Tempest in a Pint Glass

Leave it to the residents of the land of binge drinking — that would be the British Isles, for the uninitiated — to invent one of the world’s strongest brews. And then claim it will help tackle the country’s binge-drinking problem.

We are not making this up.

The beer, called Tokyo*, has 18.2 percent alcohol per volume. Drinking a single 330 ml bottle, made by Scottish microbrewery BrewDog, is the equivalent of drinking three regular pints of lager. Put another way, one bottle is twice a person’s recommended daily alcohol limit.

"Mass-market, industrially brewed lagers are so bland and tasteless that you are seduced into drinking a lot of them," BrewDog founder James Watt told the U.K.’s The Scotsman. "Our hardcore beers are loaded with flavour, bite and body, so consequently you drink less of them."

The beer — technically an oak-aged imperial stout — is brewed with jasmine, cranberries, malts and America hops, then fermented with a champagne yeast, which is what gives it the super-high alcohol content. It’s also a limited edition: Only 3000 bottles of the £9.99 (about $16.50) beer have been produced.

Health professionals have condemned the launch, saying that the brewery is compounding the country’s drinking problem, not solving it. But Zak Avery, a former U.K. beer writer of the year, is not one of them. He told The Scotsman: "To claim that this type of beer is part of the alcohol abuse problem is akin to blaming Michelin-starred restaurants for the oft-reported obesity epidemic."

Bottoms up!