The new Crafty Beggars range from Lion in New Zealand has been banned by a retailer for “an insult to a great industry”.
In a recent Tweet, Liquorland Newmarket revealed that it would no longer stock the Crafty Beggars brews due to it’s tagline causing a backlash among drinkers.
The range is marketed with the following description:
“Someone should make a craft beer you can actually drink. That’s the
conclusion we Crafty Beggars came to. A rogue society, hidden deep
within the industry, made up of nine brewers of unsurpassed skill and
fanaticism, who all agreed that beer had gone in two directions – either
hopelessly middle of the road, or so snobbily crafty that one
overpriced sip will blow your face off in a blitzkrieg of hops and
whatever else has been arbitrarily thrown in. Something had to be done.”
Lion is adamant that the range is designed to be tongue-in-cheek and there for the mainstream drinkers that were interested in trying something new but not yet ready for some of the extreme flavour options available from the craft beer community. Lion also insists that the nine brewers mentioned above are real people within the company.
Brewers’ Guild of New Zealand president Ralph Bungard has been quoted in the NZ Herald as saying that while the Lion campaign was “deceptive, craft brewers should learn to take what they dish out. He compares the wording to what a lot of craft brewers use in their own marketing – referring, of course, to the common “fizzy yellow water” tagline that is often used to describe mainstream Lagers. Bungard maintains that most NZ brewers will recognise that the campaign is all part of the larger game, and that having the big brewers enter the craft arena was a compliment to the market that microbrewers had created for themselves.