

(The pink bottles were meant to mimic Voodoo’s pink boxes it took five iterations until Voodoo’s owners were happy with the exact color.) It immediately started getting tons of press both beer-niche and of a national general interest. “ith the pink bottle, I thought perhaps it was a fundraiser for Breast Cancer Awareness,” claimed writer Lisa Morrison. The Beer Pulse blog - noticing the required TTB filing for label approval - announced the first pink bottling in August of 2011. If Maier was unsure if he’d nailed it, consumers initially weren’t the beer was a viral sensation even before Rogue had announced its release. To that he added another 10 ingredients, most notably vanilla beans, “pure maple flavoring,” and, of course, applewood-smoked bacon - the latter fact something many of Rogue’s vegan brewers were not thrilled with. “It’s a different kind of challenge.”įinally, however, he figured out what he was looking for, starting with a lower-ABV rauchbier base, a smoky German-style brown ale created with three different smoked malts.
Voodoo donuts maple bacon how to#
“John iterates and iterates and iterates, and does sample after sample and figures out how to integrate that into the brewing process, which is a different task altogether,” explained Joyce. (Maier retired in July and declined to speak for this article.) It’s even been reported that a few times Maier woke up in the middle of the night and sped to the brewery to have another go at dialing it in. Brewmaster John Maier struggled mightily to nail the sweet and savory flavor profile, initially using a porter as the base beer. “We got together, had a few beers and doughnuts and the partnership just evolved naturally from there,” Joyce told Departures in 2013.īut the idea of making a beer that tasted like a doughnut - without actually using doughnuts - wasn’t easy to pull off. Shannon and his co-owner Kenneth “Cat Daddy” Pogson invited him to come over and check the place out for himself and then they returned the favor. One day in early 2011, Rogue’s then-president Brett Joyce called Voodoo to tell them how much he loved their doughnuts. Spurred by Voodoo and other offbeat doughnutteries, the Bacon Maple doughnut became so ubiquitous in the era, that today the entire genre has its own Wikipedia page. This was still the early days of internet culture, when putting bacon on literally everything was an “extremely online” thing to do. It quickly became their signature doughnut. “But there were a lot of gross starts.”įrom the day Voodoo opened in downtown Portland in May of 2003, the kooky shop served what they called Bacon Maple Bars, essentially “long johns” glazed with maple and topped with a slice of bacon split in half. “It was a cool idea - bacon beer,” recalls Tres Shannon, one of the owners of the Portland-based Voodoo Doughnut. And, though I thought it was pretty disgusting myself, I still think about it constantly. Maybe it was just way ahead of its time, in both ingredients and its Instagram-friendly (if not completely garish) packaging. It sold like crazy - to whom?! - but it was never a beer geek favorite and today it’s mostly been forgotten by the cognoscenti.
Voodoo donuts maple bacon series#
Bacon Maple Ale was roundly mocked by the media and derided by online reviewers, but the series nevertheless forged on with five additional releases.


1988), did a collaboration project with a local doughnut shop that would instantly make a splash - though mostly for all the wrong reasons. At the start of this decade, Rogue Ales & Spirits, one of the OGs of the craft beer world (est.
