Beer and The Dark Lord - A Tasty Combination

. . .

On April 27, craft beer lovers from all over the world descended on tiny Munster, Indiana, for Dark Lord Day — the only day all year that Three Floyds Brewing Company’s coveted Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout can be purchased. More than just a beer geek mecca, Dark Lord Day has become one of the most impeccably curated one-day metal festivals in the world; this year’s edition featured performances by Bloodiest, Lair of the Minotaur, Sweet Cobra, Pig Destroyer, Municipal Waste, and High on Fire. Not exactly lightweights, to paraphrase the great American hero Walter Sobchak.

The Dark Lord Day concert has come to represent the impressive extent of the convergence of extreme metal and craft beer, two admittedly likely bedfellows that have still managed to grow and evolve together in unexpected and exciting ways. Three Floyds is leading the way, but heavy hitters from Dogfish Head to New Belgium, as well as smaller operations like Jester King and TRVE Brewing, are holding dual heathen hammers high, exposing heshers to great beer and beer snobs to great metal with an impressive array of collaborations and band-inspired beers.

That metal and craft beer have integrated so fully isn’t headline-worthy in and of itself anymore. With so many options on the market, metal-loving hopheads are too jaded to buy a bomber of something just because it bears a band name on its label. What’s interesting now is taking the multitude of data points that exist to find out why a brewery has teamed up with a band or borrowed their lyrics to sell a particular beer. Is there a reason that Three Floyds decided Pig Destroyer is best suited to sell an American pale ale and Clutch were tapped by New Belgium (pun fully fucking intended) to help brew a sour brown ale? Why are noted beer-bongers Municipal Waste associated with a pitch-black stout while This Is Spinal Tap lends its most famous line to an imperial red ale?

Despite the face-value unlikeliness of some of those associations, American craft brewers have actually done a terrific job in pairing beers with bands. If an iconic album cover can elevate a classic album to even loftier heights, then the stamp of a great, fitting band name on a tasty brew can make it that much more enjoyable. Soon you realize that the biting hops that emerge a few seconds after your first sip of Three Floyds’ Permanent Funeral feel a lot like the head-on collision of “Cheerleader Corpses” as it segues out of “Jennifer.” One too many sips of the boozy-as-hell Lips of Faith: Clutch makes “Promoter (of Earthbound Causes)” hit just a little harder. The black gold of Three Floyds Toxic Revolution rushes down your throat faster and more vigorously than the A-side of the Toxic Waste split on Tankcrimes. And Bell’s Brewery’s This One Goes To 11 Ale, uh, happens to have an 11% ABV. Not unlike Spinal Tap, even when it’s incredibly dumb, craft beer is a lot of fun.

Connecting with a beer on a level beyond the way it makes your taste buds feel can bring an entirely new dimension to the drinking experience. By and large, the breweries that elect to bring music in as that dimension wouldn’t do it if they didn’t think it added something to the beer. If one of them betrays us with, say, an American adjunct lager called Keg Stands to the Welkin At Dusk, mark my words — we will exit in droves.

I was recently able to sample three of Three Floyds’ newest band-inspired brews at Indiana’s great Bloomington Craft Beer Festival. In addition to the aforementioned Permanent Funeral (tasty, but perhaps too slight to bear the mark of grindcore’s finest band) and Toxic Revolution (the second-best beer I had all day), I had In the Name of Suffering, a Cascadian black ale that sidestepped the temptation to go for a Wolves in the Throne Room reference to pay tribute to the mighty EyeHateGod. (TRVE Brewing’s version is more obviously named Black Cascade.) It was a striking moniker for a delicious beer, and it never got old to hear dads in Lacoste shirts ask for it by name.

I may have been 20 tasting glasses deep when I had this revelation, but it still struck me how many people were huddled around the Three Floyds table — metalheads, normies, all — sharing in the same experience, and enjoying it roughly proportionally to how long they’d been there. While live bluegrass echoed through the quarry where the festival was held, the 3F table had an iPod plugged into a shitty pair of speakers, blasting hideous grindcore over the din of the beer-soaked attendees. I’m not sure if tasting Permanent Funeral will be a gateway to legions of non-metalheads giving Terrifyer a chance, but if there’s been even a few converts, I’ll continue to be tantalized by the possibilities.

What’s your favorite metal-inspired beer? Let’s geek out in the comments.

. . .