Is It All About Image - A Night With Rogue

There's a lot to be said about design when it comes to the industry of alcohol. Get it right and it can lead you to great success, no doubt.. get it wrong though and it can lead to failure, or even ruin. While I've come across my fair share of what to me is good and bad design in the beer world, I wouldn't say I've come across many beers whose design outshone the beer. When looking into what sells beer, it's initially how it looks on the shelves compared to it's competitors.. If it looks better, it must taste better surely? That gets the product sold in the beginning, but if the product fails to live up to the customers expectation then they'll be very unlikely to repeat another purchase. Consumers are fickle beings.. I should know, I'm a consumer after all.

Where am I going with this though you ask? Well, A few years back I saw on the Rogue Brewery website a few beers which, quite frankly, looked more like fine sculpture of modern art rather than beer. The monolithic bottles displayed such aesthetic beauty that I just had to have them! Unfortunately, I couldn't find anywhere in the UK to buy them at the time. A few years passed, and last year (was it last year, or is it two years already? boy time flies!) Friends of Ham in Leeds opened. In a happy coincidence a few months after they opened I saw some tweets from Bacchanalia in Cambridge that they had some of these allusive Rogue bottles for sale. Thinking nothing of it at the time (as it would be silly of me to go all the way to Cambridge just for a bottle of beer) I couldn't help but wonder if FoH would get any in as they usually take a van down there every now and again I'd heard..

Turns out they did. And just like that, I was back to four years ago, the big feelings of excitement you get when you know you can get your hands on a beer you've wanted so bad since the first saw it. Geeky, yes, but it's true. I do get exited by the notion of new interesting beers. It brought all the feelings that make me so passionate about beer, which I know is just a drink at the end of the day, but it's something I'm damn passionate about. I don't think I'd still be involved in the industry if I wasn't. I just had to have some of this beer, it had now become a personal mission.

And tonight I did.

Did it live up to my expectations? Did that beautiful package, that black obelisk of precious cargo, did it do the beer justice inside?

You're damn right it did.