Bacon Maple Ale is the glorious combo of Voodoo Doughnuts and beer
The amateur beer lover is in the midst of an embarrassment of riches. In a crowded micro-brew marketplace, the effort to grab taste buds, eyeballs and the drinker’s dollar has grown into fierce competition to see what flavors can produce tasty suds. When labors of love, audacity, and a WTF spirit combine, we get taste sensations and oddities that make us want to try it again or spit it out and give the brewery some credit for effort. This is likely the spirit that Newport-based Rogue Ales is trafficking in by embracing the institution that is VooDoo Doughnuts and producing its Bacon Maple Ale.
I suspect my own personal fascination with unusual flavors or beer concepts in beer goes back to a fake beer featured on Saturday Night Live: “A.M. Ale.” The reasoning’s simple enough: To a 13-year old, drinking is already kind of foreign, awesome and adult. Drinking beer specifically designed for the morning when polite society dictates you probably shouldn’t? Even better!
So, if you’re slightly impressed by the whole idea of daytime drinking to begin with, then beer that tastes like breakfast is appealing to the mental palate. Granted, porters and stouts with coffee in them aren’t new, but going for a doughnut flavor certainly is. I’ll applaud Rogue for opting for one of the Portland institution’s simpler creations. Considering the numerous concoctions available at VooDoo, it’s easy to see some stumbling blocks if you pick the wrong doughnut to emulate in liquid form. When I bought the 750 ml bottle from the brewery’s Portland Saturday Market booth ($13), the man working it used “smoky and sweet” to describe it. These elements can go wrong quickly. I was at this year’s Oregon Brewers’ Festival and had sampled a bacon beer that tasted more like the fat than actual bacon, as well as a beer so sweet (Dogfish Head’s Black & Red) my drinking companion accurately described it as “a combination of a Jager bomb and turpentine.”
So after popping the top on the Pepto-pink bottle (good things come in pink bottles, huh?), the first thing to notice is the overwhelming smell of pancakes. The ale’s color is straight out of the maple syrup playbook, but the relieving factor upon the first sip is that the ale is rather smoky and didn’t drown my taste buds in maple flavor. It seems like a contradiction given what the ale’s based upon and pays homage to, but the taste of bacon and smoky aftertaste seems, well, subtle -- not a word you’d associate with the ale’s inspiration. Consider this a good thing, though -- because if you go the other way, such a brew would be so sweet as to render it undrinkable. The other question worth answering: Does it taste like its namesake? I saved some of the beer for a run to VooDoo, and after eating a Bacon Maple Bar, tried it again. It tastes more like its toppings than the dough itself.
Rogue’s achieved something pretty tough by taking something with both a sweet and savory component and making a drinkable beer out of it. Maple’s definitely an acquired taste, and even diehards might grow tired of inhaling it with every opened bottle and sip from a pint glass. It’s worth trying the 750 mL bottle out every once in a while, but I won’t be springing for a case of the stuff. (I looked to see if there were six-packs of it made, and there don’t seem to be.) I do have a suggestion, though, for the folks slinging fried dough in pink boxes for their next potent potable partnership: Get a local distillery to make Arnold Palmer doughnut vodka. Don’t even tell me you wouldn’t drink that.
