In my first year of beer blogging I went by the ‘if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything’ rule. In my second year of beer blogging I’m going to flip this around a bit. Being nasty can be fun after all.
Did anyone see the Google Beer release? If not have a read of this http://www.pcworld.com/article/240952/google_tries_its_hand_at_beer.html.
In my first year of blogging I might have gushed something like this, “This mash up brings together two of the worlds most innovative brands to create a high tech, new world collaboration brew worthy of the information age.”
However I have to be honest, this thing is getting a bit old hat. Dogfish Head is a truly great brewery and one that knows as much about self promotion as beer. Last year we watched Brew Masters on Discovery Channel, which chronicled Dogfish making some interesting novelty beers. We had beer with grain chewed by people, made from an ancient recipe. We had beer infused with surfboard wood and so on. Of course all of these beers had to be rushed to a tight deadline for one reason or another, to increase the almost palpable sense of reality TV excitement.
Now we have Google Beer, I watched the video and almost laughed at the justifications of why Dogfish and Google are similar. “Google takes a fractured world of information and pulls it into something cohesive and whole.” bla bla bla. We then get to watch Google employees talking up how they used different Google tools to gather suggestions for ingredients. “Google Sites was used to put together the website and collect over 100 suggestions for ingredients.” Wow.
The end result of course represents Google and is a....wait for it....a Belgian-style Dubbel. Hmm what a bunch of @ss. There is something so ingenue about this thinly disguised marketing effort.
Last year was the year of high profile collaborations. Was there anyone who didn’t collaborate last year? I guess I’m a bit jaded from it because when I watched the Google collaboration it left me feeling embarrassed for Dogfish. These guys make some great beer and have done some interesting marketing but it feels like this has gone a step to far and become gratuitous.
This year I’ve enjoyed ignoring all the hype and focusing on brewers doing it quietly with soul. Great beer springing from the regions like 8Wired, Liberty Brewing and Townsend. Beer you seek out because you share their values, you buy into their story and you dig their beer. Not because they produced a collaboration with an uber popular tech company.
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