Prince Willy's Pint: Brewdog's Royal Virility Performance
When is a beer not a beer? When it's a gimmick, of course. And almost nobody makes more gimmicks (and fewer beers) than notorious Scottish brewery Brewdog. The most well-known of their efforts is Tactical Nuclear Penguin, a 32% abv imperial stout made by freezing their standard imperial stout until it became the world's strongest beer (if you're curious, you can find it at Wally's for only $100). When a German brewery took the crown back, Brewdog responded by coming out with Sink the Bismarck!, a quadruple IPA that they froze even more to bring to 41% abv.
The next beer to join this impressive lineup of hype is, shockingly, a beer brewed in honor of the royal wedding. To be more specific, it's a beer brewed in honor of the royal wedding night. Royal Virility Performance is a 7% IPA with "various well known aphrodisiacs" including herbal viagra, chocolate, and horny goat weed. The label features several snarky lines, including (but not limited to) "Arise Prince Willy" and "Big Willy Style," though why they didn't take the joke one more step and brew an Imperial IPA we will never understand.
Brewdog fancy themselves punk brewers, and they claim to be "about breaking rules, taking risks, upsetting trends, [and] unsettling institutions." In that vein, they also claim that Royal Virility Performance is designed to "take the wheels off the royal wedding bandwagon" because "products marketed according to an event rather than their flavour is an example of what's wrong with the industry." It's an interesting point they make, as long as you pretend that when they brewed and re-brewed the world's strongest beer it was all about flavor and not the event.
The invigorating brew sells for £10 per 12 oz. bottle (about $16 plus very expensive shipping) and there are only 1,000 of them available, so if you're a particularly twisted Anglophile, or if you feel like you need that extra special something, you had better act fast.
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