My Fellow Inebriates,

If you want a beer in our house, you have to reach past a sample jar of urine in the fridge. It doesn’t need to be there, but a certain four-year-old is so pleased with herself for having produced it that no one dares remove it.

If my parents think this is a good way to keep bears away, they are wrong. To mark the fridge as territory, Miss V would have to let loose her number one on the whole appliance, not place a neatly sealed jar beside the margarine. Just saying, parents.

Who am I kidding? I don’t have any thumbs. I’m beholden to my parents. I get to sample beer when they do. Sigh.

Both kids are still sick, cuddled together under a blanket with yours truly trembling beside, hoping Gravol can thwart a vomit splattering.

On the upside, it did make for an easy bedtime last night, which left us bears and my parents free to catch up on Fringe, accompanied by a beer: ROGUE DEAD GUY ALE. My dad bought a few onesies this week, including Friday’s disastrous FRÜLI, in a bid to get out of our beer comfort zone and into some experimental territory. DEAD GUY ALE promised to be more of a beer than FRÜLI, and it certainly was.

We used the Reidel stemless glasses to get a good look at it. Slightly hazy amber, DEAD GUY ALE displays white foam and good lacing. The aroma is roasty, herbal, and slightly citrus with some yeastiness—very promising. The flavor jibes nicely: brisk and citrus with just enough carbonation; this ale suggests a mineral spring, flowers, possibly trying on dresses. The mouthfeel is reasonably substantial, even a little sticky. Hoppy bitterness punches through each sip, balancing nicely with the malt but perhaps not delivering the deeper caramel tones we generally favor at LBHQ.

There’s quite a lot going on in DEAD GUY ALE—a little too much for my mother, whose bandwidth of beer preferences is not terribly wide. She passed her glass over to my dad, who accepted it happily. For me it was like a game of keepaway—they didn’t pour me my own glass, peeps, so I had to do some ducking and weaving to get a share.

DEAD GUY ALE is interesting stuff. A little IPA, a little Bock—a 6.5% party in a 650mL bottle. Maybe not something we’d get again, but I’d certainly rather see it in the fridge than a urine sample.