And that time may be now.
There is a beer (a Belgian ale to be exact) which costs over US$700 a bottle. It is 55 proof and looks like this:
Yes folks, that is a bottle of beer embedded in an actual taxidermied squirrel.
Seems funny, certainly strange to look at, but when I think about it, this is really one of the most demented things I’ve seen in a long time. A bottle of beer should never cost hundreds of dollars, and it should never be bottled in a taxidermied rodent. The people who have done this are sick and need to be rounded up and institutionalized before they have any more brilliant ides.
And we take their beer, because I hear it tastes OK.
Appropriately, the story is at the Asylum
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It’s not 55 proof. It’s 55 percent alcohol by volume. That extremely strong when you consider that most decent beers are about 6 percent ABV.
Oh, and that squirrel is just too weird.
I would also note that that is not a bottle of beer. I am not sure exactly what one would call it, apparently they freeze their beer to eliminate non-alcoholic fluids. But I definitely don’t think beer is a reasonable name for it.
That would be what folks in the brewing club I was slightly involved* in did with their bad brews. Let it freeze hard enough and you basically have a very strong alcoholic beverage that doesn’t taste nearly so wrong as bad beer.
So not only is it disturbing and obscenely overpriced, it is also not really beer.
* I brewed a lager – which I think is piss, no matter how “good” and it won 1rst in a blind tasting. Unfortunately, I was never able to brew a decent stout, which is what I like (unless we’re talking a good triple – like La Fin Du Monde, by Canuckistanian Unibroue). So I can brew piss that everyone likes – except me and can’t brew what I like.
$ 700 is a whole lot of money, but I think you’ve got to keep it in perspective – right now, it’s just an obscenely expensive bottle of beer of dubious quality. But 500 years from now, it will keep dozens of archeologists occupied with pondering, guessing and speculating, and there will always be a confused little crowd surrounding it in the museum, engaged in animated discussions – for that, it’s dead cheap.
And really, the only tragedy here is that they only produced eleven rodent-wrapped bottles.
Put it in a cow skin, it’s beer in a leather jacket. Put it in a dead mink, it’s beer in a fur coat.
Put it in a bear skin, it’s a …
…unless we’re talking a good triple – like La Fin Du Monde, by Canuckistanian Unibroue
Fin du Monde is good, but my favourite to consume at events of the godless is another trippel by Unibroue: Maudite (ie damned). On the other hand, if you are looking for a good USian trippel, Sapient Trip by Dark Horse brewery (MI) is very nice (and has a great graphic on the bottle: Death with a mailbox)
As for the unfortunate squirrels, as I used to tell my kids: Just because you *can* doesn’t mean you *should*
DuWayne,
Beer jack, or something like that, I’d guess.
“Jacking” is the process of freezing a liquid to get the water (as ice) out, and thus jack up the levels of everything else.
If you do that to hard apple cider, you get “apple jack”—which is not just for breakfast anymore—but it’s a generic process.
Theo –
No, the very best domestic trippel is the one my old roofing boss brews. Personally, I think his is better than the Abbey Trippel he and his wife brought back from their beer tour of Belgium – the kind you cannot get anywhere but the Abbey itself. As for Maudite – I like it, but the La Fin Du Monde is better.
I would try the Darkhorse, but at the moment don’t drink (wouldn’t mix well with teh meds). That said, I was never a big fan. Though to be fair, when they opened I was generally drinking either Michigan Brewing Company, or home brews that were generally pretty damned tasty. There was some seriously stiff competition.
Paul W. –
Yes, you can also do that with cider that has just managed to turn as well. Or worse, with silage. Though freezing silage makes it slightly more palatable (I am given to understand) that is relative to it’s complete and utter foulness. My dad likes to talk about one of his few experiences with alcohol, which happened when he was just making the transition to teen. He and a friend tapped a silo and drank what came out without any kind of filtering.
Kind of explains why my dad has never gotten drunk since. He’s lucky he can still see.
Freezing and filtering apparently makes it far less likely to cause permanent damage.
DuWayne:
It looks like you have better friends/associates than I do, at least in the beer production department. I have to make do with commercially available craft brews.
No thanks on the squirrel beer. I prefer beers that have been stuffed inside rabbits. I enjoy the robust, hoppy flavor.
That is just about the sickest thing I’ve seen this year. Can there be any doubt what produced the thought behind this? 55 percent eh?
I reserve judgment unless I taste it. I am not a beer person (as in, I can’t stand basically anything that openly calls itself a beer. Lambics and ciders are usually as close as I can get). But I do own a bottle of Sam Adams Utopias, which is also a ridiculously expensive beer, but one which I actually enjoy.
So much so that I would advocate that taking a trip to a state that it is legal to sell beer of such concentration, and paying the opening rates ($100-200/bottle) are not totally unreasonable. After all, look at scotch prices.
I prefer the copper clad ceramic bottle to the…uh…rodent here. But to each his own…
I love beer. This post made me go pour a homebrewed pale ale from my kegerator. I only wish I had a proper hand pump to serve it, instead of relying on CO2 for dispensing.
Anyways, from what I read the animals they used as bottle sleeves for this “beer” (at 55% it’s not a beer – it’s some barley-based travesty) were all roadkill corpses, so don’t think of it as a macabre way to market your beer – think of it as “recycling”!