Strange will release 1,000 bottles of Dr. Strangelove, a 11.5 percent ABV barleywine-style ale that won a bronze medal last year at the Great American Beer Festival, in its taproom on Friday. It is the first beer that Strange has packaged in bottles.
See also: - Strange Brewing will bottle its GABF medal-winning Dr. Strangelove Barleywine - Strange Brewing takes action against homebrew shop that threatened lawsuit - Strange Brewing takes action against homebrew shop that threatened lawsuit
"Hopefully, this will be a big deal," says Strange co-owner Tim Myers, who brewed this batch of Dr. Strangelove shortly after winning the medal and has been aging it since.Myers had originally planned to distribute some of the bottles to liquor stores, but says that would have required more paperwork than he was prepared to do. "For this amount of beer, it's going to be gone so fast, it's not really worth distributing it."
The bottles -- which will be hand-labeled, dipped in wax and individually numbered -- will go on sale at noon for $20 each; there is a limit of two cases per person.
Myers hopes to brew twice as much this year for a batch in 2013, and he says the beer, like most barleywines, will improve with age. "It was servable at three months and better at six months. The batch they judged at GABF had been aging for sixteen months."To bottle it, Myers and Strange co-owner John Fletcher borrowed a small bottling machine from Lone Tree Brewing -- the same machine that Dry Dock Brewing used for its first beers before giving the machine to Lone Tree.
Strange Brewing is involved in a Trademark dispute over its name with a homebrew store in Massachusetts, but Myers says he doesn't expect the "ghost of Stanley Kubrick," the director of the movie of the same name, to come after him, despite the numerous references on the beer label to the 1964 satire.
Strange, which opened during American Craft Beer Week in 2010, is celebrating its third anniversary this week with a series of events. Find them in our Colorado Beer Calendar.
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