Greg Koch kind of explains Arrogant Brewing in this video

If you weren’t aware, Stone Brewing Co. just started an offshoot umbrella brand called Arrogant Brewing, named after the company’s famed Arrogant Bastard Ale. The details have been a little sketchy, which seems to be confusing more than a few folks (like these). According to this excellent article on MarketWatch, Greg Koch envisions the brand as more of an aggressive, boundary-pushing nameplate. Interestingly enough, the brand’s first beer (beyond housing Arrogant Bastard) is a pilsner — Who You Callin’ WUSSIE.

The marketing of the brand is similarly smug and mysterious, true to the Arrogant title. If you take a look at the website and sales literature, the company has actually anthropomorphized Arrogant Bastard into a sort of rouge, devil-may-care brewer. According to the website: “Arrogant Bastard officially split from Stone Brewing in 2015 under his own brewing moniker, Arrogant Brewing, to accelerate his assault on those guilty of macro-industry deceit by perpetrating their heinous crimes against ales and lagers of true quality and depth.” The brand says stuff like this:

It’s an interesting idea, but it seems to be causing a little confusion with some fans, which is probably why Koch did the video above last week. The company is purposefully keeping it Delphic and veiled, which is cool, but maybe a little complex for all us dumb folks. From MarketWatch:

So who is Arrogant Bastard? Does it have a separate brewing team from Stone? Is Mitch still in charge of the overall brewing process or is there a different group of personnel assigned to it?

Koch: Arrogant Brewing is run by the beer Arrogant Bastard. It requires a little bit of the relaxing of the conceptualization centers of your brain. You have to just relax and let it flow. The more you want it to be penned in and defined, the less it’s going to be willing to have that done to it.

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That’s about as fair an explanation of this as I could have hoped for. But looking at how it fits in with Stone, does this mean it’s along for the ride to Richmond or Berlin?

Koch: Oh, yeah. I think we were trying a little bit too hard to put shape to something that’s a little bit ethereal, so it might be difficult to even answer those questions, because they’re theoretical.

So if Arrogant Bastard is out there in the ether just kind of drifting along the temporal plane …

Koch: Exactly …