It’s not uncommon to hear about individuals that like to collect rare wines or liquors, but there’s a big group of people out there that also like to collect rare craft beers. And, as the craft beer scene grows larger every day, this enthusiasm for collecting will undoubtedly increase.
We recently read about a rare craft beer selling for $2,000 per bottle. Yes, you read that correctly – per bottle. Suddenly $8 for a draft IPA doesn’t seem quite as expensive anymore. The beer is called “Dave” and it was produced in 1994 by Hair of the Dog Brewing Company in Portland. It is a 29 percent ABV barleywine created by one of the earlier craft brewers, Alan Sprints. He made “Dave” by freezing 300 gallons of his brewery’s flagship “Adam” beer several times, reducing the batch size to less than 100 gallons. But does it taste good? It has a perfect score of 100 on RateBeer.com, a seemingly impossible feat considering how picky beer drinkers can be.
If you’re interested in forking over the $2,000, you can put your wallet away because you’re too late. There were only 12 bottles available and they sold out the same day they became available to the public. Last year, there was a silent auction for two bottles of “Dave;” the bidding started at $1,400 per bottle and one of them ended up selling for $2,368.73. Anyone out there want to sell us his or her bottle? We’re willing to pay big.
Now, here’s our pressing question: you spend $2,000 on a bottle of beer. Do you drink it or save it?
On one hand, if we spend two grand on something, we’d kind of like it to last longer than a day. On the other hand, why buy an outstanding beer if you’re not going to drink it? You have the opportunity to taste an amazing piece of craft beer history and instead, you choose to display it on a shelf.
It’s a tough call, but we think we would invite a couple deserving friends over and share the bottle with them. At the end of the day, we’d prefer to say that we’ve tried “Dave” rather than have a bottle that we’re never going to open.