifter full I was stumbling around the bedroom. Three more big sips and I was in bed. Sleeping. Soundly.
So, if you plan to drop $100 in July when this bottle hits stores, a few cautionary tips: This is a beer in name only. Sip it like a cognac. Slowly. And limit yourself. Utopias has held the record in the Guinness Book of World Record for world's strongest beer since 2002 (not that I'd imagine there's a lot of competition there, when you get above 15% ABV). After the way I felt this morning, I'd say it's a pretty strong contender in the category of world's worst beer hangover too.