Not sure which side I’d rather visit these days. Photo via the BrewDog blog.
BrewDog definitely has a provocative style of punk marketing. Maybe consider its The End of History beer — a 55 percent ABV blonde Belgian ale bottled and then presented in a taxidermy squirrel — along with a $20,000 investment price tag. Maybe consider last year in Britain when BrewDog packing manager Graeme Wallace was responsible for a 200,000 can recall. He thought the company wasn’t being “punk” enough, so he changed the born-on-date wording on the cans to read “MOTHER FUCKER DAY” on a batch of Punk IPA which was supposedly shipped out to the whole of the United Kingdom. He was later awarded employee of the month.
And for exhibit C, we point toward Brewdog USA’s announcement last week that it would like to build a “Bar on the Edge,” which is basically a BrewDog brewpub straddling the Mexico/United States border. From the BrewDog blog:
Some people lie down in front of bulldozers. That’s cool. We’re thinking of getting there before they even leave the lot.
Our ‘Bar on the Edge’ will take back the great frontier between the U.S. and Mexico before it is taken away forever. Half in each, with amazing beer from both. Heck, you can order up a four-beer flight and drink two Mexican craft beers in the US and two from our Ohio brewhouse south of the border.
The marketing prank is an obvious fuck you to Trump’s border wall idea, aimed at curbing illegal immigration. Let us note that the BrewDog brand is not American. It is a Scottish-based brewing business (perhaps you’ve seen their Esquire TV show) that has built a $30 million U.S. base of operations on a 42-acre site near Columbus, Ohio. The company also plans on launching five flagship U.S. BrewDog bars across the country in “order to plant our beery flags in the American Dream.”
Will one of those pubs be on the Mexican/U.S. border? We’re thinking no. Regardless, BrewDog hosted a beery event in Columbus this weekend, featuring a selection of some Texas’ and Mexico’s finest liquid exports. Further proof the folks at BrewDog know how to run a clever marketing campaign, tattooed with its punk philosophies. Plus, we don’t mind that it’s sending an eat-shit message to the Trump administration either. It’s a fun one-two. Back to the blog post:
So as we expand into the US, we are ready to begin finding where our closest communities are at. The walls we’ll be building aren’t for dividing people, but for bringing them together. Over a beer.
