Episode 79: Happy Halloween – Bring out your dead

A departure from Pumpkin beers, because all the good ones are sold out in Chicago. This week we look at a “scary” beer, Rogue Dead Guy Ale.

News

Tonight story is a little bit of a warning to all you home brewers out there. Don’t try to brew with drugs. A 28 year old graduate student in organic chemistry used poppy pods to brew beer. The only problem is that he apparently used a chemical procedure first to extract the opium from the pods which was then placed in the beer to give it a little extra kick. Well the law didn’t like that idea, and they went after him, but not too hard. His punishment for this fancy homebrew is that he has to have the soil in his back yard tested where he dumped the spent grain to make sure there is no contamination, go to drug classes, and stay clean for the next 18 months. Not too harsh, but still, don’t try to brew with drugs. That is just a bad idea!

Dead Guy Ale

• Now there are surprisingly lots of beers out there with Halloween sounding names, such as Lucifer, Red Devil, Hop Goblin, or the Hopness Monster, however after looking over the shelf I could come up with no better choice than Rogues Dead Guy Ale.
• We have talked about Rogue a few times on the show, but for those of you who are new, Rogue Brewing Company is based in Newport, Oregon and was founded in 1988 and is run by Jack Joyce.
• One thing that most all of their beers have in common is that they use a proprietary strain of yeast they call Pac-Man yeast, which will give the beers a flavor that you can’t find in other ones.
• Tonight’s beer, Dead Guy Ale, is their flagship beer and weighs in at 6.5% abv. This beer is classified as a Maibock beer, which is tends to be a lighter colored bock beer that is generally brewed in the spring around May.
• Before we get into the beer itself, Dead Guy has a very distinctive bottle and tap handle, both showing a skeleton sitting on a barrel of beer. This is probably my favorite tap handle out there.
• The beer is made with four types of malts and two types of hops, and as always it has a suggestion of food on the side which is for pork or hot and spicy food.
• The beer pours a lighter color, maybe a light gold, with a nice pillowy orange white head that sticks around for a bit.
• The aroma here is mainly malt but even that is sort of subdued to some degree. Rather sweet smell with just the vaguest hint of hops in the aroma here.
• The taste is a bitter malt taste at first which is something that you aren’t expecting when you smell the beer. The hops are there, but they aren’t overpowering. However, that is only with the first sip. After I had a few sips, the malt sweetness seems to come forward in this beer and the hops tend to move to the back. There is a little alcohol hotness as well in the aftertaste, but nothing to bad. This is only a 6.5% beer after all.
• I would call this a good session beer, but it is still a little high in abv for me in that regards. I would say that it would make a good Halloween night beer however, so enjoy!

Next Week

Well enough of this Halloween themed stuff, we are jumping back into a normal series again next week, this time it is going to be Rye beers. Which Rye is yet to be seen. This is one of Jake’s favorite styles.

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