High-alcohol beers

Point of brew: High-alcohol beers

I enjoyed a pint of beer at the Super Owl Brewery on Lake Blvd the other day. This is a pleasant location and, with owners Joe and Rachel Vida it is a friendly place to let down and enjoy a few brews. The beers are excellent.

However, after I finished my pint, I realized that I had taken in rather more alcohol than was wise. In checking the chalk board from which I selected my tipple I saw the product was scored at almost 8-percent content of alcohol. While this is not quite at the level of alcohol one finds in wines it is going seriously in that direction, and contains more than twice the alcohol one might expect to find in a regular beer from one of the major brewers.

A 16-ounce pint containing 8-percent alcohol volume (ABV) delivers 1.28 ounces of pure alcohol. This is roughly equivalent to 3.2 ounces of spirits at 80 proof (40 percent alcohol volume) or two good-measure shots of whiskey, vodka or gin. This of course makes the beer very good value on the buzz-per-buck scale, and this is important to some people.

Some year ago I was in the Miskin Arms in Pont-y-Clun (South Wales) with my cousins Ron and Ken who are big beer drinkers. To my amazement they ordered pints of Coors, newly available in the UK at that time, instead of ales from the Brains brewery (Cardiff) that has satisfied their lifetime of beer drinking. I expressed my surprise at this choice whereupon they pointed to the “gravity band” on the beer tap (a statement of strength) that showed that Coors was the strongest beer alcohol-wise for the money.

But the B-per-B scale is not the only scale by which beers may be appreciated. Another scale might be the delight-per-dollar scale on which elegance and grace and balance and refinement might be judged. Now, it is perfectly possible to find those qualities of excellence in a high alcohol beer but in such case one cannot enjoy much beer before falling off the bar stool.

Craft brewers are always ready to make new and astonishing and different and inventive beers that give their consumers a new experience. Some of these beers may employ unusual and often high-risk processes such as spontaneous fermentation; in this case the ambient microbial population of the environment is responsible for the fermentation and for the way the beer turns out.

There are some places in the world where this has been done for many centuries and works quite well. But otherwise these beers can be odd and strange and sometimes rather nasty; but for those aficionados who buy them the way the beer was made is authentic of style, interesting and provides them with genuine pleasure.

Nevertheless, this is a part of what I call the extreme-beer movement. I do not drink many of these kinds of these products but they do appeal to a small but noisy category of drinkers sometimes called “the beer Nazis” for their odd and extreme views; I think high-alcohol beers and weird beers in general have been a drag on the overall growth of the craft industry because extreme beers suit too few consumers and turn off too many others who might be attracted to the category to permit an expanding market.

Fortunately, in the last year or so, craft brewers have caught on to the need for more approachable products and, although there is now a downturn in sales that I hope is temporary, we have seen an extraordinary growth in the craft industry in recent years.

The interesting thing about beer is that unlike many other products it is entirely an invention of the brewer’s mind. Some brewers are trying to make terroir claims that ape the special case that winemakers make for wines from certain credible environments. Part of that claim I am sure resides in the close connection of wineries to the place where their grapes are grown. Brewers source their raw materials from such a wide range of places that it’s not easy to make the case for terroir.

When brewers make beer they are in charge of the character of the beer. They choose how much malt and other cereals they use to make up the grain bill. They can then manipulate the mashing process, mainly by temperature choices, to determine how much of the extract is fermentable sugar that makes alcohol and how much is not and doesn’t. If they wish, they can then add sugar that is completely fermentable to increase the fermentability (alcohol potential) of the wort.

By choosing malts and occasionally other grains that have been heated more intensely or even roasted, brewers can control the color of beer from yellow to amber to red to brown to black and, in parallel to color, the intensity of beer flavor.

Brewers can choose the amount of bitterness in the beer by the kind and amount of hops used, and exactly when those hops are incorporated into the process. For the most part, hops are used in the boiling stage, mostly for bitterness, but wonderful hops aromas can accrue by adding hops much later in the process even to finished beer (called “dry hopping”).

Thus, if you like a beer, please thank the brewer who made it; if you dislike a beer blame him.

There is a small fly in the brewers’ ointment: as the alcohol content and flavor and color intensity of beer goes up the cost goes up quite a bit, not only because there are more raw materials used that are more expensive, but also because brewing for higher alcohol is less efficient in time and yield. So, to an extent greater than one might expect, the price of a high alcohol beer may be considerably more than a low alcohol beer.

To return to my opening paragraph: drinking beer is about enjoyment, pleasure and relaxation; so drink what you enjoy and adds to that experience. But particularly in a craft beer/brewpub environment make sure you know the alcohol content of the beer in your glass because it can come back and bite you in the ****.

by Michael Lewis
Original Article