Cellar Legends: Millennium and Utopias

For a long time, fat cats looking to burn cash and impress friends with their cellar collection did so in the fine-wine scene—specifically at rare-wine auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Skinner, where dropping $5K on a case of Bordeaux is relatively commonplace. So when bottles of Boston Beer’s Millennium made it onto a rare-wine auction list that included some of the world’s finest vintage Burgundies and Châteauneuf du Pape, you could say that more than a few wine lovers’ heads were turned.

ENVISIONED BY BOSTON BEER

Founder Jim Koch as “kind of a Star Trek thing—to take a beer where no beer had gone before,” Millennium is an ultra-strong (21 percent ABV) barleywine that, when released in 1999, blew the lid off of the rollicking nineties “extreme” beer scene. Only 3,000 bottles were produced and given to friends and press or sold to the company’s best accounts. The beer world didn’t know quite how to react to Millennium’s release, with its retail price of $200 and presentation in an elegant wooden case, complete with silk embossed travelling bag.

Yet with time, tasting reviews have revealed a wealth of complexity: fig, raisin, bread pudding, toffee, and chocolate— all delivered with a drinkability that far exceeded everyone’s expectations for such a bruiser. These rave reviews and the beer’s rarity eventually drove the status of Millennium (or MMM as it’s also known) to the epic proportions it now enjoys.

However, while the folks at Boston Beer have been well aware of MMM’S rise in fame, they eschewed the idea of making another batch and instead decided to up the ante. “Why not keep pushing?” asks Koch. “We wanted to make an even more complex otherworldly beer.”

The result of their exceptionally highly set bar? Utopias—a beer whose impressive strength (varying from 24 percent to 29 percent ABV depending on the vintage) is matched only by the esteem with which the beer world holds it. Unlike the rest of the super-high ABV beers that use ice dis-