Ken Weaver

The Most Wanted Beers in the World – Part 2

Part 1 of this article can be found here.

Few people will argue with the statement that craft beer is generally cheaper than wine. Sure, for $10 I could presumably scrounge up a palatable bottle of Spanish Rioja, or New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, or an Argentine Malbec, but I could also buy a six-pack of the majority of craft beers for that same price. It’s even less fair when talking about the highest-end offerings of both, comparing Pétrus and first-growth Bordeaux to the Ratebeer Top 50, with the majority of the latter retailing for under $20 a pop. These still remain two different worlds.

And yet, the craft beer world has been anything but immune to rising prices and increased difficulty of tracking down rare releases. Limited bottlings sell out in no time, eBay trafficking is becoming not only anticipated but vaguely acceptable (at least in a recent poll from beernews.org), and $20+ bottles of beer have been slowly losing their shock value (sort of). That doesn’t mean we’re buying up the majority of these on a regular basis – but there’s a legitimate market for such things that didn’t really exist ten years back. I had mentioned Samuel Adams Utopias ($100) and Millennium ($200) in the preceding part of this article, and these were amongst the first beers to take craft beer pricing to that next level. But they aren’t the first things I think of when it comes to expensive beer.

While Stone Brewing Co. is obviously well-known in the craft beer world for any number of reasons, their Vertical Epic line of bottled beers was really one of first brewery-based initiatives that tried to educate consumers about what most of us know by now: in a cool, dark closet, certain beers will develop and possibly even improve over a number of years.

Their first offering in the Vertical Epic series, Stone 02.02.02 Vertical Epic Ale, consisted of a 300-case release in early February 2002, and was followed by subsequent releases on 03.03.03, 04.04.04, etc., to culminate on 12.12.12 when the full VE lineup would finally be opened. Between the collectibility and the high quality shown in Stone’s earliest Vertical Epic releases, those initial bottles are rarely traded for but can frequently be seen changing hands through eBay, where collectors regularly pay between $400-$600 a bottle. Whether these collectors are thirsty or merely speculative remains to be determined. If you should feel like geeking out on price elasticities for Stone 02.02.02, this study will help.

One of the caveats evidently required by eBay is to acknowledge that “the value of the item is in the collectible container, not its contents.” And while I think many people just tend to slough that off as necessary eBay boilerplate (do people even use that word anymore?), it’s pretty spot-on. The contents may still taste great, but it’s infrequently only about the sensory satisfaction of what’s inside. It’s often a sense of history, of involvement, of contacting something that will disappear.

This is even more true when it comes to the charitable auctions that occasionally occur in the craft beer world. In March of 2008, Mikkeller announced they would be auctioning off a 40-bottle batch of their incredibly rare X Imperial Stout that had spent eight months in sherry casks.  Ølbutikken, one of the finest craft beer stores in Denmark, helped to coordinate a charity auction of these bottles that went to benefit Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke, a Denmark-based non-profit dedicated to development work in Mozambique. Between the previous inaccessibility of most of Mikkeller’s X line of beers and the charitable nature of the auction, the forty bottles of Mikkeller X Imperial Stout 2007 Barrel Aged sold for between 131 to 579 euros apiece, with the highest bidder (for bottle #1) also winning additional bottles of the Mikkeller X Imperial Stout 2006 and 2007.  Altogether, the auction raised nearly 7,000€ for nonprofit work in Mozambique.

But, speaking personally, there’s really nothing more jaw-dropping in terms of price, quality, rarity, ABV, longevity, and packaging than a certain special beer from Alan Sprints and Hair of the Dog Brewing Company. The first batch of Dave, a 29% Barley Wine that’s currently the highest rated of its style on Ratebeer, was brewed in 1994 and yielded approximately a hundred gallons of beer. There was no second batch. After winning the 1998 Toronado Barley Wine Festival, the beer quietly returned home to be served as occasional sips and samples at the Portland-based brewery to a few lucky visitors. I’m guessing there was a secret handshake involved. Then, in 2008, as part of that year’s FredFest (the article linked via the above picture offers further details about this event, including the involvement of Hop Press writer Lisa Morrison), five bottles of Dave were donated for a charity auction to support Parkinson’s research, which Michael Jackson had recently passed away from. The five bottles (which resemble plastic soy sauce bottles, screwtop and all) sold for between $478 and $719 apiece. Even after 14 years, recent ratings will contest that Alan’s beer is still holding up rather well.

For me, these are the beers that most frequently come to mind when it comes to expensive beer, but I’m sure there are others. News recently trickled back to me regarding the private sale of a bottle of Framboos (while the final price remained undisclosed, I was assured it was an impressive sum). What else am I missing though? What beers do you think of when the topic of pricey beer comes up?

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