I AM about to take your breath away. How do I know this? Because I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me when I realized that in the middle of a deep recession I am recommending a beer that costs $35 a bottle.

What? Am I insane?

Probably. It would take a rare occasion for me to pay $35 for a bottle, but I’ll tell you about this extraordinary beer anyway. It is the 2006 vintage  for a beer this expensive must have a vintage  of the Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien, an unfiltered, unpasteurized, limited-edition ale brewed by Brasserie des Franches-Montagnes in Switzerland. In its favor, the beer comes in a 25.4-ounce bottle, rather than the more typical 12 ounces. More important, it is superb: brown in color yet bright in the mouth, with a bracing, spicy, tart, almost woolly complexity reminiscent of a Belgian lambic.

About the only thing against it is the price.

Aside from that, what makes this beer so unusual? The Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien is one of a growing number of beers that spend some time aging in oak barrels, which may be typical for wine and whiskey but is a rare thing indeed for beer. In a way, the brewers of these barrel-aged beers have reached backward into the future.

Centuries ago, barrels were the only vessels in which to brew and store beers. Most brewers strove to eliminate any flavorings that wood might impart to the beers, soaking and scrubbing the wood to make the barrels as neutral as possible. In industrialized times, of course, steel and aluminum serve a brewer’s purpose with far less effort and wear than wood.