For starters, The Minerva brewery in Mexico says and you can see I'm quoting here if you read the piece : The Artisan honey ales would appeal to a section of the beer drinking public that has so far been snubbed by larger brewers. Unquote.
I'm off to brew a beer with Brodies in a few weeks for my London Beer Festival at The Rake and I know that they do a 'Pink Pride' beer with New Zealand hops, Raspberries and the help of the local gay community but not targeted at them; good for them, not a large brewer but still doing it. So Minerva are not the first. They are possibly way out on their marketing though if they think that just because they've brewed a honey beer the gay community will enjoy it. After all a friend of mine on twitter and good customer said and again I quote 'They can keep their Pink Pride and their honey ales, mine's a Bourbon County Stout'.
I of course completely agree with this notion, after all, just because someone is homosexual does not mean they are into fruit beers or sweet beers. It shows massive ignorance on the part of this company to even attempt to market these beers to the gay community and I for one think that to try to is basically trying wholeheartedly to move equal rights back 10 years, if not more.
I have to hold fire slightly here and quote Dario Rodriguez Wyler of Bodega, Minerva's distributor 'We're out in the market with great respect with the idea of offering a product directed to the gay-lesbian community that has been ignored for far too long but is important and very demanding'. So, whilst 'outing' themselves they've decided to release a nice, sweet, honey beer that manly men and womeny-women won't like.
Yeah Right.
So I'm going to try and skip the name of the beer completely for the want of all sorts of Carry On-esque jokes and try and find a positive somewhere.
Testing the water, I asked if we should stock them at The Rake(yes I was joking) and got the answer 'not sure you need another honey or strawberry beer, wait until it comes out in cock flavour'.
What's the packaging like again? Hmm, shall we wait until it comes out in a cock shaped bottle too. Oh that'll be never then!
To put a slightly more serious note on this, I wrote a piece on girly beer a while back, some people loved it and agreed with me, others accused me of being sexist for assuming that when someone ordered a 'girly beer' they meant fruit beer. Surely pigeon-holing a beer for the gay community is just as bad?
So as a responsible retailer, what the fuck am I supposed to think if somebody comes into the bar and asks for a gay beer? Answers in the comments box folks.
