The Devil's Bible rendered in amber and oak. Decocted Czech grains and noble Saaz hops commune with brown sugar bourbon wood. Warm, dark-fruited, yet impossibly crisp. A manuscript of restraint and temptation.
In the early thirteenth century, in a Benedictine monastery in Podlazice, Bohemia, a monk was sentenced to death. His crime is lost to history, but the sentence was specific and terrible: he would be walled up alive. In desperation, he offered to atone by creating a book that would glorify the monastery forever, a book containing the entirety of human knowledge, completed in a single night. The abbot agreed. The monk began to write.
By midnight, it was clear the task was impossible. No human hand could produce what he had promised. And so, according to the legend, the monk abandoned his prayers to God and called upon the devil. Satan completed the manuscript before dawn, and the monk added a full-page portrait of the devil himself in gratitude, a horned, crouching figure with clawed hands and a green face, unlike any other depiction in medieval art.
The Codex Gigas exists. It is real. It measures 36 inches tall, weighs 165 pounds, and contains 310 vellum leaves requiring the skins of 160 donkeys. It includes the complete Latin Bible, Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, Josephus’s Antiquities, medical texts, incantations, and that singular, haunting portrait of the devil. Analysis suggests one scribe wrote the entire text, a task estimated to require twenty to thirty years of continuous work. It now resides in the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, taken as spoils during the Thirty Years’ War.
Codex Gigas is brewed in the Czech tradition from which the manuscript emerged. A Czech Amber Lager at 5.4% ABV, decocted from Czech grains and seasoned with noble Saaz hops, it carries warm, dark-fruited complexity touched by brown sugar bourbon wood. A manuscript of restraint and temptation. The prayer and the pact, bound together in a single glass.
