When to drink your "special beer"?

On Friday I had a delivery of some very special Brewdog beers. These are beers that are only brewed in small batches, and a released in a strictly limited capacity. I managed to get a case of three of these limited beers: Paradox Jura, a 15% whisky aged imperial stout, Lost Dog which is an imperial porter which has been aged in rum barrels and brewed together with the Lost Abbey brewery in California, and Abstrakt AB:08 which is a deconstructed blonde imperial stout. Yes - blonde stout.

Being limited edition means that there is a demand for them that is higher than normal for Brewdog beers. Which of course in simple economic terms means that you have to pay a bit more for them. It's not just the reason that they are high in demand that makes them expensive - but the fact that these beers are lovingly made and have been aged for up to a year. Time equals money.

These beers, for a 33cl bottle cost 15€ (Paradox and Abstrakt) and 20€ (Lost Dog), but despite that I managed to pre sell them many eager beer fans in Estonia who simply hadn't had the chance to get their paws on beers of such quality before. There is a growing band of beer drinkers in Estonia that understand you get what you pay for, and that beer can be treated in the same way which wine has been treated since it became "posh". These are the same drinkers who realise that they are being served up mass produced liquid and are expected to drink it with pride because it's made in the same country they live in.

When I first had the opportunity to bring these beers to Estonia my first thought that a) they would be too expensive and b) that there wouldn't be any takers for them. My second thought was that I should forget about my first thought because that kind of attitude is so last year. As I've outlined above, there is a market for these type of beers precisely because others are thinking like my last year first thoughts. One of the main reasons my hand was bitten off by many when I offered these beers, is because Estonians have been denied great beer for so long.

The beers arrived, I got them registered; don't get me started on this ridiculous ruling. It's only necessary in Estonia and is just another ridiculous blockade in the way of getting good beer here. I have to give one bottle as a sample (I bet they drank it and declared it vastly inferior to Saku Rock) and then I have to pay to get the beer registered. Not the brand - but the beer. Three new Brewdogs, means three samples and three amounts of cash passing from me to them. They also require a lab analysis which gives the breakdown of ingredients,ABV, OG and various other bits of information that I don't know what they do with, or indeed understand. When I ask the brewers for a lab analysis in order for me to register the beers (and release them from the excise warehouse), nearly all of them ask me why I need and what information is required. After I've told them, I then go onto their website and see how many other countries in the world they export to, and ask myself the the question why they don't know what information is required on the lab analysis. Afterall, surely all of these other countries have the same rules and regulations about bringing export beer into their country?

Of course they don't.  It used to be the same for wine  - but last year the Estonian authorities dropped the registration process. Something to do with Estonia not making it's own wine (meaning shiraz, chardonnay etc - not fruit) perhaps? I strongly suspect that someone on the board is also on the board of Saku or A Le Coq. We don't want any of this export beer. Locally produced beer is much more suitable for the good people of Estonia. Access denied. Next!

Anyway - all this hard work only makes the beer taste better, and it's a sense of excitement when the papers are all in order and the the beers are authorised for release. So excited I was by the time I got home with my three new Brewdogs, that without thinking I started reaching for the bottle opener. And then I stopped. Not because it was two o'clock in the afternoon. Not because I had to pick George up from playschool at 5pm, I stopped because these were "special beers".

A bottle of Worthingtons White Shield was given to me by a brewer about 8 years ago. Nothing special about Worthington White Shield (and I mean that in terms of availability - it certainly is a special beer), but the special thing about this beer was it's best before date. White Shield is bottle conditioned which means that is has a small layer of live yeast at the bottom of the bottle. The yeast carries on doing it's job while the bottle sits on the shelf, keeping the beer fresh, the alcohol levels topped up and generally conditioning the beer. In the same way that you can lay wine down in the hope that it improves with age, you can do this with certain types of beer. If they have yeast in them, or they haven't been filtered, or they have a high alcohol content, then they should last a long time. Indeed, some beers have been found at the bottom of the ocean, or hidden away in cellars and have been drinkable. The worlds oldest "drinkable" beer, was found in our very own Baltic Sea http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12393875  and some were found underneath the brewery in which I used to work in the UK http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3352667/A-fresh-future-for-flat-old-beer.html

The beer I was given wasn't so old - it had a best before date of  May 1994 which made it 10 years old, and I promised that I'd leave it for a special occasion.

I've still got it. I can't bring myself to open it. It's a mixture of lots of things that is keeping me from opening it. Its one of my all time favourite beers - the last I have, it's the old style bottle that isn't made anymore, and it's 18 years old. That's the same age as some of the people who drink in my bar. It's going to have such complex flavours, additional alcohol levels and a whole different taste to when it was first brewed. Considering that WWS has a 3 year shelf life when it's first bottled - that makes it 21 years old. May 1991? Estonia was still the Soviet Union when this left the factory. This beer has history. If I drink it, then it's gone never to come back. I guess it's a bit of a security blanket for my days back at the brewery in Burton on Trent. Ah well, maybe it'll taste nice in another 10 years. I might try it then.

The Brewdog beers will also keep. They have a best before date of 2016, but I suspect that they will keep and mature for much longer than that. And whereas the Worthington is just an aged ale, the Brewdog beers are special within themselves. The Paradox is aged in casks from one of the worlds greatest whisky producing islands Jura, the Lost Dog is aged in Rum casks and has been brewed with legendary Californian craft brewers Lost Abbey, and the Abstrakt is a blonde beer that thinks it's a porter. You don't just crack open one of these beers when you are about to sit and watch the football on a Tuesday evening. You need a sense of occasion. Something to match the celebration of such a good beer. Or..you can buy two! I've learnt this from my Worthington White Shield experience. You dare not drink the beer because once you have, although it lives long in your memory, it's gone. If you buy two, then you can drink one of them safe in the knowledge that you still have one to look at, display, polish, swoon over and all the other sort of strange things you do when you have a "special beer". You'll confuse people who aren't into beer by bringing the bottle for them to look at and expecting them to show the same sort of admiration as you have for it. I've got a bottle of Ola Dubh Special Reserve 30, and once a year at Christmas I get it out and declare to whoever I'm having dinner with that I'll drink it. They look at me like I'm some sort of odd ball getting all dreamy about a small bottle of beer with an unpronouncable name. I never drink it though - because it's the last one I've got.

Of course the great thing now is, that there are some very special beers now readily available in Estonia without having to crack open the special stuff. My bottle of Hardcore IPA went very well with this years Christmas turkey, and its so readily available that I actually had two bottles of it over dinner.

It'd be interesting to hear from the other guys about when they intend to drink their beers. Maybe we should all get together this time next year and ceremonially open our beers together to mark the occasion when three great beers first arrived on the shores of Estonia.

I wonder if the people who work at the alcohol registery office are thinking of doing the same?