Drink Like a Dead Guy

By Lee Heidel December 10, 2016

rogue dead guy — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale and Whiskey are a perfectly matched pair.

Beers are brewed. Whiskeys are distilled. Different words, different meanings. However, the ingredients and some of the processes can be very similar, and those similarities have brought several traditional breweries into the world of distilling. Dogfish Head, New Holland and Ballast Point all made their names in the craft beer section of your local package shop, but have extended into spirits in recent years. Perhaps the best known creator working in these two genres is Oregon’s Rogue.

Related Post: Highland Park and Sixpoint Collaboration Beers

Rogue Ales started in 1988, when many of today’s hottest brewers weren’t even born. Its reputation was forged on flavorful beers highlighting the extremes extracted from malts, hops and creative additives. That creativity found new heights in beverages like Beard Beer (a beer that utilizes yeast cultured from facial hair) and the Voodoo Doughnut collaboration series where grapes, mango and bacon have alternated through as featured flavors.

Dead Guy Ale — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The stalwart workhorse of the Rogue line of beers is Dead Guy Ale. Designed to be Rogue’s take on the German Maibock, this smooth, balanced beer is easy to overlook. But quality and drinkability never go out of style and that combination has kept Dead Guy Ale in the Rogue rotation since the 1990s.

When Rogue expanded into spirits, they chose the same base ingredients as the beloved Dead Guy Ale for a partner whiskey. Dead Guy Whiskey is made with Munich and Rogue branded malts harvested from its own farm, along with Rogue’s own strand of Pacman Yeast and water. It’s a nearly identical checklist to the original beer. Other than a few small grain variations, the only thing the whiskey is missing is hops.

Dead Guy Whiskey — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The similarity in base elements makes these two drinks perfect pairing companions to judge the effects of distilling and aging versus traditional brewing. Dead Guy Whiskey’s punch of citrus, wood and mild honey bring out the more delicate floral notes in Dead Guy Ale. Meanwhile, the comparatively thick malts and carbonation in the ale give way to the cutting vanilla finish of the whiskey.

Rogue Dead Guy Ale is 6.5% alcohol by volume and available in 22 ounce bottles, six packs and on draft. Rogue Dead Guy Whiskey is 80 proof and available in 750ml swing-top bottles.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Liquor, Beer, and Wine

Lee Heidel is the managing editor of Brew/Drink/Run, a website and podcast that promotes brewing your own beer, consuming the…

Food & Drink

Bourbon snifters: What they’re good for, which bourbon you should drink from them, and more

Why you should have bourbon snifters, and what to drink from them

Snifter

If you’re new to bourbon, you probably pour your favorite whiskey into a rocks glass with or without ice and sip it while you binge-watch the newest show du jour on Netflix and call it good. And while that’s all well and good, as we aren’t here to tell anyone how to imbibe whiskey, you might not be enjoying it as much as you could be. That’s to say that there are whiskey glasses designed to elevate and heighten your whiskey-tasting experience.

Don’t believe us? Just take your classic rocks glass, for example. It’s fairly uniform and unexciting. It’s designed for cocktails. That’s because when you drink an Old Fashioned. Sazerac, or Whiskey Sour the experience is all about the various flavors the ingredients (when combined with whiskey) create.

Food & Drink

How many glasses of wine are actually in a bottle? You might not like the answer

Apparently there should be more than two glasses in a bottle of wine?

Wine being poured at dinner table

If you're anything like me, you've never paid much attention to rules or regulations. Even as a child, I didn't pay any mind to those telling me what I should or should not do. Of course, there were and are rules of common sense put into place to keep us safe, and even my younger self could appreciate and abide by those. But if my teacher told me to use a red crayon, you could bet I would use a green one. If my piano instructor told me to play the white keys, I would only play the black ones. I wouldn't say I liked being told that there were lines and limits; honestly, I still don't. I get a little irked when given a guideline or a box, which is, perhaps, the reason I fell in love with food and wine. With food and wine, there aren't any limits...with two exceptions - baking (because it's either science or witchcraft, and I still don't know which) and how many glasses of wine there are in a bottle.
My evening routine tells me that there are approximately two to three glasses of wine per bottle, depending on the glass or mug I've selected from the cupboard, but apparently, this is not the case.

How many glasses of wine are in a bottle?
The sad truth is that there are five whole glasses of wine in one standard 750-milliliter bottle. This may come as a shock to those of us who could have sworn that an entire bottle contained only two glasses, but here we are. Don't shoot the messenger.

Food & Drink

Our 4 favorite whiskey drinks, ranked

The best whiskey drinks, ranked

Whiskey cocktail

We love whiskey. We love it all: bourbon, single-malt Scotch, rye whiskey, Irish whiskey, and Japanese whisky. We enjoy it neat, on the rocks, and especially mixed into our favorite classic cocktails. The latter is what we’re going to get into today.

We don’t have to tell you that whiskey is a great spirit to mix with. There’s a reason some of the most well-known cocktails ever created use whiskey as the base or, at the very least, one of the main ingredients. Take a look at any list of “classic” cocktails. While you’ll see many made with gin, vodka, tequila, and other spirits, many of the most well-known feature whiskey.