][1]Back in November, the 5pm blog told you how the Fraserburgh Brewdog company had developed a super strength beer called Tactical Nuclear Penguin. With an ABV of 32%, it just beat the previous record for the world’s strongest beer, the 31% German beer Schorschbräu.
Indignant at having the title snatched from them, the Germans retaliated with a 40% ABV beer. Not to be outdone, the Brewdog pack have come back with a 41%ABV beer. Designed to be drunk in spirit-sized measures, it’s a quadruple IPA that contains four times the hops, four times the bitterness and is frozen four times to create a staggering 41% ABV, stronger than whisky and vodka.
So far, so much clean knock-about fun. There is nothing like a little bit of healthy competition to rally the fans of a beer brand and, just as importantly, to generate headlines. But, maybe I’m being a little po-faced here but what is less easy to swallow is the German-bashing, war-referencing blurb that goes with the sensitively named new Sink the Bismarck! beer.
It has been launched along with a video spoofing the ‘sausage-munching’ Germans being beaten by the brave Brewdog boys who ‘march into battle’ against the ‘might of the German navy’.
Paraphrasing Churchill, the brewer’s MD, James Watt is quoted as saying, ‘We will fight them in the mash tuns, we will fight them in the fermentation tanks, by golly we’ll physically get into the freezers and fight them there if we have to.’
Now I like Brewdog beer and I like what the company has set out to do. They make beers unlike anything else you will find on the supermarket shelves and they are pushing the boundaries of what people expect beer to be. In many ways, they are exactly the sort of innovative, creative and young Scottish company that should be encouraged.
However, no matter how tongue in cheek the video is, the war was sixty years ago and German-bashing is not quite the widely appreciated national sport that it was a few decades back. Does anyone remember what happened when Piers Morgan’s Mirror previewed the Euro 96 clash between Germany and England with the headline ‘Achtung! Surrender!’
Let me remind you what followed. Morgan was forced to apologise and Germany won on penalties.