Two years ago, John Gasparine was wandering through the Paraguayan forest when he stumbled upon Palo Santo, or Holy Wood. Upon returning to the United States, the Baltimore business man — a self-professed beer geek — left a message for Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione saying he should build a beer barrel out of the wood. After a series of conversations, the Delaware brewer agreed.

“I told him to get a shitload,” Calagione remembers. “We were going to build the biggest wooden barrel since the days of Prohibition.”

Thus begins The New Yorker’s story about the rise of extreme beer. It’s an interesting — albeit dated — look into the world of craft beer. The article is a bear to read, but exhaustively reported and well worth any beer geeks time.

As for the resulting barrel: It’s fifteen feet high and ten feet in diameter, holds nine thousand gallons, and cost $140,000 to build. “If Dogfish were a publicly traded company, I’d have been fired for building this,” Calagione said. All of us are glad it’s not.