The ABV Atlas

There is the Kraken — the terrifying leviathan of Norse sailors' legends, believed to ascend from the depths, grab entire ships in its tentacles and plunge them below into darkness. This is the perfect guardian of the 17.0-17.9% range, since the alcohol in beer in this category works just like that — it wraps you up and pulls down in the same way as the abyssal waters. All drinks within this range are to be tasted with moderation and small measure.

The abyss of the strength wars

This range of beers is definitely located within the territory of the extreme era of beer — the time of imperial and experimental beers with maximum strength and intensity. You can easily see from the name that the beers we find in this category belong to this era of imperial stouts aged in barrels, powerful New World barley wines aged in brandy barrels and strong Belgian dark ales. These are the beers produced by only one brewery in limited editions and high prices — the beers designed to share in thimble amounts and taste the greatness of beer. The best examples among those rated here deserve bottles in the nineties with the flavor of dark fruits, oak, spirit and molasses.

A classic cautionary tale

Yet the deep holds not just treasures but wrecks too, and among this band we have perhaps the best-known close-calls in the history of beer: Samuel Adams Triple Bock. Brewed in 1994 in its iconic blue bottle, it was among the first attempts to create an extreme-strength beer in recent times — and quickly acquired a reputation for tasting like soy sauce, and being almost as bizarre as it was ambitious. That it finds itself in the band, scoring far lower than those around it, is not the result of any failing on the part of the band but part of what makes the band what it is. Bold and audacious experiments on the boundary of extreme beer are littered with failure, as well as success, and 17% is the realm in which many of the most famous failures have landed.

The land of strange things

Like the band below, the styles here cannot be made to behave themselves — a cider and a pommeau crop up among the stouts and barley wines, as in this realm beer loses its distinct boundaries and becomes something else. This is the prize of the deep end: you never know what you might haul up from it. Take care in reading the styles along with the scores: sometimes, here, a low number is a sign of something interesting.

Below is whatever Hop Horizons has logged in the 17.0–17.9% range, ranked and broken down strength by strength.