A Company is Making Sriracha Beer, Is Probably Trying to Kill Me

We’ve reached peak Sriracha, everyone. You can all go home. Please, please, if you are one of those people who incessantly seeks to Srirachize all of human existence, go the fuck home.

Much to the despair of anyone with functioning taste buds, an Oregon-based (of course it is) company called Rogue Ales that apparently hates me in particular* is coming out with a Sriracha Hot Stout Beer some time before the end of the year. More distressingly, this is not being done as an elaborate prank. These are people who seem to be under the misapprehension that Sriracha-flavored beer could, in this or any other theoretically-posited reality, not be terrible.

Do not be fooled. No matter how infinite the multiverse, there cannot exist a reality where Sriracha beer is not a horrifyingly awful idea. This is because Sriracha is not good. It is, in fact, the opposite of good. Its entire existence is a cruel mockery of what condiments should be.

“Well, at least it’s not all sweet/vinegary/not hot enough/too hot like [insert name of hot sauce brand you assume I enjoy because you’re a big fan of straw men]!” I hear you gearing up to say.

Technically, you are correct. Sriracha is not any of those things, because Sriracha tastes like nothing. It has no flavor. It evokes only the anonymous memory of generic spice, while at the same time possessing the curiously napalm-like quality of incinerating even the remotest bastions of actual flavor in any dish it pollutes. Sriracha is not hot sauce, because it cannot truly be considered any kind of sauce. It is, in point of fact, the anti-sauce whose Mark of the Rooster the dire prophecies foretold.

I’m not actually kidding when I say that the Lays Sriracha flavor losing the contest last year was one of the 10 best moments of my life,** because it was an anchor of sanity in a world being rapidly overtaken by blurry-eyed, zombielike Sriracha fans, pod people who’d somehow had their taste buds surgically removed. I thought we’d crested the societal Sriracha hill and beheld golden, majestic plains as far as the eye could see, free of even the merest taint of toxic red sludge. It felt like I was leaving Mordor, freeing myself from the spectral rooster known as the Witch-King of Huy Fong.

Sadly, it turned out to be an illusion; the light at the end of the tunnel was nothing more than an oncoming train. We march inexorably towards our doom, and when the end comes, it comes in a Srirachan cataclysm.