Rogue Voodoo Doughnut Maple Bacon Ale Review

When trying different beers, especially craft brews, quality ingredients are key.  Take some great things and add them all together, sounds simple enough right? Unfortunately that isn’t always that easy. Typically those crazy bottles with outrageous ingredients are fun in concept, but fail in their follow through. Rogue Brewery’s scrumptious breakfast in a bottle, is a maple doughnut bacon ale. Yes, that’s right it has doughnut, bacon, and maple syrup flavor in a beer. It’s a crazy flavor made with the help of Voodoo Doughnut’s bacon maple doughnut.

The name and ingredients aren’t the only interesting thing about this flavorful ale. The presentation makes the manliest man look like a little sissy girl. The 750 ml bottle (25.4 oz) isn’t a small one, so unless you have hands like Andre the Giant you’re bound to look puny. Not only is it large, but the brown glass bottle is coated with a loud pink label. This makes it immediately obvious that this beer isn’t for the faint of heart and that’s not just because of the delicious bacon.

It takes the the sweet syrupy taste of maple and combines it with the smokey flavor of bacon and sprinkles in some more doughnut type sugar for good measure. The first three ingredients are all smoked malts including: Cherrywood, Beechwood, and Hickory. This comes through loud and clear as soon as the bottle is opened. The first sip can be quite overwhelming with the smoky bacon flavor combined with the sweet sugary syrup taste all in liquid form. It is truly a unique beer, both in flavor and presentation.

Now this isn’t a beer that you’d buy a lot of, as the flavor can be rather overbearing. This is a higher quality sipping ale that embellishes an experience with it’s appearance, smell, taste, and presentation. The price for a bottle at a bar with typically run you about $15, whereas you can pick up a bottle (if you can find it) for about $12. Seeing as you can get a quality sixer of some other tasty brews, it isn’t the most reasonable in terms of price point. But you do get some serious quality and the chance to find out what basically amounts to liquid bacon tastes like.

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