Would you drink a $200 bottle of beer?

Ballantine Burton Ale

Well, I guess he first question is if you’d pay $200 for a bottle of beer.

That’s because eight bottles of Ballantine Burton Christmas Ale are up for auction at eBay. The starting bid is $1,500 (none as I type), the “buy it now price” is $5,000 and the auction closes May 28.

From the auction description:

The labels state that the ale was brewed for Edward Boghosian on May 12, 1946. Seven (7) of these were bottled in November 1960 and one (1) was bottled in November 1959.

This ale was never sold to the general public and only given to special celebs, friends and employees during the Christmas season. This batch was made for a local Rhode Island TV executive. The bottles are all intact and in overall excellent condition. Some labels may be a little loose and a few caps have some oxidization. Please refer to photos.

I auctioned off one Ballantine Burton ale bottle a few weeks ago for $130+. I was able to recently obtain the remainder of the bottles which are now being auctioned off here. There are no further bottles available once these are gone.

As any Internet search will show you, these Ballantine bottles have a well deserved reputation. Back in 1994, Steve Kemper wrote a story for BeeR the Magazine titled “Pub Crawling New York with the Beer King” detailing in evening spent in several of Manhattan’s historic barrooms with the late Alan Eames.

They finished at Bahama Mama, where Eames had a bottle of Ballantine Burton Ale delivered to the table. That particular beer had been aged in wood from 1946 until 1966 and had been in the bottle for 25 years. After Eames explained how he came to own the bottle, he said: “This is the Dom Perignon ’55 of beers, and God sent it to me.”

Another beer in that lot he came across sold for $400, and Eames suggested the one they opened could be the last bottle in existence. He was wrong about that, because the bottles keep showing up. But eight at one time, and with a display box, should take your breath away (and your pocketbook if you intend to own the lot).

From the story: “He poured. The color was coppery, the head fleecy and alive. We tasted. Eames moaned with joy. I joined him in chorus. The ale tasted of wood and caramel and roasted grain and humus. Our please was complicated by the pain of loss that always accompanies the impeding disappearance of something fine. Eames poured out the last of it, and we drank.”

You may recall that eBay briefly outlawed selling vintage beer, then relented by setting forth several rules, starting with “The value of the item is in the collectible container, not its contents.”

Perhaps. But we all want to know what the beer inside tastes like. What the heck – if you bought eight bottles it wouldn’t hurt to open one.

Added May 29: The auction closed without any bids.

Forget those tasting rooms in Texas

The bill in the Texas Legislature that would allow microbrewers to sell their product on the premises of their breweries appears to be dead.

Brock Wagner of Saint Arnold Brewing told the Austin Chronicle:

Our bill was opposed by Mike McKinney of the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas, and with him opposed to it, we were not able to even get a hearing on the bill in committee.”

Makes no sense to me. If you take the tour, begin to appreciate the place where the beer is made, maybe have a free sample, and then want to buy a 6-pack to take home shouldn’t you be allowed to?

Drinking in place – German delights

Today’s New York Times features a must-read story on the front of the travel section headlined On a German Beer Trail, One More for the Road. Evan Rail (who recently also wrote about Czech beer innovation) set out with a definite purpose:

I wanted to try those German brews that had maintained a sense of local flavor, beers that were produced in their hometowns and, more or less, nowhere else.

In Cologne, I would drink Kolch, a light and fruity pale ale, one of the few beers protected by an appellation of origin as if it were a wine. In Leipzig, I would seek out Gose, a spiced amber beer that was out of production for two decades and that is just now making a small comeback. And in Bamberg, I would try the elusive rauchbier, a beer made with wood-smoked malt that is said to taste like liquid bacon.

Other beer pilgrims could have just as easily chosen other cities with great brewing histories “Dusseldorf, Dortmund and Munich come to mind,” but my trio seemed to offer the most promise and variety.

He starts in Berlin, where there were once 700 brewers of weisse beer and now the last two major producers have merged. But this isn’t a story about tracking down some ancient beers before they disappear – much as a blues fan might have headed to the Mississippi Delta a few years ago to see Frank Frost or Junior Kimbrough in a real juke joints.

The point of this story – to me, at least – is not history, or even tradition. The point is place.

Rail drinks Kolsch in traditional pubs where the average patron is “73 1/2 years old” and also goes clubbing with a much younger crowd in a packed club playing hip-hop at high volume. Even before getting there he finds another young and diverse crowd, favoring the local beer.

Why beer, in such a slick place? And why Kolsch?

“We’re proud of it,” Mira said. “I’m not necessarily proud of being German, but I am proud of being from Cologne. This is our beer.”

Reading this I couldn’t help thinking about tasting a wonderful Kolsch-style beer brewed in North Scottsale, Arizona. At an upscale brewpub decorated in a cowboy motif, where nobody talked about the fact that the beer was different or local. (And the brewery is long gone.)

We know, historically, that the Kolsch evolved into the style that it is for practical reasons (involving such arcane matters as brewing water).

But something else also happened along the way because it is brewed in Cologne and because it is different when you drink it in Cologne.

That’s why you should read this story.

(And we haven’t even got to the smoked beers of Bamberg or Leipzig’s Gose – tomorrow, perhaps.)

Food & Wine gets it (right)

Russian River Brewing barrel roomThis is beer and food done right, mostly for the food and wine crowd.

Maybe precisely for that crowd since it is in the June issue of Food & Wine magazine (the grilling issue).

In “The Keg vs. the Cork in Sonoma” chef San Yoon of the Father’s Office in Santa Monica, one of Southern California’s first “good beer” bars, takes writer Ray Isle on a tour of Sonoma County breweries.

There are plenty of recipes, attractive photos of beer and food, and inviting descriptions of what the beers taste like. A picture of Yoon sitting on barrels at Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa (rather small if you already clicked on the link above) is a striking full page in the magazine.

(A quick aside. The barrel room at Russian River isn’t quite as sexy as the magazine makes it appear. The photo here is more what it looks like to the human eye on an average day. But barrels sure do give beer some razzmatazz. Imbibe magazine ran just a killer two-page picture of Jolly Pumpkin’s Ron Jeffries in his barrel room in the its March/April issue. Barrels are suddenly [almost]) as cool as babes in T-shirts.)

Food and Wine even includes an online bonus: An interview with Russian River owner/brewer Vinnie Cilurzo.

Can you ‘nail’ a Belgian style?

Dan CareyIn all fairness to Todd Haefer – who writes a Beer Man column that appears in many newspapers part of the Gannett chain and already catches enough grief for some of his comments – he didn’t write the headline and the term didn’t appears in his copy, but here it is:

Beer Man: New Glarus nails the Belgian style

The headline made me giggle. Haefer is writing about New Glarus Belgian Quadruple, part of brewer Dan Carey’s “Unplugged” series. Quadruple is simply a word you don’t hear Belgian brewers use. It became a term of convenience – meaning dark and very strong, ala Westvleteren 12 or Rochefort 10 – after Koningshoeven began shipping LaTrapppe Quad to the United States in the mid-1990s. That Trappist monastery is located in The Netherlands.

So not only does the headline insinuate that any style is something so specific that it can be “nailed” but that a Belgian brewer or consumer would cotton to the idea.

Speaking of styles serves many good purposes, but testifying for the other side here is Carl Kins, a Belgian beer enthusiast who has judged several times for the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup. “We Belgians do not like categorization that much. Whether it is strong blonde ale or abbey style is not very relevant, as long as the beer tastes good,” he said in the chapter called Matters of Style in Brew Like a Monk.

Last week Stephen Beaumont wrote about this beer and Enigma, another in the “Unplugged” series. Spend a little time with his descriptions and it becomes apparent that Carey is more focused on “nailing” a great beer than capturing, or recreating, a style.