Sink the Bismarck

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Permalink Reply by Tom Ashton on February 17, 2010 at 10:14pm

Is making a 41% beer really something to be proud of? i bet the alcohol will just overpower everything. and NZ$100 for a 330ml bottle, shite. i'd rather have a bookbinder any day :)

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Permalink Reply by David Wood on February 17, 2010 at 11:05pm

They're just in a silly competition with that German brewery to make the worlds strongest 'beer'. I think once you ice distil a beer, it is no longer beer. As Kieran HM has said: if you class it as beer, you might as well class whiskey as beer.

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Permalink Reply by Soren on February 17, 2010 at 11:33pm

I do agree that its silly but I would still classify it as beer. Whisky is distilled to 80+% then evaporated and diluted down to bottling strength, on the way it gets most its character from the wood its aged in. These strong 'beers' are still beers that have been concentrated in strenght, and I assume flavour without having tried them myself... Eisbocks have been made this way for a long time, and they are definitely beers:)

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Permalink Reply by Mike Neilson on February 18, 2010 at 7:28am

Its getting a little stupid now isn't it!! I would rather buy a bottle of Single Malt over this any day!!

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Permalink Reply by Soren on February 18, 2010 at 8:01am

aiight! if mike thinks its getting stupid they must have crossed the line! i'd still like to try it though...

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Permalink Reply by denimglen on February 18, 2010 at 3:47pm

I don't think it's stupid to be honest.

No different to things like Pliny The Younger, just alcohol instead of hops. And I'd make a safe bet that if someone brought out a beer with twice the amount of hops as Pliny/Ruination/etc everyone would be on it like the mutts nuts.

Good on them I say. Sounds like those dudes get reamed by the local government, go hard, stick it to the fuckers.

...Any mug (with money) can take a normal batch of beer and distill it until it's as high as you like...

I dunno about that to be honest. You need a clean as beer to start with to freeze distill it. Any fusels, off flavours or anything are going to get concentrated by freezing. It's not like they're running it through a reflux still and stripping it down to near pure ethanol - which any mug with a decent still and some training can do. I'd bet if you took your average kiwi lager/draught and FD'd that it would be damn near undrinkable.

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Permalink Reply by Greig McGill on February 18, 2010 at 8:21am

Yeah, but classification arguments aside...

There is skill in brewing Utopias. It's taken Jim Koch and his crew years of teasing and training his yeast to ferment that beast of a beer to 26%. It *deserved* to be "the strongest beer in the world", and whether you like it or not (and I like it), it was truly a reflection of what it means to be a craft brewer. Any mug (with money) can take a normal batch of beer and distill it until it's as high as you like. Sure, after a while, you'll be battling with your distillation technology, and I guess there's an art to that, but really, it's just brewing machismo writ large. There's a place for that. TNP was funny, and I hear is a genuinely nice drop. This latest effort (awful name aside) is just a step too far.

Schneider Eisbock is in at beerstore at the moment I see. Give that a crack. THAT is how you do an Eisbock. :)

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Permalink Reply by Regional Wines and Spirits on February 18, 2010 at 10:37am

I think the punch line is that we are all talking about a small brewery on the other side of the world. Its very effective marketing if you follow the maxim that all publicity is good publicity. Personally I think some of thier publicity stunts do the beer world, and potentially thier own interests damage not good but they obviosly dont think so.

Kieran H-M

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