Beer of the Week – Rogue Yellow Snow IPA

As a hopeless geek who takes notes and keeps track of every new beer I try, Oregon's Rogue Ales is both one of my favourite and one of my least favourite breweries.

The "favourite" part is for as obvious reason: Rogue makes a whole bunch of really great beers. Sadly, we can only get one of them - Dead Guy Ale - in Ontario on a regular basis, with others showing up far too infrequently as part of the LCBOs seasonal beer promotions. But when anything in one of Rogue's distinctive silk-screened bottles appears on the shelves, I always grab at least a couple of bottles, as the odds are high that I'll enjoy it even if it's a beer I've never tried before.

The problem, though - and the reason for my "least favourite" comment - is that even when the name is new to me, sometimes the beer inside the bottle isn't. Because as evidenced by the little 'A' for 'Alias' that appears next to many of the beer names on Rogue's RateBeer page, the brewery is infamous for renaming, rebranding and repackaging their beers on a frustratingly regular basis. Which is fine if you're just doing some casual drinking - after all, as I note above, it's hard to go wrong with a Rogue beer - but when you're on a beer hunting expedition and looking for new stuff, it's pretty annoying when you find out that those bottles of Wild Irish Rogue and Shakespeare Stout that you lugged home are actually the same beer.

Things get even more confusing when Rogue not only renames a beer, but then uses the original name for a different beer entirely. This happened a few years ago when their Yellow Snow Ale, a pale ale infused with juniper, was redubbed Juniper Pale Ale, while a new beer was launched as Yellow Snow IPA. The original Yellow Snow was briefly available at the LCBO at one point, and I found it to be a decent but fairly undistinguished brew. So when I heard that it was coming back for the current LCBO Winter beer promotion (LCBO 698068 - $6.45/650 mL bottle), I didn't pay much attention until a friend tipped me off to the fact that it was a different beer, and from most reports, a very good one.

Pouring a burnished deep orange with a slight haze, and topped with a robust and creamy white head, it certainly looks great in the glass. And the big aromas of citrus peel and pine will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the hop-forward IPAs favoured by brewers and beer drinkers on the US West Coast. So goes the flavour as well, with juicy and mouth-puckering grapefruit notes coming through, right from the aggressive opening to the long and (literally) bitter end.

There is enough fruity sweetness in there to offer at least a hint of balance, but I'd still venture a pretty well educated guess that this might well be the hoppiest beer we've ever seen at the LCBO. It won't be a beer for everyone, but hopheads like yours truly who dig other American IPAs like the Southern Tier and Dogfish Head versions that the LCBO carries year-round will be mighty pleased with Rogue Yellow Snow.

We'll just have to grab what we can now, and hope that if a beer by that name comes back again in a couple of years, it's still the same one.