It’s a cliche, but it’s painfully true: sometimes, you need the strongest booze you can find. Maybe it’s to ease the pain of a break-up, maybe you want to celebrate something, or maybe you’ve just spent too much time on the Internet and learned the hard way that yes indeed, if it exists there is porn of it.
Most people go for cheap whiskey or cheaper tequila. Some people, needing a stronger taste, will pick up Chartreuse or an even cheaper vodka. And some people will just skip palatable booze altogether and drink gasoline, which we don’t recommend, but it will actually wipe that horrifying Deviantart drawing of your beloved childhood icons from your mind (protip: no, it probably won’t).
But if even that’s not enough, or you just don’t want to risk blindness, then it’s time to break out the big guns, by which we mean the strongest legitimate booze you can find. And there are six candidates for your alcohol induced brain scrubbing pleasure:
1.
Sam Adams Utopias
Sam Adams proves that there’s absolutely nothing that America can’t mass market, even craft beer. Sam Adams has worked itself into the enviable position of being the only beer you can find across most of the country, complete with advertising, that’s actually palatable. Even when you’re in the worst parts of the country for drinking, the kind of place where they actually think Budweiser should be consumed instead of used to kill weeds, you can find Sam Adams.
Which doesn’t stop them from making kinda goofy beer, like the 27%, $150 Utopias.
Yes, we said $150. Why is it $150? Because it’s made with the same yeast they use for champagne, as if that makes a difference, and is aged in sherry casks. So, basically, it’s an extremely fancy beer that actually tastes pretty good.
Although we’re forced to wonder what’ll happen when somebody buys this expecting something that isn’t beer. The bottle is somewhat…misleading.
2.
Tactical Nuclear Penguin
OK, we have to admit it: we’d spend the sixty bucks this booze costs, just because we love the name. Heck, we’d drink it just because of this warning on the label:
“This is an extremely strong beer; it should be enjoyed in small servings and with an air of aristocratic nonchalance. In exactly the same manner that you would enjoy a fine whisky, a Frank Zappa album or a visit from a friendly yet anxious ghost.”
But there are better reasons to consume this beer.
BrewDog, the people behind this potent brew, have gotten in trouble for featuring a beer at eighteen percent pure, sweet alcohol called Tokyo, for a reason we can’t be bothered to Google. This is so strong it has to be served in shotglasses, which we imagine has to cause a lot of barroom brawls when you pour a shot and half of it is head.
Meanwhile, humorless people in Scotland have demanded to know why a beer almost as strong as your average whiskey has been produced, never realizing that the answer is, pure and simple, because the very concept is awesome.
3.
Sink the Bismarck! Quadruple IPA
I’m going to break from the royal “we” for a moment to confess something. Something that makes me isolated among beer drinkers, something that might mark me as a freak: I really can’t stand IPAs.
I have no idea what it is. I enjoy every other kind of beer. Dark beers, red beers, pale ales, sticky reds, rye lagers, brandywines, I’ve tried them all and thoroughly enjoyed them. But IPAs? Can’t do it. Don’t like them. They just don’t taste good to me, which makes summer a living hell as everywhere I go, the decent beer is all IPA.
So the idea of a quadruple IPA kind of grossed me out, until I read “forty-one percent alcohol by volume.” Beer you can do shots of? Now this is a beer I can get behind!
This is actually another creation from BrewDog, as it turns out, which seems to have given up any pretension of doing anything other than trying to make the strongest beer humanly possible, and you know what? God bless them for it. This is a worthy endeavor. These guys should be getting the next Nobel Peace Prize.
