Thursday, June 24, 2010

Tactical Nuclear Penguin

First off, apologies for the long time without a blog post. My initial schedule of having at least one post a week got temporary delayed during the madness of my graduation from college, and then that temporary delay rolled into an indefinite delay all too easily. Well, no more! Elitism for the Masses is back, and I’ll be updating much more regularly from now on. (And for the record, yes, I do realize the irony of making a statement about trying to keep to a regular schedule in the post right before I went AWOL. Ah well!)

Anyway, if you look over at that blog description on the left side of the page, you’ll notice that one of the categories reads “Exotic Beers,” a wholly worthy subject of discussion, but one which (alas!) has gone unreported on this blog thus far. Well, I intend to correct that lapse today, with a review of BrewDog’s Tactical Nuclear Penguin, a beer that was, until recently, the strongest beer ever made.


At 31% ABV, some might not even consider the Penguin to really be a beer at all, but it does qualify according to some definitions of the beverage. The primary definitional issue is that, unlike most beers, the Tactical Nuclear Penguin’s extraordinarily high ABV can only be achieved by a process of distillation. In this case, cold distillation is used, which means that the beer is brought to a temperature of 32º Fahrenheit, the freezing temperature of water—but not of alcohol. Because alcohol freezes at a lower temperature (-173.2º F, to be exact), this means that the water will freeze out of solution, and it can then be removed from the beer to raise the ABV to a higher level. In the case of the Penguin, this process is repeated multiple times (the bottle indicates that the batch is frozen at least three times before its ready to ship).

This process of distillation puts the Penguin in a class with whiskey and other liquors (at 32%, we’re past the realm of most liqueurs). Generally speaking, beer is not distilled, but is only fermented and aged. However, there are a few styles of beer that are cold fermented. Particularly, there’s a style of beer known as an ice bock, which is a German bock beer that’s been cold distilled. Although only one ice bock has an alcohol level anywhere near that of the Tactical Nuclear Penguin (produced by the German brewery Schorschbräu, with an ABV of 31%), they do still possess some rather high alcohol percentages, and are also (to my tongue) rather tasty indeed. So there’s some precedent for allowing beers to be cold distilled. However, the most obvious reasoning comes from the definition of beer itself: an alcoholic beverage consisting of malt, water, hops, and yeast (plus multitudinous other optional ingredients). Since the Penguin includes all of those ingredients, it qualifies as beer, even if it’s on the razor edge of the definition.

Now, as I mentioned, the Tactical Nuclear Penguin is the world’s former strongest beer. It has since been outdone rather handily by it own creators, who have recently put out a 41% quadruple IPA known as Sink the Bismark. Why “Sink the Bismarck”? Well, there’s also a German brewery by the name of Schorschbräu that’s in the super-beer market; they had dethroned the Penguin with a rather large 40% beer, and are currently the record-holders with a massive 43% superbock. They were also the ones responsible for that aforementioned 31% ice bock. At a certain point (which I’m guessing we may have reached), this all begins to look like a pointless pissing match, with these two adversaries only focusing on ratcheting the alcohol up as high as possible, rather than on the true goal of any self-respecting brewer, which is to produce a quality beverage. Still, I have an appreciation for anybody who wants to push the boundaries of any artistic medium, be it art, music, or brew. Also, I was recently heartened to read a review of Sink the Bismarck by my buddy Scott Miller over at Beer(ein)stein, which painted the beverage in an unexpectedly favorable light. And in any case, these definitional issues are something of a moot point: the beer, or “beer,” was there, sitting in a bottle in front of me; I didn’t really have much choice in the matter: it had to be tried.


At 32% alcohol, this isn’t exactly a beer that you have a whole glass of. No, the best vessel for this beverage is a quality whiskey glass, meant to hold a small quantity of liquid and to propel the aroma up to your nose. The beer pours darkly, as one might expect of an imperial stout, but it possesses a surprisingly thin consistency—must be all the alcohol. There’s hardly any carbonation to speak of, and only the slightest head develops. The aroma is full of alcohol, as expected, but it’s not terribly overwhelming; you would have to inhale for quite a while before getting the standard nose burn associated with the smell of most liquors. Besides the booze, the nose contains a fair amount of malt, and a goodly quantity of smoke. If you swirl the beer in your glass, it will stream down the sides on legs, just like a good whiskey. Clearly, even before tasting, this is a rather exceptional beer.

Speaking of which, the taste is rather unusual. Obviously, it’s significantly more alcoholic than all but a few other beers in existence, so the flavor profile will be at least a bit different. This is certainly a beer that was meant to be sipped, not chugged. The taste is somewhat similar to whiskey, due to the base of malted barley and the peaty smoke character, but there’s still some hop flavor and bitterness left in the brew, which helps to bring the taste back to the realm of beer. After I’d finished about half of my glass, I decided on a lark to throw a cube of ice into the beer, like one might do with a single malt scotch, to see if it had any effect on the flavor. Surprisingly, it did. Even just looking at the beer after the addition of the ice (plus a few minutes), you could tell that some of the oils were separating out of solution. Tasting confirmed this theory: the ice really opened up the Penguin, and made into a far better beer. That’s just my opinion, however; some of the others with whom I tasted the Penguin preferred their beer “neat,” although they immediately started laughing at the notion of having “neat” beer at all. But these were also the same people who told me that they preferred their whiskey without water or ice, so perhaps it’s just a trend. To my palate, the Penguin is (rather appropriately) far better on ice.

All this being said, I can certainly appreciate the merits of the Tactical Nuclear Penguin. Although this contest for the highest ABV is beginning to seem like a pissing match, I am glad that there are breweries out there willing to push the craft to its very edge. After all, this is what has made Dogfish Head such a successful brewery in the last decade. However, I don’t think that I shall be seeking out the Penguin again anytime soon. I’m glad to have tried it, but in the end, it seems like much more of a noble experiment than a tasty beverage. I wouldn’t refuse another glass if it was offered to me, but I doubt that I’d ever spend my own money on another bottle. I’ll rate this one 3.5/5—2.5 points for taste, and one more for the delightfully experimental attitude.

This has been a rather long-winded post. Thanks for sticking with me! I’ll be back within a week at most, with an entirely new subject to write about. Until then, I wish you many happy beers.