Facebook asked me to be a fan of women who like beer! I do wonder why. Of course I clicked through, a little concerned it might be a more, ur, specialist site – you know the kind with black bars across the ladies eyes and pixellated bits until you pay a subscription – Oh! Look Out!, I found on two more clickthroughs a page from the brewers? pub company? PR company for a shadowy cabal? for a random pub in Burton on Trent who apparently created the page (? don’t understaaaaand fzbk):
“Every Wednesday evening 2 courses are £11.90 and 3 courses are £14.90 from The Dial Ladies night menu. Visit www.thedial.uk.com to see the full menu.
BEER COCKTAILS ARE JUST £4.95!”
BEER COCKTAILS?!
http://www.bittersweetpartnership.com/experiment/
(Let’s have an example of this beer cocktail then:
Amber Mojito
6 fresh mint leaves / caster sugar / 1/2 lime, cut into wedges / 60ml Havana rum / ice / 100ml ice cold Coors Light / 1 spring mint to garnish)
Well I can’t see WHY you’d want to do this in any way at all but whatever…. for one crazy second I thought this would be like – you know – Black Velvet (guinness and champagne)… but I was wrong. Yet I still don’t know who on earth the Bittersweet Partnership are (I wonder what their name could.. imply…) – ooh and note the “Coors Light”, for the ladies…
More clicking through, and by this time I have developed RSI, I get the “Alfie” page: http://www.bittersweetpartnership.com/whats_it_all_about/. (DYS?). It appears that the main push from the Bittersweet Partnership, via a Facebook intro, is to raise awareness of a super new product. KASTEEL CRU ROSE. You heard. Rose and lager. Rose… and… la…
Rosé lager! All this clicking and we’ve reached the grail. And what a grail! This isn’t just a fruit beer. This is pink wine topped up with Wifebeater!
My Former Boss once poured half a bottle of pink blossom hill into the remnants of his pint of Carling at the end of a boozy lunchtime, and i suspect Kasteel Cru Rose would not at all dissimilar… if you’re reading, Former Boss, perhaps you could sue them? I mean, SOMEONE SHOULD. This hamfisted and bon-bon-bonKERS attempt to get women drinking beer by MAKING IT INTO COCKTAILS is both the worst and best thing ever! Let’s think about the assumption it’s making: women like cocktails. Women don’t like beer. But if it was in a cocktail!! There’s only one problem – and that is that brewed hops plus tequilla plus vermouth plus a maraschino cherry and ideally a sparkler would taste like a Hermesetas addled pig had done his business in your mouth… \o/ \o/ ???
Taking this back to the initial facebook page for “women who like beer” – it’s not surprising that no-one is ‘a fan’, given that by the time we’ve gotten to the crux of this bizarre push, we’re not reeeally talking beer anymore, are we Tonto. It makes me wonder what’s lurking at the bottom of other facebook ads. A fanpage for La Roux will turn out to be advertising Jeremy Vine endorsed stock cubes?!
Oh, and whilst I’m putting “cru” on a beer doesn’t make it any more premium… (hello Kronenboug ‘Premier Cru’ et al, purse, sows ear, springs to mind)…
Full disclosure: you can probably disregard all of this as I myself have been known to sample the power shandy in my younger days (half of budvar, topped up with smirnoff ice). Internet searches give me a whole range of variants on the power shandy – mostly with a “bomb” aspect – i.e drop a shot of midori into a can of Special Brew. One suggestion is for a shot of soju to be chucked in a mug of Hite! Non, mon cher…