Extreme brewers are doing their best to help it devolve. This past October, I joined Calagione at the Great American Beer Festival, in Denver, for the première of his Sahtea and Theobroma. The festival was founded in 1982 by a home brewer named Charlie Papazian, when its title still sounded like an oxymoron. “That’s a great idea, Charlie,” Michael Jackson told Papazian, in so many words. “Only what will you serve for beer?” Twenty-six years later, more than eighteen hundred beers were on tap at the Denver convention center. A vast hangar had been divided into booths for four hundred and thirty breweries, grouped by geographic region. Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and Miller had their usual elaborate stage sets, and most beers followed the classic German and English styles. Still, the night belonged to extreme beer.
Wandering through the hall in the hour before it opened, I saw signs for beers called Goat Toppler, Chicken Killer, and Old Headwrecker, Incinerator, Detonator, Skull Annihilator, and the Obamanator. Many were double I.P.A.s that seemed to be competing for the highest I.B.U. rating. But others were faithful re-creations of ancient recipes, or else beers invented from whole cloth. “When you’re making an extreme beer, it’s like pushing beyond the sound barrier,” Jim Koch told me. “All of a sudden, everything is silent. I remember when I first tasted my Triple Bock. It dawned on me that beer has been around for thousands of years, and I am tasting something that no brewer has ever tasted. It was inspiring, beautiful, almost reverential.” Even Garrett Oliver seemed to be bowing to the trend. His booth featured two wonderful bottle-fermented ales and a pale ale called BLAST!, with eight kinds of English and American hops. “No, this is NOT a double I.P.A.,” a sign beneath the tap read. “Even if you believe in those.”