All About Beer Magazine

You’ve probably heard of the ‘inventions’ of Leonardo da Vinci. The archetypal Renaissance Man designed a submarine, a tank, a steam cannon, a bridge to span the Bosporus, an airplane, a helicopter, a hang glider and—quite practically—a parachute. Genius indeed, for one man to envision and sketch things that no one had ever dreamed before. Yet none of these designs would come to practical fruition for almost 400 years, waiting advances in metallurgy, textiles, power generation, and power transmission. Leonardo was too soon.

“The craft beer drinker isn’t brand-loyal or even style-loyal. They’re collectors, like birders, or trainspotting, and the rarer the beer, that’s the bigger prize if you have it on your list.” – Goose Island Brewer Greg Hall

It happens to brewers, too, only in their case it’s usually the culture that’s lacking, not the science. When you look back over the last 50 years of beer in America, you see, time after time, beers that were born too soon. Some held on, surviving until their genius was vindicated. Some went under, leaving only memories and a few bottles on collectors’ shelves. These are the beers that were Brewed Too Soon.

Old School

Not every great beer that came before its time was born of a craft brewer’s fevered brain. Every generation forgets that their dried-up, despised parents were once young, and dreamed their own wild ideas. Now we build double IPAs and pack whole leaf hops into re-jiggered water filters to soak hops into the beer as it runs to the glass. But our fathers and our grandfathers built icons: Ballantine IPA and Ballantine Burton Ale, aged months or years in great wooden vats, and they built stills and distilled hops essence to spike them. You can dream really big dreams when you have the resources of a five million-barrel brewery behind you.

“The normal IPA would probably spend a year to two in storage,” I was told by John Brzezinski, the retired head of Ballantine’s Technical Department, the man in charge of formulation. “It was a magnificent product, if that was what you liked. It was stored in tanks 140-150 barrels in size, wooden tanks, lined with mammet [brewer’s pitch]. Before each batch was packaged, it went through taste tests, and Otto Badenhausen [one of the two brothers who owned Ballantine] would be on the panel. Those batches judged to have the best characteristics were set aside for further aging.” That further aging, in vats, not bottles, could be as much as 25 years.

“Once a year,” John continued, “the Ballantine Burton Ale was packaged from those batches. It was not packaged directly, but blended with IPA. IPA had a BU of 45-50, Burton Ale had something like 60-70 from the additional dry-hopping.”

If that sounds amazing, check this out. Ballantine Burton Ale was the ultimate in limited release beers: none of it was for sale. Every case was given away to people the brewery deemed worthy—executives, politicians, movie stars, athletes. Many of them had no idea what to do with a beer like this: President Eisenhower sent his two cases back to the brewery.

If a brewery made that beer today, and sold 1,200 cases for whatever the market would bear, they’d probably find themselves with a lot of money, and maybe a couple first-born children. Back then? A curiosity, a publicity stunt. Imagine: Dark Lord Day, and they’re giving the stuff away.

There were other beers from big breweries and regional breweries that came along in the 1970s and 1980s, right at the beginning of the craft beer revolution, beers that maybe could have made it twenty, ten, or even five years later, but never got a chance. Beers like Prior’s Double Dark, a nice, sweetish dark lager from the Christian Schmidt (earlier known as Adam Scheidt) Brewery of Norristown, PA (Prior’s is rumored to have been the inspiration for Saranac Black Forest Porter from Matt Brewing); or Schlitz’s Erlanger, the big brewery’s shot at a fuller-bodied lager. It was almost as if the craft revolution had given these brewers the courage to re-visit their roots, but it was too soon…and too late.