Ah, Bill Bill Bill….Not a sonnet nor Lady Macbeth can tame this dark $7 black tar of Gehenna! T’was a mighty dagger I saw before me whence I traversed the Food of Whole to find ye, O pitchmead from the House of William! Yeah, it was a dark, evil-tasting beer. Here’s what I thought.

Let’s backtrack a moment. Shakespeare was that tragically talented author who is still arguably the greatest author of the English language (although his was that fruity English with ‘th’ on the end of everything). The ‘tragedy’ I speak of is not his controversy in life or death, nor his inner demons he fought while writing all the sonnets, but rather the fact that his modern-day audience mainly consists primarily of uninterested, apathetic teenagers. Leave it to Rogue to make a beer honoring him…then to make another hideous glass etching in his likeness on the bottle. Let’s start by looking at the color of this thing: Black as hell, to say the least. It rates a Lovibond of 135 on the website, which is high even for a stout. Most definitely enjoy this out of a mug to really see it in full character. It’s a very decent wager that this could be blacker than some coffees. The head is what you’d expect- not very frothy, kind of jagged and brown-bubbly. The aroma gives hints of a good chocolate malty base but a tough roasted tug on the nose. The flavor is very unexpected- it’s easy to expect a light chocolaty taste but instead I’m graced with a tough, slightly bitter roast with a tiny hop structure balancing it out. The nose of this beer does not come close to dictating how it actually tastes. With an IBU of 69, it’s not exactly a bitter stout, but it just feels thick and meaty. The texture is the most important part of this beer, but the fact that it’s $7-9 a bottle at specialty beer stores or fancy grocers, it’s not exactly an everyday beer either. But then again, what really is nowadays? On a side note, I did try to read the Complete Works of William Shakespeare following consumption. Yeah, I still can’t figure it out.