The ABV Atlas

And now we’ve reached the top. The World Eaters – the devourers, the final powers, the things that follow after the death of the gods and consume the remnants of the world. There is nothing above them, and nothing above this band, because this is the only category in the entire Atlas without an upper limit. From thirty percent to the wildest record attempts ever entered into the collection, everything gathers here in the unlimited darkness at the summit of the mountain. Thirty bands of climbing brought you here. Here the Atlas runs out of world.

The crowded summit

This is the twist. After the empty and nearly empty shelves of the twenties – the World Serpents with nothing logged, the vacant Void Walkers and several bands represented by one solitary drink – the summit is full. It is one of the fullest bands in the upper Atlas because every strength from 30% onwards pours into this single, roofless category. In the Hop Horizons collection, it stretches from 30% to an astonishing claimed 75%. The climb did not end in isolation, but in a festival of impossibility.

The strength wars, in one place

Much of what appears here is a record of the “world’s strongest beer” rivalry that gathered pace during the late 2000s and early 2010s. BrewDog and Germany’s Schorschbräu, in particular, repeatedly answered one another with increasingly extraordinary numbers. The history is condensed into releases such as BrewDog’s Tactical Nuclear Penguin at 32%, Watt Dickie at 35% and the wonderfully named Sink the Bismarck! at 41%. Schorschbräu’s SchorschBock 57% finis coronat opus, recorded here at 57.7%, is not merely among the strongest but the highest-scoring beer in the band – proof that, at least in one exceptional case, extremity and excellence can coexist. These were beers of bravado, technical ambition and flag-planting on an uncharted peak.

The Lithuanian complication

Beside the frozen record-breakers stands a very different Lithuanian tradition, represented by honeyed drinks from Lietuviškas Midus, Stumbras and others. The distinction matters, however. Traditional mead is a naturally fermented honey drink, usually far below the strengths found here. Products such as Suktinis, Raganaitė, Krupnikas and the formidable 75% Žalgiris belong instead to the related world of mead nectars, herbal balsams, honey liqueurs and distilled or fortified mead-based spirits. They preserve honey, herbs and Baltic drinking traditions, but they did not reach 40%, 50% or 75% by fermentation alone. Their presence in Hop Horizons reflects the collection’s broad inclusion of mead and mead-derived drinks, while also showing how completely the boundaries have dissolved at the summit.

Where “beer” finally gives out

It must be said directly: at this height, the word “beer” often loses almost all precision. Some entries are genuine brewed beers concentrated by repeatedly freezing out water. Others are fermented beers subsequently fortified or blended with distilled alcohol. Scottish Beithir Fire, for example, begins as a strong Scottish-style barley ale but is explicitly blended with Scottish spirit to produce its advertised 75% ABV. Snake Venom is more contentious still: although marketed at 67.5%, an independently tested sample was reported at 41.1%, and the possibility of added ethyl alcohol became part of the resulting advertising dispute. These figures therefore need to be presented as published or claimed strengths rather than treated as equally verified brewing achievements.

The purist could remove a sizeable part of this category. Yet this is probably exactly where such arguments belong: at the top of the mountain, where “beer”, “spirit”, “mead”, “concentrate” and “stunt” cease to remain neatly separated. The proper response is to lay out both the drinks and the disputes surrounding them. Borderlands are untidy. That is the point of them.

Other landmarks beyond thirty percent

The Hop Horizons collection already contains many of the great names of the strength wars, but several important releases remain beyond it. The ABVs below are the published strengths of the named editions. Inclusion records their place in extreme-drink history and does not imply that every product has an undisputed claim to being conventional beer.

The end of the climb

And from the Wisps at nought-point-nothing to the World Eaters reigning at the summit, that is the entire Atlas – thirty-one bands, thirty-one guardians and the whole scale of drinks Hop Horizons has chosen to gather beneath the broad banners of beer and mead. At one end are beverages with scarcely any alcohol at all. At the other are things so strong that even their identities become difficult to defend. Everything recognisably human about beer lies somewhere between them: the ordinary session pint, the treasured bottle, the improbable experiment and the disputed 75% world-record claim. Thank you for making it all the way up. Mind the fall.

Below is everything Hop Horizons has logged at 30% and beyond – the strongest drinks in the entire collection, broken down strength by strength, all the way to the top.