Sly Fox's email blast today announced that the annual Christmas Ale is released. Kinda lame label this year:
Interestingly, the website indicates that the bottled and canned beers will be different: Bottled: 16.0 OG | 16 IBUs | 6.5% ABV Canned: 14.0 OG | 16 IBUs | 5.5% ABV
Hmm, I suppose they ran two batches of this beer, one to bottle, one to can, and they just made the bottled version slightly stronger. Perhaps they think folks will age the bottled version and they wanted to give it a bit more preservative power? Or it was an unintentionally higher efficiency rate in their mash. I agree that's a bit of a head scratcher.
My thought was maybe they expect people to give the large bottles as gifts, vs. pick up a case of the cans to bring to a holiday party. So the party beer should be "normal beer" strength?
I suspect more what @jmdrpi is saying than the aging thing, because 6.5% is still too low to age. Large bottles are often shared between people, where as cans are more single serving.
