It is no secret that beer fanatics in a certain place (Yourtown, USA) in a certain time (right now) long to plant their lips upon a snifter, tulip or chalice of some rarified, vaunted, practically mythical ale. Likewise, it is no wonder that some people will go through the Ahabesque task of trying to hunt these beers down. The expeditions launched from ports of call—one’s front door step, the office mail room, the nearest FedEx store—are called Beer Trades, or simply “BT”s. The prey are known as whales—primarily White Whales, or “WW”s.

But what is it that makes a beer a Moby Dick? At what point does the storied amalgamation of malts, hops, yeast and bugs, and blow-me-down adjuncts morph from ale to whale? And more to the point, how far are some people —the beer traders—willing to go to harpoon such a catch?

In the words of Herman Melville, “Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity.”

Everything has a Price

Everyone fetishizes something. To land the white whale of automobiles, say, a 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante, you would’ve had to shell out £3,000,000—around $4,800,000—for one recently. If you haven’t outgrown baseball card collecting, you can catch a 1909 Honus Wagner tobacco card for a cool $2.8 million. Cheaper still for comic book collectors, your “WW” may be Action Comics No. 1 featuring Superman’s debut. If that’s you, try using $300,000 as bait. All have two things in common. They are ridiculously expensive and, therefore, almost impossible to obtain.

What about beer collectors? A scorched bottle of Löwenbräu found in the wreckage of the Hindenburg in 1937 set an auction winner back $18,000.

While not quite fetching six figures, even some 21st century brewed beers are endangered species. And though it’s practically one of the Ten Commandments—thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s beer—who among us doesn’t have a Holy Grail ale?

Craft beers are often limited by production and distribution. Though I live in California, my stash includes New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red from Wisconsin and Goose Island Imperial Brown Goose that I picked up in Chicago. From my home state, I’m holding Lost Abbey Cuvée de Tomme, North Coast Old Rasputin XI and more.

I have never traded beers with strangers, nor bought from them, nor seen the need to, nor felt the urge. But I’ll try anything once. If not beer-for-beer, would I have to resort to cold, hard cash (OK—soft, virtual PayPal cash) on an eBay auction? By any means possible, I set sail to land the following whales in a one-month period: Flossmoor Station Wooden Hell, Cantillon Blåbær Lambik and Iron Hill Ring of Fire.

Wooden Hell, a bourbon barrel-aged barley wine from Illinois, received a boost in awareness by medaling at the Great American Beer Festival. On BeerAdvocate.com, it is actively sought by almost 250 users while available for trade by fewer than a dozen as only 30 cases were sold. Blåbær from Belgium’s revered Brasserie Cantillon is a blueberry lambic with an availability that can be counted using all your fingers, yet 100 extra Advocates are clamoring for a bottle. And Ring of Fire is a porter from Delaware, one that has the distinction of being aged in Tabasco barrels from Avery Island, LA. It may not sound as desirable as other highly sought-after beers such as Vanilla Bean Dark Lord (Three Floyds) or Black Tuesday (The Bruery), but it sure is distinct, and with nobody listing it as available.

I decisively boarded my whaling ship, a.k.a. the Internet, anchors aweigh.

To BT or not to BT?

Procuring beer—by hook or by crook, or at least by beer trading or an online auction—that is not ordinarily available to you, either because it is not sold in your market or no longer commercially available, is not necessary. That is said from the standpoint that beer is necessary. But in this day and age, no matter where you live in the United States and most of the industrial world for that matter, a reasonably locally brewed, well-made beer is available to you. This is why sought after beers are called “wants” and not “needs.”

BeerAdvocate.com uses a system of “Wants” and “Gots,” while RateBeer.com has users file bottles in their virtual Beer Cellar as “Wants” and “Haves.” Beyond this, users start threads in the online forums announcing beers they are ISO (in search of) or have FT (for trade).

You may not live near one of the highest-rated (sexiest) breweries, but your neighborhood or regional craft brewery deserves your support. But of course, we always want what we can’t get. Just ask The Rolling Stones. Furthermore, if you really need a beer from some distant shore, booking a trip to go pick it up yourself isn’t always feasible (but it is a lot of fun).

Perhaps this is why one of the best parts about beer is that it’s a vacation in a bottle, or growler. This goes beyond the idea that alcohol is an escape. (Drinking loads of cheap beer achieves that.) Rather, just as the point of taking a holiday is meeting new people in strange lands, it is those very people from those same faraway places that make a beer more amazing. It takes more than yeast to make beer come to life and this must be what people are in search of. Maybe shipping off bottles transcends mere beer trading and becomes a correspondence. Trades don’t need to be Holy Grail for Holy Grail; they can be mixers of regionally available brands, my Firestone Walker for your Bell’s, my Hair of the Dog for your Cigar City. Keep it up and fellow traders turn into friends (albeit ones who can’t share real beer in real time).

A role by any other name is still a geek. Advocate. Enthusiast. Aficionado. Beer Geeks aren’t fashioned or formed through genetics or environment―they are self-made.

Electrical engineer by day, beer-reviewing machine at all other times, Jens Ungstrup spends about 20 hours per week beer hunting, drinking, reviewing and networking with brewers. That’s not all he spends. Of the 40 bottles of Mikkeller X Imperial Stout-2007 sold at auction, he dropped the equivalent of US $750 to snatch up three of them, making it one of the 48 Mikkeller beers he has reviewed on RateBeer.com.

Ungstrup started to move beyond Tuborg in 1990. He lives in Frederiksberg, a suburb of København―Copenhagen to the English-speaking world. The Danish capital city has become the Scandinavian gourmet capital over the past couple decades, garnering more Michelin Guide stars than are found in Rome, Madrid or Vienna. So it stands to reason that while in 2000 there were a mere 19 breweries in Denmark―population 5.5 million―craft breweries open at such a rapid clip that there are now over 125.

This might explain why three of the Top 5 users on RateBeer.com are Danes. Ungstrup has, as of press time, reviewed 13,134 beers. To commemorate his 12,500th review this past March, which coincided with his fortieth birthday, the Dutch brewery De Molen concocted a barley wine brewed with oak chips soaked in 40-year-old cognac. And what did you get for your big four-oh?

Down the list, the American “RateBeerian” with the most reviews is Josh Oakes of Miami, FL, who has reviewed an admirable 7,472 beers. A German supplanted his position in the Top 5 alongside―you guessed it―two Danes. He presumable won’t have squat brewed for his next birthday.

In contrast, four of the five most active beer geeks in the original virtual beer community, BeerAdvocate.com, are American. Brad Riley, as his alter beergo BuckeyeNation, leads the charge with 3,755 beers reviewed. One wouldn’t expect the most prolific reviewer to be 40-year-old M.D. married to a woman who hates beer and who lives in Des Moines, IA―unrenowned for its beer culture. But that just proves that beer enthusiasm knows no bounds.

Tonight they’ll sleep in tents, or just sleeping bags on the cold, hard cement, but tomorrow they’ll be listening to bands and drinking even more beer from when the proceedings kick off at 11 a.m., until late into the following night. The prelude to a multi-band, multi-stage rock festival?

Nope.

This is Dark Lord Day. The one day a year, late in April (this year the 25th), when the Three Floyds Brewery hosts quite possibly the biggest craft beer release party in the U.S.—a gathering of 5,000-plus people—to unleash its monstrous, and fiendishly sought-after strong stout, Dark Lord. The economy may be in dire straights, unemployment is continuing to rise, but there seems to be no shortage of people clamoring to pay $15 for a 22-ounce bottle (or six) of the latest vintage of Dark Lord, with its wax-dipped cap and cartoonish label.

Welcome to the insane world of limited-edition beers.

Power to the People

Three Floyds’ Dark Lord Day—a 12-hour marathon of beer and bands—is just the most extreme, over-the-top case of fanaticism engendered by a single beer. There are plenty of other limited-edition releases produced by equally small, regional craft brewers throughout the year.

Seasonals, by definition, are “limited”—be it a summer hefeweizen or a high-alcohol winter warmer—and most brewers have tapped into the growing popularity of that segment. But only a handful of breweries and specific beers—Lost Abbey’s Angels’ Share, Portsmouth’s Kate the Great, Foothills’ Sexual Chocolate, Deschutes’ The Abyss, and of course Dark Lord, to name a few—seem to stir up the kind of frenzy that compels people to travel from as far away as Japan and Denmark for an event such as Dark Lord Day.

It wasn’t always this way, though. And we can thank the Internet, with two sites—Ratebeer.com and Beeradvocate.com—specifically fueling the current madness. This was all surely an unintended consequence of the public ratings that members of these sites are allowed to post on specific beers they’ve tried—from pints they had at a pub to bottles they bought at a store to samples they tried at a beer festival. These, along with detailed tasting notes, then get compiled into rankings based on the points that Joe Public “reviewer” assigns the beers.

While it’s a sort of populist way to determine the “best in the world”—and isn’t that what the Internet’s becoming, giving a voice to the masses via blogs, forums and other new media?—it has also helped foster a certain hysteria. As of this writing, prior to Dark Lord Day 2009, nearly 500 BeerAdvocate users, going back to 2002 when Dark Lord was first made, have posted reviews of the various vintages of the beer released over the years, using florid language—”big malty chocolate cake with hints of toffee, coffee, clove and dark fruits”—to describe its every nuance.

One rather incredulous beneficiary of this kind of rating/reviewing hysteria is Tod Mott, the head brewer at Portsmouth Brewing in Portsmouth, NH, whose Kate the Great Imperial stout has been regularly ranked in the Beer Advocate’s Top 10. His annual Kate the Great release party in February has drawn people from up and down the East Coast and as far away as Illinois for the chance to pay $10 each for a couple of the scant 900 22-ounce bottles (there’s a two-per-person limit) that are produced. Last year’s offering sold out in a mere four hours, probably about as long as a flight from Illinois to New Hampshire. “It’s really funny because [the ratings are] so subjective,” he says. “There are so many incredible beers on the West Coast that I’m totally blown away that we’re ranked number four. This tiny little brewpub in the middle of Portsmouth. We produce 1,200 barrels of beer a year.”

But those rankings and the buzz surrounding them do have a lot of power. After all, what serious beer lover/enthusiast/geek wouldn’t want to try—cue symphonic flourish from heaven above—The Greatest Beers In The World? And since most of the beers topping these lists are, no surprise, damn hard to get a hold of because of the small production runs and, therefore, nonexistent national distribution, it just feeds that irrational desire many consumers seem to have for things that are hard to get.

A number of brewers mention these sites specifically when trying to explain the rise of the limited-edition cult beers. “[It’s] all thanks to the Beer Advocate, the goddamn Beer Advocate,” Portsmouth’s Mott grouses jokingly. “It’s ridiculous. I mean, [Kate the Great] is a good beer, but, Christ, there are so many good beers out there.”