Will Samuel Adams Utopias Hit 40% or 50% ABV?

In an interview with Drink Insider, Samuel Adams founder Jim Koch commented on the potential for the ABV of Utopias to go even higher than this year’s 29%.

We could do 40, 50% tomorrow. You just get an ice cream freezer, put dry ice in it and churn it for about an hour or two and you’ll freeze about 2/3 of the water out of it. So we would end up with about 60% alcohol. (laughs). Honestly, we can’t get much higher than where we’re at. We’re at a wall. It was about 28% last time, 29% this time with the new release of Utopias. I think the highest alcohol we have in any barrel is about 33%. So we actually blend down because this is not about hitting an ABV number, it’s about flavor.

The Triple Bock is about 20%. It’s not going much higher. The yeast is done – short of some breakthrough in the genetic makeup. We need to find a yeast that has a noticeably thicker cell wall. That’s essentially what’s going on. The yeast, through natural selection, is having thicker and thicker cell walls. The alcohol is a poison for the yeast. Normal yeast pushes back in at about 12% and it just kills the yeast. So slowly over these 28 years we’ve been thickening the cell walls. To get to 20% wasn’t too hard. The last ten points have been exceedingly slow.
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