THE DRINKING LIFE Sam Adams brings potency to a new height By Ian Donnis

There are worse things than having Jim Koch stop by your office on a weekday mid-afternoon with a large duffel bag loaded with beer.

So we were hardly put out when the proprietor of Sam Adams Beer dropped by the Phoenix last Thursday, May 29, to share samples of Utopias, a limited edition 50-proof (25 percent alcohol by volume) elixir billed as the strongest beer ever brewed. Thoughtful fellow that he is, Koch (pronounced, "Cook") also brought a few sixes of his other varieties, including Sam Adams Light, Sam Adams Boston Lager, and Sam Adams Summer Ale, as a prelude to the main tasting event.

Koch, a former management consultant and sixth-generation brewer who launched the Boston Beer Company in the mid-’80s, has been steadily upping the extreme-beer ante since releasing Sam Adams Triple Bock (17.5 percent alcohol by volume) in 1994. It’s no coincidence that the high potency brews, while certainly a welcome source of interest for beer enthusiasts, also mesh nicely with Sam Adams’ insurgent image and Koch’s role as the quip-offering genial impresario. Or as he says, "You have to be a little crazy. This is the lunatic fringe of brewing."

Scheduled for lease this week (about 8000 25-ounce bottles at $100 a pop), the Utopias, envisioned as a Father’s Day gift, is meant to be sipped at room temperature in a two-ounce pour, rather than slurped by the pint, and it comes in a nifty ceramic, copper-coated miniature brewing kettle. The more esoteric ingredients in the brew (which contains so much alcohol that it doesn’t need to be refrigerated) include caramel, Vienna malts, Bavarian smoked malts, and several different types of yeasts, including a variety used to make Champagne. Says Koch, "In the 6000 years of beer history, these flavors have never existed before."

Well, how does it taste?

The anticipation was palpable among our crack squad of tasters — intern Nicole Dionne, Phil Maigret, Patrick Beyer, Stacy Congdon of the production staff, and your humble correspondent — as we made our way through a few rounds of the more conventional Sam varieties. The aroma of the Utopias, with hints of bourbon and beer ("It tastes the way cognac smells," says Koch), sparked our interest. Phil pronounced the taste "fabulous." Stacy called it "very smooth." Nicole cited "a really rich flavor." Pat described the Utopias as "what you want a sipping liquor to actually taste like." Suffice to say, we were favorably impressed.

Asked whether he made the beer for the effect or the taste, Koch says his goal was mainly to do something different. Such efforts, after all, help Sam Adams to have a higher profile in an industry where, even with the increased popularity of craft brews since the ’80s, small brewers like Boston Beer have just a tiny percentage of the overall market. Regarding giants like Anheuser-Busch, Koch says, "They probably spill more beer than we make . . . [Craft brews are] not a meaningful part of the market for the big breweries."

Still, especially with all the upheaval in the world these days, it’s nice to know, thanks to the overall quality and variety of beer, "[that] today, in America, is the best time and place to be a beer drinker in the history of the world," according to Koch. "That’s pretty cool."