The ABV Atlas

The World Breakers break the world apart... the forces whose emergence splits the heavens and brings the age to its conclusion, the final power before the end. Not the end itself, which comes one band higher up, but the breaking that occurs just before it. The World Breakers exist within the 29.0–29.9% band because it is the level of power at which the barrier created by beer was broken, at which somebody managed to achieve a mark no-one had achieved before, and in doing so broke open the world to come.

One below the end

Twenty-nine percent. There is just one band above this, and it is an open-ended one – the summit. Here the air is nearly entirely devoid of anything – Hop Horizons (at the time of writing) does not list any beers at all, while the wider world has only a handful, each one a calculated attempt to push as far as possible against the very limit of what fermentation and freezing can accomplish together. Nothing gets here through luck. Everything at 29% ABV is there because somebody wanted to be as close to the limit as they could get.

Dave

And here we have the brewery where it all began. Way back in 1994, before extreme beer was even a term, Oregon's Hair of the Dog brewery froze three hundred gallons of its strong ale Adam multiple times and pulled out approximately a hundred gallons of the concentrate with about 29% alcohol content. The concentrate was named Dave. At the time, it was one of the strongest beers on earth – made almost as a challenge and becoming a legend ever since then. Bottles of it are still passed around like relics decades later. Dave is, quite literally, the grandfather of all that you see above in the Atlas. All freeze-concentrated beasts below owe a bit of their existence to this crazy, brilliant experiment. It is the beer which opened up the world.

The ones who followed

The rest of the World Breakers followed the road that had been paved by Dave. The Belgian brewery De Struise took its IPA and froze it down to 29%, calling the result Little Boy and Fatman. A number of Russian extremists, headed by Ability Brewing, now get to those levels with freeze-concentrated stouts and mead blends, just dozens of bottles at a time. And Samuel Adams' Utopias, at its absolute peak, reached 29%. A tiny pack of beers, all standing right on the edge of the summit, all descending from one frozen experiment in Oregon thirty years ago.

Below is whatever Hop Horizons has actually logged in the 29.0–29.9% range, broken down strength by strength.