In the picture below you’ll see that the alcohol content of DuClaw’s barley wine style ale, ‘Devil’s Milk, used to be 10.6% abv. Apparently it used to be available in tiny little 12 oz bottles as well.
The 22 oz. bottle of Devil’s Milk that I drank the other night was a full 11% abv. Good things really do get better over time, with any luck, and bigger too (just ask the TV industry.) In any case something caused the beer to grow stronger over the years, whether luck or skill, and then they put it in larger bottles. All good things.
Maryland based DuClaw makes quite a few craft beers, actually, and this one is a winter seasonal. It’s quite good – surprisingly sweet for a barley wine – a sweet, hoppy beer perfect for the coming cold. The finish isn’t nearly so bitter as some other barley wines I’ve had in the past. Devil’s Milk is a good deal smoother than something like Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot Ale, another tasty barley wine.
I’d never heard of DuClaw before – probably because I’m based out of Arizona and I don’t think anyone around here carries the stuff. Which is a shame. On the other hand, isn’t it amazing and awesome that there are over 1,700 craft breweries operating in the United States? We’ll be very lucky if we ever get around to trying a quarter of the beers made in America.
Talk about a good way to ferment or, er, foment innovation and growth.
Once upon a time the beer market was completely dominated by a few aging German lager mega-corporations. Now those same corporations are bigger than ever, and the biggest - Anheuser Busch – was bought up by an even bigger foreign firm, InBev, for $52 billion dollars in 2008 making the brewer the largest in the world.
And yet where does all the innovation come from? Outside of clever advertising schemes, the real growth not just in sales but in quality and variety of product is happening in the micro breweries all across the world, but especially here in America.
Anyways, I just love all the subtle differences. I love the fact that I can try a beer from Maryland that’s like nothing I’ve had before, even though I’ve had brews from all over the United States. And I love that I have friends who brew beer in their garages. Truly, the world is a better place because of all these myriad brews.
If you’re anywhere in Maryland, I’d definitely recommend finding yourself a bottle or two of Devil’s Milk. And, of course, don’t drink and drive. Live somewhere walkable so that you can stumble home like a decent, civilized human being.
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