Pasteur's Cure Pours at a Rabies Clinic, and the Name Checks Out

Mother Road released a 6.6 percent Imperial Dark Mild named for Louis Pasteur, and poured it at a community rabies vaccination clinic in its own taproom. The brewery describes a malt-forward beer with bready, toasty, biscuit and light caramel notes.

Style: Imperial Dark Mild
Release Date: 2026-09-27
ABV: 6.6%
Mother Road Brewing Company (Flagstaff, AZ)

Louis Pasteur worked out why beer spoils, and then worked out how to stop rabies. On Sunday, Mother Road Brewing Company found an occasion that needed both halves of that resume.

The Flagstaff brewery released Pasteur's Cure, a 6.6 percent Imperial Dark Mild, at a community rabies vaccination clinic held in its own taproom. Pours of any size went for five dollars during the event.

The naming is doing more work than most tribute beers manage. Pasteur's research on fermentation in the 1850s and 1860s established that microorganisms drive the process, which is the foundation of pasteurization and a direct ancestor of how modern breweries think about yeast health and contamination. In 1885 he went on to develop the first successful rabies vaccine. Mother Road makes that connection explicitly, and it is the rare case where a beer name lines up with the event it was poured at rather than just sounding clever on a tap list.

The beer itself is described by the brewery as smooth and malt-forward, with bready and toasty flavors plus notes of biscuit and light caramel.

Imperial Dark Mild is worth a moment, because it is close to a contradiction in terms. Mild is a traditional English style built around low strength, generally sitting in the 3 to 4 percent range, where the point is dark malt character without much alcohol behind it. Pushing one to 6.6 percent means keeping that soft, bready malt profile intact while adding a good deal more body and gravity. The tasting notes suggest that is exactly the target - biscuit and light caramel rather than roast or char, which is what separates a mild from a porter or a stout at any strength.

Pasteur's Cure poured at Mother Road Brewing Company on South Mikes Pike in Flagstaff during the September 27 clinic.

Editor’s Take

Beer names reach for science all the time, usually at the level of a periodic table joke on a can. This one actually did the reading. Pasteur is the rare figure who belongs equally to the brewery and to the vaccination clinic set up in its parking lot, because he is genuinely the hinge between the two - the man who worked out what yeast was doing, and then, decades later, worked out how to stop rabies. Picking him lets a taproom event and a beer release point at the same person without either one straining.

And then there is the restraint of what they actually brewed. A name this good could have been hung on something enormous and barrel-aged, the sort of beer that arrives with a paragraph. Instead it is a dark mild, a style whose entire proposition is drinkability, nudged up to 6.6 percent and handed over at five dollars a pour regardless of size. Bready, toasty, biscuit, a little caramel. Pasteur spent his career on fermentation going right rather than fermentation going large, which makes a clean malt-forward beer a more fitting tribute than anything louder would have been.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.