Are we compensating for something?

Uinta brews mighty beer.

Here's a brief primer on Utah beer. There are a bunch of laws about alcohol in public places: you can't have two glasses of beer in front of you at once...you can't order a pitcher for friends unless your friends are already there...there is something called a club for which you have to have a membership...there is something called a tavern where you can go to get drunk...you can get beer at the bar of a place that serves food but if you want wine you have to sit at a table and actually get food...and so on and so forth...

The rules governing the sale and use of alcohol and the reasons it is done this way in Utah are here: http://abc.utah.gov/index.html

The biggie is the strength of the beer, which, when for sale in the grocery store is limited to 3.2% alcohol by weight (and nobody measures alcohol that way). In the rest of the civilized world, alcohol is measured by volume. 3.2% by weight = 4% by volume. Most competent Utah microbrews seem to be pegged at 4% ABV. Here's a list of some known beers and their ABV.

If you want to get some beer with more legs than you can get at the grocery store, you can go to a state liquor store and get all kinds of great booze at more or less recognizable prices. There are two in the vicinity of Ogden - and I think all the state stores carry about the same inventory. Here's a map to the stores: http://abc.utah.gov/stores/index.html.

What blew me away was that it seems like the local brewers go into overdrive trying to make up for the lower ABV beer in the grocery by upping the octane in their other offerings. Most of the microbews I found have varieties in the grocery store, but they were all well-represented in the liquor store, too. Bottle after bottle I picked up in the liquor store had ABV of 6.9%, 7.3%, 8%, and the Uinta Anniversary Barley Wine Ale (which is a really fragrant hoppy ale) tops out at a whopping 10.4%. I had one last night and it took a little while to recover. I didn't have a second in the same sitting. I downshifted to the tasty and alcoholically pedestrian Wasatch Evolution Ale - a 4% ABV beer that I got in a local grocery store (it's in almost all of them).

There's a lot to be said for the rationale of the Utah State liquor control - which is not alone; 18 states control the sale of alcohol at the wholesale or retail level. My home state of Montana had state liquor stores, too (of course, in Montana, you could buy a bottle of booze from a bar at 1:45AM to take home and finish the job - a notion that always amazed my out-of-state friends; Montana offers wine in grocery stores - which I consider a sine qua non of a civilized world). I really enjoyed my sturdy barley wine ale, but I also like having a really tasty microbrew or two after work at home without ringing the bell too hard - giving the 4% beer a good place in the arsenal (other 4% -ish options are run-of-the-mill commercial brews).

And for anyone still not convinced: I once lived in an actual dry county in Arkansas. Utah beats that by a wide margin. 4% is a lot higher than 0%. And just for the record, you have to buy a case of beer at a time in Pennsylvania, you can't buy beer on election day in Pittsburgh, New York State doesn't sell wine in grocery stores. It weird everywhere - except in Louisiana, where they will sell you a daiquiri at a drive-up window (but they won't put the straw in it...)