Step inside, Walk this way, You and me babe, Hey hey! Pour some hops, malt, yeast and water on me!

Long-gone are the days when a rock band’s merchandise portfolio consisted of T-shirt, badges, patches, caps and, for the very affluent, a signature guitar, bass, drum kit as endorsed by our favourite musical heroes.  Signature wine, beer, whiskey and hard liquor are now the trappings for all the best bands.

It seems each classic rock band has a signatue beer: Motorhead has its Bastards Lager; KISS has its Destroyer pale lager; AC/DC has its Australian Hardrock pale lager; Iron Maiden has its Trooper Ale, the most visible of them all.  Then just outside of the mainstream, signature beers can be found by artists as diverse as Sepultura, Deftones, GWAR, Pearl Jam and Mastodon, who’s given the world not only a German lager but also a black IPA.

The latest band to release its own signature beer is the UK’s globe-conquering titans Def Leppard, who’ve been working with Seattle’s Elysian Brewing to bring us the Def Leppard Pale, available on draught and in 16oz cans.

With its humble beginnings in the northern British city of Sheffield, in the industrial heartland of South Yorkshire, we should expect Def Leppard’s Def Leppard Pale to be a classic British Bitter rather than a west-coast style Pale, and we’re not disappointed.  The classic British malt profile is combined with US hops to reflect both the bands late-‘70s birth in Britain’s Steel City and its early-‘80s success in the US that made it one of the biggest bands in the world?

We look forward to seeing Def Leppard and its Def Leppard Pale in Europe sometime soon.