EXTREME BEER

(eks.TREEM beer)

n.

A well-aged, usually high-priced beer with an exotic flavor or an exceptionally high alcohol content.

— extreme-beer adj.

Daniel Bradford describes the beverage in elegant language: "Silky, rich, creamy, with slight caramel notes. . . . It has much in common with a very balanced single-malt whisky." If properly cellared, it should age very well, adds Mr. Bradford, an aficionado of the libation.

Bottles of this stuff sell at auction on eBay for $150 to $300. But this isn't Scotch — it's "extreme beer," a growing phenomenon at the far edges of America's 25-year-old craft-brewing movement.

This particular brew, Utopias, is produced periodically by the Boston Brewing Co., makers of Sam Adams 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%. ...

The extreme-beer movement marks the latest effort by specialty "microbrewers" to transform their quaff from a commodity to a premium product.

— Ken Wells and Christopher Lawton, "It Ages Well, Goes With a Good Cigar And Is Kept in Cellars — - It's Called Extreme Beer — For Price, Alcohol Content," The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2003

Koch recently spent a beautiful day ensconced in his brewery's lab and surrounded by small glasses filled with beer samples. He was oblivious to the nice weather outside because he and two of his brewmasters were testing this year's entries for the Great American Beer Festival.The three tasted "Triple Bock," a yet-to-be-marketed sherry-like barley beer that is aged in an oak cask. Koch and his brewers like the way the new beer is developing. "It's a taste that nobody has ever put into a beer," he boasts.

It's what Koch calls an "extreme" beer and what Boston Beer specializes in — a premium, niche product that appeals to select drinkers, not the masses.

— Jenny C. McCune, "Brewing up profits; Boston Beer Co.," Management Review, April 1994

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Food and Drink