Last week some of the Beer Viking crew made a couple of visits to Borough to visit the Rake and Utobeer. We noticed that through Melissa Cole, who’s Taking the Beard Out of Beer and admin for social networking group lovebeer@borough has joined forces with Scottish craft brewers BrewDog for a take-over of the Rake, including a small scale tasting session.
Doc D broke down and got tickets 1 & 2 for the Saturday session and ahead of that I wanted to do some research into BrewDog.
I only got so far because after reading about the Portman Group taking issue with BrewDog’s labeling I became very distracted.
The Portman group has some sort of labeling code and have the following issues with BrewDog beers:
Rip Tide: “The product is described as a “twisted merciless stout” associating its consumption with anti-social behaviour”
Rocker: “Description of the product includes "nourishing foodstuff" and "magic is still there to be extracted from this drink" implying it could enhance mental or physical capabilities”
Punk IPA: “This product is described as an “aggressive beer” thus associating its consumption with anti-social behaviour” 
It’s not just BrewDog they have issues with, apparently they are also don’t like Skull Splitter, a 8.5% beer produced by the Orkney Brewery.
Roger Protz has a good post on the importance of silly names to beer and then updates this with some thoughts on the conflict of interest here.
Headlines are: Portman Group is a self-funded “independent” advisory board to the UK drinks industry – who will persecuting craft brewers for silly names are upholding that labeling on alco-pops is fine.
The Tank thinks that this stinks. Just because your owners make an inferior product and this is being shown at the sales till, don’t blame labeling and try to use lawyers and nuances to take out the competition.
Come on people, let’s rally that blitz spirit and start to vote at the tills and boycott the Portman Group members products. (Or failing that, sign this petition!)
Tue, Nov 25, 2008
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