Birdseye Chili Beer - Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery

BuckeyeNation

Iowa

2.75/5  rDev -15.4%
look: 3.5 | smell: 3.5 | taste: 2.5 | feel: 3.5 | overall: 2

hey hey hey!!!
but I like it when that lightning comes
hey hey hey!!!
yes I like it a lot
hey hey hey!!!
yes I'm jumping like a jumping jack
dancing screaming itching squealing fevered
feeling hot hot hot!!!

--from the album 'Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me' by The Cure

Bright burnished gold with a healthy infusion of orange, speckled liberally with chili pepper bits. Uh oh! I'm beginning to think that it isn't possible for a chili pepper beer to have a nice looking head. Something to do with capsaicin, I'll bet. This one was cream in color and fell alarmingly quickly to a barely covering film, eventually disappearing altogether. Needless to say, no lace.

The nose was surprisingly light on pepperness, smelling instead like a lemon and orange, citrus fruity pale ale. There was enough chili pepper present to identify the beer as a chili beer, but barely so. It was a pretty impressive job of sandbagging because the first mouthful practically burned my mucous membranes clean off.

That first mouthful brought tears to my eyes and beads of sweat to my forehead, and it only got worse with each subsequent sip. After that first napalm-like sample, about the time my vision began to clear, I was amused to hear Alanis Morissette's version of 'King of Pain' come over the sound system. I can't imagine a more appropriate song for that particular moment in time.

I thought Rock Bottom's last chili beer (Chipotle Wheat) was impressively torrid, but it can't hold a candle to this molten mouth wrecker. Underneath the fire, especially on the finish, I was able to appreciate a decent, citrusy, pale malty beer that really had no chance to show its stuff. That's too bad, because if those flavors hadn't been obliterated by the heat, this might have been an okay ale.

The body (keeping in mind my difficulty in assessing it with a numb mouth) was medium in girth with a lighty stickyviscous finish and a throttled back amount of cask-conditioned carbonation. Hard to derive much pleasure from the mouthfeel when my mouth was busy feeling such pain.

Birdseye chili sounds like such a friendly, gentle pepper, but don't you believe it. All one needs to know is its alternative name, African devil chili, to discern its true, evil nature. These bad boys go for $2750 per metric ton on the world market. Frankly, I'm surprised that Rock Bottom allowed wdmrock to spend almost three grand on one batch of beer.

Serving type: cask
@ Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery, 4508 University Ave, West Des Moines

05-09-2006 20:23:30 | More by BuckeyeNation