The Devil Made Me Returns With Smoked Serranos, Not Fresh

Smoke a chile and it becomes a different ingredient. The bright, grassy, green-tasting edge of a fresh pepper cooks off, and what replaces it is darker and more leathery, with heat that arrives late rather than up front. The best known example is the chipotle, which is simply a jalapeno that has been smoked and dried.

Adroit Theory has run the same process on a hotter pepper. The Devil Made Me is a porter brewed with smoked serrano peppers, and it returns this week as what the brewery calls one of its most requested beers from the past.

The tasting notes Adroit Theory supplies are short: roasted grain with a wisp of smoke, subtle and building heat, dry finish. The brewer's own assessment of this batch is that the heat landed at the right level and the smoke stayed restrained, describing the result as crushable.

The restraint is the whole difficulty with the category. Chile beers fail in one of two directions, either disappearing entirely or turning into a novelty that nobody finishes. Serranos sit meaningfully above jalapenos on the heat scale, so the margin for error is real. Building heat, the phrase the brewery uses, is the more forgiving of the two outcomes, because capsaicin accumulates across a glass rather than fading the way acidity does.

The pairing writes itself. Smoke, roast and a dry finish point directly at anything that has spent time over a fire, and this would sit comfortably next to grilled meat or charred vegetables.

The label follows Adroit Theory's usual line in horror imagery, running a strip of film frames across the can and asking, in the release copy, where evil actually comes from. The brewery's answer for the purposes of this beer is fire and brimstone.

The Devil Made Me arrives Friday mid-day at the Purcellville taproom, on draft and in cans. Five cases have been packaged, tying it with Black as Your Soul for the smallest run of the week.