Sunday 17 June 2012

Our beers are in no way commercial

Waitrose


Morrisons


Sainsburys


Tescos


13 comments:

  1. "And we're not hypocrites..." This is of course the elephant in the room with The Scottish Brewer isn't it - behind all the hype and bollcks they in fact do everything they claim to despise. Well pointed out Ed (but wait for the fanboys to leap to their defence).

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  2. Well that was always just a marketing line wasn't it? One of my favourite things about the BD marketing was the sort of "yep, we know it's all bollox, but that's what a small brand without resources has to do, so c'mon, give them a break" thing we heard from the apologists. Whereas, in fact, nowadays, aren't they tied up with self-styled "boutique merchant and investment bank", the Griffin Group? And don't they employ proper professionals to get the image right? I'm not knocking it - the beer won't sell itself, and even your second million must be hard to make. They're building a business and creating jobs, so of course the beers have to be commercial, and squarely in the middle of the market they're aiming at (post-tweaking, that is, in the case of Punk IPA).

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    1. The market in question being the anti-marketing market. That's a good market, they're very smart.

      Bloody recuperators.

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    2. Well you'd have thought so from the website but the price tags in the supermarkets tell a different story!

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  3. I think their defence would be that they don't brew JUST to make money. They brew to make money, and to make a decent product that they're proud of. A product that focuses on flavour rather than margin.

    If someone asked you to brew a beer that would make you rich, would you brew Punk IPA?

    Awesome. Would love to visit this!

    Beer.Birra.Bier.

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    1. This ad is actually a very good example of bullshit. The point isn't that it's all lies (as Mark demonstrates, you can make a case for it being true, kind of, sort of); the point is that it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, because it's not intended as a statement of fact. It makes about as much sense as saying "Buy our beer! This isn't an advert!" - but, again, making sense isn't what it's about. It's there to get the image across - "ooh, BrewDog! BrewDog different! BrewDog unique! BrewDog passionate and authentic and rebellious and non-conformist! BrewDog BrewDog Brewdog!" - and unfortunately it does that very well.

      If someone asked you to brew a beer that would make you rich, would you brew Punk IPA?

      Quite possibly. Is there another independent brewery founded in the last ten years which has done better than BrewDog?

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    2. I suspect there aren't many brewers that don't brew to make a decent product that they're proud of.

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  4. So long as they have not got any accountants telling them what to do, it's craft, I reckon.

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  5. I would say yes and no to this, on the one hand their main line, creation of bars, big advertising drives are all pretty mainstream and big business. But on the other their experiMENTAL approach to brewing new beers is on an almost reckless level.
    I would however also back that in recent times Brewdog have erred on the side of big business and could benefit from some more love to the "craft" side of their image - it couldn't hurt anyway.

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