Northwest Brewery Produces the World’s Most Expensive Beer

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Unless you’ve beer toured Vancouver, BC in the past couple years, you have no idea what’s happening up there. The once beer-challenged city, that for so long lagged sadly behind Seattle and Portland, recently emerged as a legitimate craft beer destination. It’s a craft beer boom town, actually. The revolution was late getting there, but it hit the city hard and fast.

One of Vancouver’s oldest, best-loved and most-creative craft breweries just released a beer that some are calling “the world’s most expensive beer.” Glacial Mammoth Extinction, by Storm Brewing Company, sells for $1,000 a bottle. If you ask nicely, at the brewery you can get a one-ounce tastings for $5. 

James Walton, the owner and brewmaster at Storm Brewing, created a strong sour beer and then froze it twice at -30 Celsius. He took the boozy liquid extracted from the ice and stored it in barrels for two years. Walton says the beer drinks more like a port wine than a beer, clocking in at 25 percent ABV. It is a labor intensive, time consuming process. Still, $1,000 per bottle?

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Storm Brewing – The outside of the building is a good representation of what happens inside. Photo courtesy GoFindBeer.com.

What really adds to the beer’s price tag is the packaging. Each one-liter bottle is hand-blown by a local artist, Brad Turner, and fitted with a pendant made by another local artist, Richard Marcus. The pendants are fashioned out of ivory from the tusk of a prehistoric mammoth that the brewery says is 35,000 years old. Furthermore, Storm Brewing is only selling ten bottles of the beer.


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Photo courtesy Storm Brewing.
Photo courtesy Storm Brewing.

Who’d Brew Such a Thing?

Among Vancouver’s breweries, Storm Brewing is the first (and perhaps only) brewery that you’d expect to do something so outlandish. James Walton is something of a mad scientist. Not only is he a skilled and respected brewer who opened his brewery almost 20 years ago, long before the craft beer boom hit Vancouver, but he is an eclectic, enigmatic character. He is a rock star in his own beery way, revered for his creative, unusual and often daring approach to brewing.


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James Walton talks beer at the brewery.
James Walton talks beer at the brewery.

Here’s how I described Storm Brewing and James Walton in an article I wrote for Sip Northwest magazine last year:

“This self-fashioned brewery is the spawn of James Walton, who cobbled the brewery together using, in many cases, scrap metal and a welding torch. With spikey, bottle-blond hair, a ray-gun belt buckle, and high-heel platform boots that look like something David Bowie would have worn during his Ziggy Stardust phase, James is dressed for work (brewing) and not for clubbing. The beers are a reflection of the man; Storm Brewing cranks out some of Vancouver’s most imaginative beers. Local beer nerds rave about James’ sour beers, like the Imperial Flanders Red and the legendary Black Currant Lambic.”

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You can read the whole story, Welcome to the Boom Town, here.

 

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