Voodoo Ranger's Roulette IPA hides two foul-tasting mystery cans among four good ones

Voodoo Ranger, New Belgium's fastest-growing craft brand, wanted a collaboration with Chicago's infamous Malört — a spirit famous for tasting like punishment — that both brands' rule-breaking fans would film.

A roulette six-pack: four easy-drinking cans, two secretly brutal Malört-style IPAs, identical packaging, spinner on the pack — the drink itself is the dare.

Fact & Fiction designed a six-pack of identical cans — four Juicy Haze IPA, two never-before-seen Malört-style IPA — with a functional roulette spinner; the reveal only comes at the first sip, on camera, at house parties.

The pack was built to flood social feeds with filmed first-sip reactions; LBBOnline covered the launch as experiential marketing that 'redefines' the format. Malört's cult of reaction videos gave the mechanic a ready-made audience.

In June 2025, New Belgium Brewing's Voodoo Ranger partnered with Chicago's notorious Jeppson's Malört and agency Fact & Fiction to launch Roulette IPA: each six-pack holds four cans of Juicy Haze IPA and two mystery cans of a 'bitter, regrettable' Malört-style IPA, in identical packaging with zero visual indicators and a functional roulette spinner on the pack. 'Roulette IPA isn't just a collaboration, it's a dare wrapped in a six-pack,' said New Belgium CMO Rebecca Dye Yonushonis.

The pairing weaponizes both brands' reputations: Voodoo Ranger is irreverent and fast-growing; Malört is the wormwood-heavy Chicago spirit 'equal parts punishment and rite of passage' that has spawned countless reaction videos. The agency's brief was to turn that rule-breaking energy into 'product-driven moments worth documenting, sharing, and watching' — the first sip is the content, filmed by the drinker's friends.

The product is the media plan: hope for haze, brace for pain, and 'whatever happens, hit record.'

Malört already had a filmed-reaction economy around it; the six-pack imported that ritual into a mass-market craft beer format.

Identical cans make the gamble real — the uncertainty, not the flavor, is what gets people filming.

The functional spinner puts the game on the pack itself, so every purchase carries the prop for the video.

If your product has a love-it-or-suffer-it variant, uncertainty is the engagement: let chance, not the marketer, decide which experience each customer gets.

The collaboration launched in June 2025 as a limited six-pack experience; LBBOnline reported it as a bid to 'flood social feeds with authentic chaos,' with results still to be seen.