RESULTS: The Meantime College Beer Club Poll.

You voted, I listened. Of the 95 people who voted, a slim majority came down in favour of me keeping the bottle to open and blog on at a later date - as you can see, the score was 41 votes to 54. I remain, good gentlefolk, your humble servant, and so am happy to do your bidding.

On a wider level, it also elicited a bit of debate about the club itself, and elitism in general, which I think is healthy. The beers are £15 each, which is undeniably expensive, but not outrageously so - they compare favourably to BrewDog's Abstrakt series, for example.

In an email to me, Peter Haydon from Meantime points to the amount of research that goes into each of the recipes - these are bespoke recreations of historical styles, not whimsical creations (not that there's anything wrong with whimsy, of course). He also suggests joining with friend to split the cost, or even selling one of the bottles on eBay - purely as a collectable, and not for consumption of course.

I'll post soon on the concept of value vs. cost (ooh, I bet you can't wait for that one, can you?), but until then, a couple of questions. What would you pay per year to join a club like The College Beer Club? And would you purchase the bottles individually, even if this meant paying, say 10% more for them than the club members?

The Meantime College Beer Club

OK, I'll admit that I'm skating on thin ice here. Not only is it a beer so unspeakably rare that it is numbered 74/100, but I actually don't even open it. The reason for that is that its best before date is December 25th, 2023. I know that this is going to be a stupendous beer, but maybe I can leave it in the bottle for a few years yet? I've put a poll on the blog here, so that you can decide what happens. If you want me to commit infanticide on this beer, I will. If you want me to keep it and open it in the future, I'll do that. Just cast your vote.

The Meantime College Beer Club is quite an undertaking. The beers will be, in their words, "wood aged beers, historic beer styles from previous centuries, recreations of lost recipes, plus, of course, the kinds of innovatie new brews upon which Meantime has built a world-wide reputation". I can't pretend that it's not an exclusive club - £350 for 24 bottles of beer is a fair old whack of cash - but what you'll get for that are a series of never-to-be-repeated slices of brewing history.

I'm just as curious as you to find out what the beer is like, although there is also part of me that will have no trouble at all stashing this in the cellar for a few years. It seems a shame not to pop the cork and sample what is, according to Meantime's Peter Haydon "liquid Christmas cake". But equally, bottled beers like this need at least a year or two to settle down and find their equilibrium. So I've put a poll just to the left of this post, below my profile - you get to decide what happens to this beer.

For me, it's a win-win scenario - I'm going to drink this beer at some point, whether it's next month or in 5 years. The question is, what do YOU want me to do?