Hi beer fans, happy Friday!
The Lagunitas “Waldos’ Special” is a seasonal released about this time every year in honor of April 20th. The Waldos were/are the legendary Marin County stoners who made the number 420 their code for smoking marijuana, a joke which has since spread everywhere. Good to see that selling out didn’t cost Lagunitas all of their character.
Last week’s big story about Bud Light’s controversial promotion with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney is still frothing. I was silly enough to think that AB management had known what they were stepping in, but that does not seem to be the case, and the corporate reaction has been pretty lame.
Not surprisingly, the best story I found was from Kate Bernot at Sightlines: The Sound of Silence — LGBTQ+ Voices Get Left Behind in the Culture War on Bud Light . Go read this. It’s too long to really summarize but here’s a nice chunk. The people quoted are beer industry marketing professionals.
The controversy surrounding Bud Light is a business story, but one caught in the midst of a culture war. And when anti-trans panic worms its way into any apple with the slightest hint of rot, it tries to work its way to the core. The decay that told hold because ABI printed Mulvaney’s face on a set of cans shipped exclusively to her as a personal gift from the company has gone so deep that the performance of hatred became the centerpiece, obscuring the capitalist reality in which it’s all based. Culture wars in beer—or any other industry—won't subside until consumers realize that for-profit corporations by definition don’t have moral imperatives we place on people. They exist first and foremost to make money and for most, ethical responsibilities come later…
“There’s all this talk about Bud Light—Bud Light’s good; Bud Light’s bad; Are their sales going to tank. But do you realize trans girls could be murdered over shit like this?” Uhrich says. “This is actually a dangerous thing and I don’t think people realize that.”
Despite the firestorm it touched off, Bud Light's partnership with Dylan Mulvaney does matter for trans visibility.
“Trans people can enjoy things. We can be marketed to,” Engel says. “It’s nice every once in a while seeing somebody market to us even if it’s not a product I'm interested in. But I’d like to be noticed a little more than as a marketing opportunity. ”
Jonathan Ochart, founder and CEO of The Postcard Agency—a digital marketing and public relations agency that specializes in working with LGBTQ+ brands and nonprofits—says that when ABI works with Mulvaney, it sends a message that trans people exist and have a right to be visible in society. As LGBTQ+ people see that across advertising as well as politics, the arts, sports, and more, it advances the idea that they can live more authentic, public lives.
Even visibility in marketing campaigns often sparks reactionary backlash. Ochart says that’s where a global corporation such as ABI has the clout to set the terms of the discussion. Through steps like denouncing hate speech against a trans person and deleting hateful comments on its social media, a company can help set ground rules and reject the idea that anti-trans speech or actions are valid and normalized.
“When there’s that big solidarity from such a large corporation, that sets the tone. That doesn’t leave room for misinterpretation and can help squash hate speech,” Ochart says. On Bud Light’s Instagram page, for example, there was no reference to the controversy or the company’s statement. The brand simply didn’t post between March 30 and April 15. Its Facebook page hasn’t been updated since March 30. Here, Ochart says, ABI missed the mark with a chance to say something of meaning.
Uhrich, who worked for seven years in MillerCoors’ marketing department, agrees.
“If I was Dylan Mulvaney, I’d be out blasting ABI, like ‘Hey, you’re my partner on this, why haven’t you stood up and said No, this isn’t OK?’” Uhrich says. “They have left her to the wolves.”
He says that if companies aren’t willing to use their vast resources—money, influence, industry relationships—to protect the trans people that they were willing to use for potential gain, then those corporations have no business working with them in the first place.
Emmy Liederman at AdWeek has a similar view.
On April 14, Bud Light responded to the uproar around its partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney with a declaration of patriotism. The expression of its “responsibility to America,” which did not address the slew of consumers who responded to the collaboration with resistance, left some audiences questioning why Bud Light recruited Mulvaney if it was not prepared to protect her.
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We also mentioned the attempt by a man named Seth Weathers to profit from the controversy by selling “Ultra Right” anti-woke beer. There’s only one problem — he doesn’t own a brewery, and he hasn’t found anyone who does who wants to make his beer. That article only speculated about who the brewer might be; now we know who it was supposed to be, but there was never a firm deal and now there’s no deal.
From “Daily Dot” via msn.com
Mike Zoller, beer editor of PorchDrinking.com, first reported that Weathers attempted to tap Illinois-based Bent River Brewing Company to brew his anti-woke beer. Zoller also said that Bent River Brewing told him that Weathers used its name without permission.
“We were initially approached to possibly contract a beer for a customer," the company reportedly said. "Without our knowledge our name was listed on a website for a brief period of time. When we were made aware of the marketing for the product, we chose to pass on producing it.” …
Bent River Brewing told the Daily Dot via email that "we were referred as a potential contract brewer. We declined."
Ultra Right's website still says the beer is being crafted in Northern Illinois, where Bent River Brewing is based. An archive of the site on the Wayback Machine reveals that since Saturday, it changed the date the first six-packs were supposed to start shipping—May 11 or thereabouts—to the even more vague "approximately 30 days after order."
Weathers also probably hasn’t considered whether it’s legal for him to distribute beer, but first he has to get some.
Whatever I’m drinking tonight won’t include that Waldos’, which isn’t cold. I’ll probably start with the Vice Cherry I mentioned a few weeks ago, and then on to IPA, maybe Liquid Gravity.
What are you drinking? Anyone brewing?