{"id":5668,"date":"2013-07-02T10:55:49","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T22:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/?p=5668"},"modified":"2013-07-02T10:55:49","modified_gmt":"2013-07-01T22:55:49","slug":"brewdog-boundary-road-and-becoming-the-villain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2013\/07\/02\/brewdog-boundary-road-and-becoming-the-villain\/","title":{"rendered":"BrewDog, ‘Boundary Road’, and becoming the villain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"'Boundary<\/a>
‘Boundary Road’ \/ Independent \/ Asahi’s BrewDog sales flyer, with bonus superfluous apostrophe<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here’s an interesting angle on the “faux-craft” clusterfuck that has besieged the local beer business: BrewDog<\/a>, plucky young Scottish upstarts equally loved and loathed for their antics and attitude, have finally signed up an official New Zealand distributor \u2014 and it’s ‘Boundary Road’<\/a>. That is to say, it’s the grotesquely-misnamed Independent Liquor, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Asahi<\/a>, operating under the guise of their contrived and not-really-existent “brewery… nestle[d] in the foothills of the Hunua ranges”. As a conglomerate, B.R.B. \/ I.L. \/ Asahi are peddlers of\u00a0all kinds<\/em> of bullshit and nonsense, and really know how to put the f<\/em>-word in “faux-craft”, so to speak.<\/p>\n

Independent work the fakery at both ends and very fond of the “origin-fudging” I tipped as the unfortunate theme of 2012<\/a>. With Boundary Road, they’ve set up a Potemkin1<\/sup><\/a><\/a> craft brewery which they pretend\u00a0isn’t the hugely industrial facility<\/a><\/a> that also manufactures three-litre casks of vodka RTDs\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0which pumps out licensed knock-offs of green bottle Continental lagers that try very hard indeed to look<\/em> imported. Leveraging the mega-bucks of the alco-pop business,2<\/sup><\/a><\/a> they seem keen to take up a seat alongside our existing local beer duopoly, and to carve out a greater slice of the market. Already armed with big, mainstream international brands \u2014 both counterfeit and genuinely imported \u2014 they recently embarked on a campaign to shore up some “craft” cred. It began in earnest with their ‘Resident’ project<\/a>, which brought in (with some wankery and double-dealing) an American brewer<\/a> whose image still adorns several beers,3<\/sup><\/a><\/a>\u00a0continued with their distribution of the Sam Adams \/ Boston Beer Company range from the U.S., and now \u2014 or at least very soon, judging by the Beervana exhibitors list<\/a><\/a>\u2014 includes distributing BrewDog. The effort to co-opt some goodwill by associating with those brands is transparent in the way they’re labelled as imported by “Boundary Road” while they avoid using that name on their decidedly low-brow volume-game products like Ranfurly<\/a>.4<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

\"BrewDog<\/a>
BrewDog ‘Punk’ IPA tap badge<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

BrewDog are expanding at an impressively dizzying pace, but signing up with Boundary Road \/ Independent \/ Asahi is complete nonsense and makes a mockery of all the occasions on which they’ve (rightly!) been invoked5<\/sup><\/a><\/a> as aggressive and elaborate marketers who remain genuine<\/em> rather than resorting to peddling offensive and insufferable brandwank<\/em><\/a><\/a>. There’s tremendous worldwide demand for their stuff \u2014 including here on the other side of the world, and including\u00a0by me<\/em>. Some of my favourite beer-related moments have been BrewDog ones, one way or another<\/a>, and I’d love to have them more readily-available around here. But seriously, guys, there are (approximately) eleventy-bajillion<\/em> companies involved in the import-export of booze and most of them\u00a0aren’t<\/em> producers of exactly<\/em> the kind of industrialised garbage you specifically rail against. It’s no surprise that a company like Independent will happily clip the ticket, take their markup, enjoy some collateral credibility, and not particularly mind being ridiculed by a member of “their portfolio” \u2014 but it’s fucking depressing that the “punks” at BrewDog would go into business with alco-pop-peddling bullshit-artists like these.<\/p>\n

\"BrewDog's<\/a>
BrewDog’s ‘The Revolution’ \u2014 featuring Boundary Road’s apparently-beloved Carlsberg third in line<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Because I really do mean “specifically<\/em> rail against”, above: Carlsberg is one of Independent’s flagship faux-imports,6<\/sup><\/a><\/a> and also regularly appears alongside Stella and Becks in BrewDog’s marketing material, being obliterated with golf clubs<\/a> or sent to the gallows. They even once had a memorable campaign \u2014 BeerLeaks.org<\/a><\/a>, now retired, but cached in the Wayback Machine<\/a><\/a> \u2014 which quite-rightly decried the origin-fudging practices of brand-first companies and called out Carlsberg by name. With its maximally-deceptive combination of subsidiary, parent, and licensors, Independent is\u00a0exactly<\/em> the kind of “faceless cartoon monstrosity” with a “destiny dictated by accountants” that was supposed to be first against the wall. With the aforementioned eleventy-bajillion alternatives, I just can’t believe BrewDog couldn’t find anyone better to deal with7<\/sup><\/a><\/a> \u2014 and, really, if you can’t find a distributor worth doing business with in a given territory,\u00a0don’t do business there<\/em>; craft beer drinkers, the impassioned people you’re supposedly brewing for, will understand. Likewise, there’s a horrible irony in the joyful way BrewDog have been joining in<\/a> the healthy skepticism about the U.K.’s new ‘Let There Be Beer’ campaign<\/a> while shipping beer to those very-same “fakes and phonies”. Hypocrisy’s an interesting sin, one that’s basically immune to evasion and retreats to relativism,8<\/sup><\/a><\/a>\u00a0and one which undermines BrewDog’s authenticity. This isn’t ‘Equity for Punks’ anymore; it’s descending into Equity for Avril Lavigne<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That said \u2014 and even while keeping a few well-worth-reading cautious words<\/a> about their partial-public-ownership model very<\/em>\u00a0firmly in mind \u2014 I’d still rather have a slice of BrewDog than of, say, Moa<\/a>. The apparently spineless hypocrisy of the former doesn’t remotely rise to the level of the latter’s misogyny and clueless backwardness<\/a> \u2014 which earned them an enduring personal boycott (not that they’ll ever care). But, much like my reaction to Emerson’s after the Lion buy-out<\/a>, if this rubbish deal stands, I’ll just be\u00a0less excited<\/em> about BrewDog than I used to be. Handing my money over to their habitually-bullshitting distributor will happen less readily, and feel a little bit gross. Getting in bed with ‘Boundary Road’ takes the shine off the Scots and sits there as another depressing little data point that “success”\u00a0always<\/em> involves selling out at some point \u2014 which I sure as hell\u00a0hope<\/em> isn’t the case. Martin, James \u2014 BrewDogs, of all levels \u2014 I implore you;9<\/sup><\/a><\/a> be the freakin’ Batman again, don’t be Harvey goddamn-Two-Face Dent.<\/p>\n

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>\u2014 <\/span>The Dark Knight<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

<\/a>1:<\/strong> Matt Kirkegaard<\/a> and I are resolved to use this term more often. It comes from the maybe-never-actual (but-still-perfectly-symbolic) fa\u00e7ades apparently thrown together<\/a> to once fool a visiting Empress. I first used it for the way D.B. kept the corpse of Monteith’s around to pretend they still brewed on the West Coast (a practice they’ve actually since resumed, but for a long time the place was mothballed), but it fits these foundationless “brewery brands” so perfectly as well. This kind of shallow origin-fudging for the purpose of creating illusory scale and\/or origin and\/or character is \u2014 if you ask me \u2014 “faux craft” in its purest form. \u2191<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/a>2:<\/strong> During serial abuse of the meaning of the word “independent”, they note<\/a> that they’re #1 in RTDs and that their “key brands” are “Woodstock, Cody’s, [and] Vodka Cruiser”.\u00a0\u2191<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/a>3:<\/strong> Meanwhile, that<\/em> whole production was a year ago, now. Has anyone seen them advertising for a new “resident”, or are they going to keep producing Spike’s beers in perpetuity? And if so, does he<\/em> know that? I’d love to see the contract he worked under…\u00a0\u2191<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/a>4:<\/strong> Itself a very long-standing piece of origin-fudging, I suppose, given that the town the beer is named after almost couldn’t be further from where it’s brewed.\u00a0\u2191<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/a>5:<\/strong> Including quite-frequently\u00a0by me<\/em>. They were, if I recall correctly \u2014 always a big “if” \u2014 my go-to example for non-aggravating beer marketing in our podcast thereon<\/a>. \u2191<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/a>6:<\/strong> Along with preposterous claims to “Uncompromising Quality” and “Exclusive Aromatic Hops”, Boundary Road’s version of the Carlsberg carton bears a quote from Jacob Jacobsen, the brewery’s founder: \u201cIn working the brewery it should be a constant purpose, regardless of immediate gain, to develop the art of making beer to the greatest possible degree of perfection so that this brewery as well as its products may ever stand out as a model and, through their example, assist in keeping beer brewing in this country at a high and honourable level\u201d. I submit that, given the context in which his beer now finds itself, if you attached magnets to his corpse and wrapped his coffin in copper coil, he’d be spinning in his grave so hard he could power the whole of Denmark. \u2191<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/a>7:<\/strong> For completeness’ sake, I suppose there is an outside chance that BrewDog don’t actually\u00a0know<\/em> the nature of Boundary Road \/ Independent. But the companies register and the Googlemachine aren’t exactly rocket wizardry, and so this alternative (if anything) makes me even further depressed. Meanwhile, I once worked for a bar \u2014 the Malthouse here in Wellington \u2014 which imported a whole bunch of BrewDog itself, way back in 2009, without a need for a distributor at all, and one of the aforementioned “favourite beer moments” of mine was personally lifting an actual metric tonne’s worth of cases into cool storage in the ceiling.<\/span> \u2191<\/a>
\n<\/a>8:<\/strong> Unless you take your “punk” to the absolute extreme and turn into some kind of full-on morality-denying anarcho-capitalist<\/a>. In which case you should say so, because no one likes a fucking nihilist<\/a>.\u00a0\u2191<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/a>9:<\/strong> In the spirit of full disclosure, it’s worth pointing out that while drafting this piece I learned that Jos Ruffell (a director of Garage Project, site of my day job, and himself a BrewDog shareholder) posed a similar (though presumably less sweary) question in the Equity For Punks forums. I have no idea whether Martin and James have read that, or replied, and I hope it’s obvious that I’m speaking just for myself here, as always. \u2191<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s an interesting angle on the “faux-craft” clusterfuck that has besieged the local beer business: BrewDog, plucky young Scottish upstarts equally loved and loathed for their antics and attitude, have finally signed up an official New Zealand distributor \u2014 and it’s ‘Boundary Road’. That is to say, it’s the grotesquely-misnamed Independent Liquor, a wholly-owned subsidiary … Continue reading BrewDog, ‘Boundary Road’, and becoming the villain<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-5668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blahblah","tag-brandwank"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1516,"url":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2011\/02\/23\/brewdog-%e2%80%985am-saint%e2%80%99\/","url_meta":{"origin":5668,"position":0},"title":"BrewDog \u20185am Saint\u2019","author":"Phil","date":"February 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"BrewDog aren't all about the stunt beer and over-the-top prankish gimmickry. They aren't even all about brewing at the stronger end of the spectrum. They do happen to do both of those things particularly well, but they don't neglect the more-everday stuff, either. I really liked 'The Physics', an amber\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Actual Diary entries"","block_context":{"text":"Actual Diary entries","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/category\/diary\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"BrewDog \u20185am Saint\u2019","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-content\/uploads\/BrewDog-5am-Saint-225x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1261,"url":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2010\/12\/31\/brewdog-rip-tide-imperial-stout\/","url_meta":{"origin":5668,"position":1},"title":"BrewDog ‘Rip Tide’ Imperial Stout","author":"Phil","date":"December 31, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I normally try not to have too-many 'new' strong beers in a single day, but New Year's is New Year's, so what the hell? 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It's only very subtly hopped, leaving loads of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Actual Diary entries"","block_context":{"text":"Actual Diary entries","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/category\/diary\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"BrewDog 'The Physics'","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-content\/uploads\/BrewDog-The-Physics-225x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1183,"url":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2010\/12\/25\/brewdog-paradox-isle-of-arran\/","url_meta":{"origin":5668,"position":3},"title":"BrewDog ‘Paradox: Isle of Arran’","author":"Phil","date":"December 25, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"My Christmas Day was a rather relaxed affair, this year. 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Amanda, one of our bartenders at work, was at their Thorndon store, found this, and generously split it with me. I was pretty damn chuffed; my particular fondness for good Australian beer is pretty well-known\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Actual Diary entries"","block_context":{"text":"Actual Diary entries","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/category\/diary\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Mountain Goat 'Hightail' Ale","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mountain-Goat-Hightail-225x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5913,"url":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2013\/09\/11\/beer-diary-podcast-s03e04\/","url_meta":{"origin":5668,"position":5},"title":"Beer Diary Podcast s03e04: (Postponed) pre-Beervana Hostful","author":"Phil","date":"September 11, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"And we're back. Though we're not quite as back as we intended. This happens to us, sometimes. George has been abnormally busy, post-holiday \u2014 though often with new-puppy-related duties about which he's not remotely about to complain \u2014 and I was diverted, in the actual around-Beervana-itself days, by ingloriously falling\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Podcast episodes"","block_context":{"text":"Podcast episodes","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/category\/podcast-episodes\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Boundary Road 'Cantainer'","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-content\/uploads\/Boundary-Road-Cantainer-150x150.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5668"}],"version-history":[{"count":66,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5743,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5668\/revisions\/5743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}