Rogue Beard Beer

Brewer Descrip­tion
It’s here! Our lat­est brew ded­i­cated to beards, Beard Beer is brewed with a yeast cre­ated from Brew­mas­ter John Maier’s beard. No Need to freak out, Brew­ers have used wild yeasts in beer mak­ing for cen­turies. John has had the same Old Growth Beard since 1983 and for over 15,000 brews, so it is no great sur­prise that a nat­ural yeast ideal for brew­ing was dis­cov­ered in his beard. What does Beard Beer taste like? Try it, we think you’ll be surprised…

I remem­ber hear­ing about this beer last year when Rogue announced it. I finally ordered Beard Beer from Rogue’s web­site. It was actu­ally a decent price for the beer itself, but their ship­ping costs are always ridicu­lous. The story behind this beer is that the yeast used to brew it is from a man’s bear. Rogue was test­ing a new yeast strain from har­vested hops, but the test came back neg­a­tive. As a joke, they decided to send in clip­pings of the brewmaster’s beard. The test results proved that the hair fol­li­cles con­tained a yeast cell that was per­fect for brew­ing beer.

No, the beer doesn’t taste like a beard, and it wasn’t brewed with hair either.

The beer itself is quite impress­ing. It pours a cloudy golden bronze with many inter­est­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics within. The aroma is of bread, cit­rus and other fruits. The smell is also accom­pa­nied by a small spice. The fla­vor is truly sur­pris­ing, and each sip is def­i­nitely inter­est­ing. You notice a nice layer of cit­rus along with some zesty spice. The fruit taste that I notice are oranges, pineap­ple, and a lit­tle guava. It is quite bready in taste, but also very sweet. There isn’t much hop­pi­ness to Beard Beer, but the beer still deliv­ers. The spici­ness that you get from the aroma accom­pa­n­nies the weird­ness of each sip. Over­all, I love Beard Beer…you wouldn’t even guess that it was made from a man’s beard.

Rogue has been known to cre­ate some eccen­tric ales using their in-house devel­oped hop and yeast strains. Their in-house Pac­man yeast has been a great addi­tion to many great Rogue beers, and I believe the Beard yeast will soon be used again in the future.