Beer in the new era

http://coolmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Rogue-VooDoo-Doughnut-ChocolatePBBanana-Ale-2.jpg

standing on the shoulders of giants

jesus they made more than one variety with voodoo? rogue is the worst

Heh, I have one of those sitting at home that a "friend" donated to me. Kinda scared to try it. Figure I'll share the wealth at my next bottle share.

boy do I have good Rogue gossip, got an inside source

said source specifically mentioned the Voodoo collabs as the beginning of the end & proof that the owners were hopelessly out of touch

unfortunately the only other thing I can say in a public forum is psychgawsple otm

One of the things I learned at Dark Matter today is that the roasters there modeled their brand after Three Floyds, to such an extent that naming their espresso bean Unicorn Blood was done strategically to attract the attention of FFF, which worked, given the recent DLD collab.

Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar is super delicious though... I've only come across one other beer that was anything like it, and that was from North Carolina and impossible to find here.

yeah that's a good one, I also like Brutal Bitter, their reds, and the Juniper ale

yeah rogue isn't worthless per se, i've always thought that dead guy was a great bock and i love that hazelnut brown too, but it's seldom worth the price and their seasonal lineup is never really worth caring about imo

rogue used to be really good i thought, 10 years ago or so. dead guy is great.

i haven't bought any rogue beer though in probably 6 or 7 years

i used to go to their garage sales where they mark down beers left over in their storage facility, and even then the prices didn't add up! and of course the beer was always mediocre at best, we ended up with WAY too much imperial mocha porter one time and it was not a pleasant beer to drink in any quantity ugh

lol beer advocate lists the style of voodoo doughnut as "fruit/vegetable ale"

marcos - they're definitely competent at making interesting low abv, drinkable beers without too much hop intensity like you were asking about a few weeks back. but again, too expensive!

rogue used to be really good i thought, 10 years ago or so. dead guy is great.

― marcos, Tuesday, April 29, 2014 1:42 PM (2 minutes ago)

very true, they have kind of been surpassed by other breweries in the last ten years

xp

specifically regarding price point, it seems to me that Rogue is just slapping a few extra bucks on cuz they actually think their brand is worth the extra $.

When I first moved to the northwest 8 years ago Rogue seemed all fancy and exotic but it does feel like they sort of coasted and there are tons of more interesting brewers. The maple bacon honestly feels like the only new thing I've seen (and not tried) from them.

They aren't bad but they all have a similar flavor that I don't really enjoy.

tbf tourists always want to go to rogue and spend a lot of money there when they do. which probably speaks to the brand more than anything, also rogue is in the airport and the pearl and major touristy places so i guess it's just convenient. this is probably their primary business model, bank on the tourists and price the bottles high b/c tourists will pay for it

it seems craziest when you compare rogue to their closest competitor deschutes, who makes much more affordable and much more impressive beers. blows my mind that they can continue to sell things consistently at $4-5 more than deschutes (per six pack) and they're still in business

especially considering that deschutes probably makes a killing on tourists too

I remember really loving Brutal Bitter, but yeah that was a decade and MANY other beers ago.

when my friends and I went to PDX a month or so ago a bunch of people wanted to drink Rogue hard booze which I thought was even more o_O than wanting to drink their beer

Rogue is the only US brand that the best beer shop in my UK town stocks more than three varieties of (like, there's three full shelves of Rogue stuff), which I assume points to having good distro more than anything else. I haven't tasted much from them, though I did pick up a bottle of Shakespeare Oatmeal Stout on a whim and will probably try it over the weekend.

that wasn't a bad stout iirc but as dan peterson said, it's been a decade for me too and many other beers ago.

Sounds like they are the Shiner of the Northwest.

Well, I guess except Shiner Bock is generally pretty damn cheap.

Hm, Brutal Bitter does get a 97 on ratebeer. It may be time for a retasting.

I've only recently started actively exploring what's out there so this is all novel to me at least :)

AVOID: New Belgium x Cigar City Lips of Faith.

The bottle has "Best Enjoyed by November 2014" printed on it, good luck with that!

lol what was wrong with it

Dumb question, but is the US the only country with a vibrant and exploding craft beer scene? I honestly have no idea. Other countries seem to be more ... traditional?

I think it has spread to a lot of other countries in the past 10 or so year?

Welp we know there's Mikkeler in Denmark, there's Nøgne Ø and HaandBryggeriet (yes, I copy-pasted those) in Norway, BrewDog in Scotland... Those are the ones that come to mind immediately for me. I think Belgium and Germany's beer cultures could reliably be called "craft" to a large degree, too?

There's a ton of craft beers from Italy too, judging by the selection they have at Eataly.

the italian craft beer scene seemed to be just beginning when i was there, i don't recall seeing more than 2-3 'craft' brands and it seemed to be farmhouse stuff following an agritourism model similar to wine. that was a few years ago though, and we weren't seeking it out by any means cause duh wine

think you could make a much stronger case about belgium and germany always having a solid craft beer scene, not sure how much it's changed in the last 10-20 years but i'd imagine brewers there are benefitting from some of the momentum in the us? i don't know how many new breweries are springing up but i'd guess that beer nerdery in the us and elsewhere has significantly increased the profile of traditional euro breweries. even 20 years ago wasn't hefeweizen still a fairly new and unexplored style?

i'm sure the uk has a strong craft scene too, and iirc that has expanded significantly recently (i remember one article a few years back saying it had doubled?)

think you could make a much stronger case about belgium and germany always having a solid craft beer scene

totally agree, though something about calling centuries-old traditions of brewing a "craft beer scene" seems kind of hilarious

Ten years ago there were (something like) 5 breweries in London; now there are something like 50 and new ones opening all the time; it feels like every other railway arch has a brewery in it now. That's just in London, a similar thing is happening across the UK. Are these "craft breweries" rather than "traditional"? For the most part the answer is yes; the new breweries tend to be quite inspired by the hop-heavy US / New World styles but they also tend to retain some elements of traditional UK brewing, most notably holding on to cask / real ale as a means of delivery, something still pretty rare in the US aiui.

There is a campaign group in the UK called CAMRA - the Campaign for Real Ale: they have, for more than 40 years now, been championing real ale as a product: unpasteurised, unfiltered, cask ale. They succeeded in saving traditional British real ale from near-extinction at the hands of massive companies who were buying up small breweries and selling inferior keg beer, and CAMRA have been a major part in a blossiming of many hundreds of small, local breweries over that time. Are those breweries "craft beer"? By the US definition, yes, but that phrase is used here to mean this new generation of brewers who take the US scene as inspiration and who are often a bit more likely to use keg beer as a means of dispense (sometimes filtered and pasteurised, sometimes not).

There is a bit of a wrangle between some bits of CAMRA who insist that "proper beer" is traditional cask ale delivered in the traditional manner and those who say that really good beer is really god beer no matter how it made it into your glass.

But yeah, there's a massive scene of small-scale local brewing in the UK. Very little of it makes it to the US.

the real ale ppl can def be weirdly partisan but i do wish it was more of a thing in the states. there's an annual cask fest in my area that has some delicious stuff from the u.k.

After a week of drinking real ale in London, drinking an IPA from The Kernel was like a breath of fresh air. I like real ale, but the flatness tends to make me drink it faster, and more of it, so I usually just end up feeling gross.

yeah I am a big fan of carbonation also

there are always a few "cask conditioned" things on tap at local brewers, I believe this is the same thing?

well yes but the real ale ppl will tell you that there's as much a stylistic component (basically low-abv beers with subtle flavors and malt emphasis) as anything.

So, would something like Bell's (unfiltered, but not afaik unpasteurized) hooked up to a typical beer engine be considered "Almost Real Ale"? bc a bar I used to frequent does this sort of thing all the time. (The Globe Pub fwiw Chicagoans)

one of my favorite things I had recently was plain old Bronx Pale Ale on cask

I had Zombie Dust on cask once, it was fantastic.

the camra thing is cool because it's kinda like a d.o.c. stamp of certification for beer culture (as opposed to just the product itself). would be interesting to see that attention to the process of serving / defining beer take hold in other places with different regional styles, but it might be a good thing that you can find something so distinct in london and not in a southern ca suburb or whatever

After a week of drinking real ale in London, drinking an IPA from The Kernel was like a breath of fresh air. I like real ale, but the flatness tends to make me drink it faster, and more of it, so I usually just end up feeling gross.

i felt like this after visiting germany, too. just craving something with more hop flavor after being bombarded with malt and yeast and wheat for a few weeks. hard to say that one is objectively better than the other but i think i am developing a hop dependency

AVOID: New Belgium x Cigar City Lips of Faith.

The bottle has "Best Enjoyed by November 2014" printed on it, good luck with that!

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Wednesday, April 30, 2014 8:16 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol what was wrong with it

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, April 30, 2014 8:17 AM

Was this an herb-based beer (had horehound and wormwood on the list of ingredients, among others)? Saw this at WF today and was curious, but didn't buy.

Described as: "Belgian yeast with Anaheim and Marash peppers along with loads of citrusy hops aged on Spanish Cedar."

Didn't get any of that except for the off capsaicin flavors, kind of a dank mildewy flavor. Drain-poured (something I rarely do).

That's nuts. I'd rather have a peanut butter beer.

yeah maybe one too many things in the mix there