Name – Dad’s Little Helper Malt Liquor
Country – United States
Type – American Malt Liquor

I’ve made it no secret about my love/hate relationship with Rogue.  There beers to me always tend to be on the extreme opposite sides of the scale.  They are never really in between.  They also tend to catch a bit of shit from people for a number of things.  From the pricing of their bottles to alleged bad treatment of employees to blind rebrandings of beers.  My latest battle with Rogue is somewhere along that last option.

I know of at least a couple of beers that Rogue simply rebranded to a different name over the years that has confused some customers into thinking they were getting a completely new beer.  But the issue with this recent change is they didn’t necessarily rebrand the beer but changed the beer inside.  Dad’s Little Helper has been a Malt Liquor for a number of years now but recently I had read that they change the style to a Black IPA.  Well upon hearing that I decided I would give it a try.

Now hear is where the issues started coming in.  I just assumed the beer would be in the same bottle that it used to be.  I’ve seen it a number of times on shelves.  Plus I had started noticing Rogue beer having a new lithograph on the necks of the bottles.  They said things like dare and risk.  So I figured these were newer bottles.  And lastly I looked at the price tag below it for Total Wine and it said the style was Black Ale.  Perfect right?  Nope.

When I popped the cap off this and poured it into my glass I noticed the lack of anything black going on in the color.  Hell it wasn’t even brown.  It was mighty yellow and clear with an okay sized white head sitting on top.  Had I become color blind like Ed Roberts?

The smell was full of sweet corn and grains.  Not a single bit of roasted malts or big hops that I was hoping for.

And the taste was exactly the same as the smell sweet corn and grains.  Sorry I’m not being super descriptive but I got to make due with what I’m working with.

So I looked at the bottle and did notice then that the bottle said Malt Liquor on it.  But a lot of breweries call their beer a malt beverage right on the label I thought.  So I took to the interwebz.

Low and behold the new Black IPA version of Dad’s Little Helper has a color change.  Same artwork but purple instead of brown.  And it does say Black IPA on it.  So there we have it.

I will definitely take some of the blame on this as I could have looked online first or even when I was in the store to see which I was getting.  I will just throw a teeny, tiny amount at Total Wine for having the price tag and description say it was the Black IPA version.

But in the end the malt liquor version wasn’t as gross as you might think.  It wasn’t sink worthy but just not good in my opinion.  It definitely tasted like a malt liquor so I guess they get some points for that.  But this was not my style of beer.  I purposely never bought it all these years because I knew that.  This purchase was a mistake thinking I was getting something completely different.  So I won’t be completely harsh on my grade to it.

Grade – C-