The ABV Atlas

The Star Beasts are the creatures which fell from the sky... things from beyond, born in the depths of space and descending to earth burning. Every culture has its own star beasts in a variety of shapes and sizes. These are the creatures from the skies, the monsters from nowhere, the fallen things, the creatures that were born in space and not in earth. These beers belong to the 25.0-25.9% category because a beer with such alcohol percentage has, in a sense, flown to the skies and lost all contact with earth. It is no more the earthy, earthly thing, but something heavenly.

A quarter alcohol

Twenty-five percent. Say the numbers aloud – it means one part of pure alcohol for each four parts of the liquid which pretends to be beer. It is much stronger than the majority of fortified wines and even approaches spirits. Nothing gets there by chance or fermentation - the vast majority of such beer is produced through freezing and subsequent distillation of ice to get rid of water and extract a concentrate. The names of the beers reaching these heavens seem to constitute an encyclopedia of the world's coldest countries... Russia's GUSI and UGAR with their ice stouts from the Arctic, the Netherlands' Kees, Scotland's BrewDog and its concentrate barley wine, Canada's Storm and its fantastic freeze-distilled sour. Cold beers from cold countries, as one would expect.

The one that came the old way

But there's also the single beer ever recorded in this category, which got there in a completely different way. It's a mead – Lithuanian creation from Lietuviškas Midus – and it got to 25% through an incredibly long process of fermentation of honey and not a freezer as most beers do nowadays. It's simply amazing. While the rest of the world struggles to make it to a quarter alcohol with all industrial tricks and barrelling, here is this mead at the very same strength, reached exactly how the old ways taught us... natural fermentation. The very first ale of our ancestors and the very latest of extreme brewing at exactly the same strength.

Beer that wants to be spirit

This is also, more or less, the point where the most famous attempt of creating a sipping spirit out of a beer lies. It's a Samuel Adams Utopias, which has gone through this mark of alcohol during all these years of raising to heaven while defining itself as such. In fact, this is the thing all beers in this band represent - beer, which stopped pretending to be just a beer and turned into an experience, served in thimbles and tasted in small sips.

Below is whatever Hop Horizons has actually logged in the 25.0–25.9% range, broken down strength by strength.