That damn pink bottle


I reckon a good proportion of the sales of Rogue’s Voodoo Doughnut beers can be put down to that pink bottle.

That lurid colour really makes the beer stand out on the shelf. It draws people’s attention to it and then they go ‘‘bacon maple doughnut beer? I’ve got to buy that’’. Then they get home, try some and then pour the rest of the bottle down the sink. Because it is an unpleasant beer.

Or at least that’s my experience of it. And yet, I kept the empty bottle for months – even though I’m not at all a bottle collector. I just loved the pinkness of it. It was so different, so eye-catching. So pink. I’d have even re-used it for my homebrew but the pink coating on the glass meant that I’d be unable to see the fill level.

Even though I rated the bacon maple Voodoo beer not very highly at all, I was compelled to buy myself one of the second collab, the chocolate, peanut butter and banana. Because of that seductive pink bottle. I’m such a sucker for gimmicks.

However that bad bacon beer experience did loom large in my mind and so I put off opening its sibling for a good few months. That was until Sunday, when I became a bit daring and decided to drink it.

How is it? Well, I managed to finish the bottle this time and without feeling like I was choking it down. So that’s a tick for the CPB and B beer.

A bit of a cross goes up because of the aroma, which is a lot of chocolate. But that cheap chocolate they use to make supermarket Easter eggs with. Yeah, it’s still chocolate but not great chocolate.

As far as flavour goes, that chocolate dominates with the banana in the background. I would have liked some more of the banana. I’d also have liked them to get the banana flavours from using hefe yeasts rather than ‘‘banana extract’’, which is what they actually used (I feel like that’s cheating a bit), so that’s a cross too.

It’s a tick that I could find no evidence of peanut butter flavour at all. That’s good given the beer’s dominant chocolate characters because peanut butter and chocolate go together as well as vegemite and donkeys (ie, not at all).

At the end of the day, it’s a weird beer. Certainly drinkable as a novelty but I can’t see myself buying another one.
But I’ll most likely buy the next Voodoo beer – because of that goddamned pink bottle.

2 replies »

  1. I have to 100% disagree that chocolate and peanut butter don’t go well together. Chocolate and peanut butter are a match made in heaven, with the sweetness of the chocolate going excellently with the oily, saltiness of the peanuts.

    That being said, this beer is a clusterfuck by all accounts.

  2. I hate this beer so much- Voodoo is amazing and the collab should be more than a pretty pink bottle. But yeah, we all have one on our shelf. Dammit.

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