The Brew SiteBrewDog, No.
I’ve pretty much ignored the PR stunts of Scotland’s BrewDog because, well, they’re just that—stunts. But this is just offensively crude, in my opinion. I will never drink beer (or anything, really) from a bottle packaged in taxidermy roadkill.
Craft beer jumped the shark years ago with the food pairings, meet the brewer “events” and civet coffee beer. At this point, drinking from a dead animal almost seems like the next logical step. I pay 35 freaking dollars for a bottle of flat Angel’s Share. I only with I could drink it from a dead squirrel at that cost.
You know…honestly…I could care less about drinking out of a dead animal…although that is indeed funny. My concern here is this stupid ABV battle between breweries to try and gain attention.
This is starting to kinda stray away from everything the craft beer culture has done, and is trying to do. BUT that being said, you can’t take away credit from them for trying to push the boundaries again. They remind me of DogFishHead in this respect, and I would rather they garnished attention in this way rather than in trying to expand to huge levels and push their stock prices up.
For me though, one thing is for sure. You see me paying the $800+ price tag for one of these, and I won’t lose any sleep over not trying this beer.
Ilya
I actually have no problem with the whole 55% ABV thing—if they want to distill a spirit that high in alcohol, more power to them, although I personally don’t see the point and I don’t think it’s proper to call that “beer” any more.
The taxidermy is what I find offensive, maybe disrespectful even; yes, there are the American craft brewers who push boundaries like Dogfish and Stone but I can’t imagine an American brewer sinking to something like this, it would backfire too easily. There’s a dark humor there, no doubt, and I was darkly amused at first when I thought it was a joke; finding out it was for real was completely off-putting.
(And the homebrewer in me just shudders at the idea of how unsanitary that whole set-up has to be…)
Plus, it just smells like pure stunt marketing solely for the purpose of seeing how much money they can extract from people. Cynical of me, yes, but that sort of thing always rubs me the wrong way.