Does the entire Innocent Smoothies aesthetic strike you as deeply fucking irritating?

Just to note that I am in Tesco now and they have the following Brewdog beers- "Punk IPA" "Dead Pony Club" and "Elvis Juice."

kind of want to try their grapefruit IPA to see if it's as bad as claimed, but Elvis Juice is such a terminally bad name

'dead pony club' and 'elvis juice' basically just make me think of landfill leachate

Brewdog have some distribution deal, it's even in some of the roughest Onestop branches in the UK - where the idea of a £6 4-pack is unthinkable.

elvis juice just sounds like sloshing human remains siphoned from the bottom of the king’s coffin to me

Very much the Tramp Juice versions of craft beers, they're borderline drinkable and you kid yourself they're fine because of the price.

(Actually the two NEIPAs they did with Cloudwater were pretty fine and the Vietnamese Coffee edition of Black Eyed King Imp was excellent but apart from that they're bang average.)

The comment upthread about the bars being 'tie-off after work' places is bang-on; the one in Birmingham is the only place I've been asked if I'm selling coke, then asked if I'm buying by someone else within 5 minutes when an ad agency were in there following their Christmas party. The one in Sheffield has people who know nothing about beer there, more or less including their staff after the argument I had with one of them and we once saw two girls in Bristol buy bottles and pour them in order to take selfies with the beer and handbag dogs to post on Instagram then leave with the beers untouched. I was in the one in Stirling over Christmas and it was weird, guys at the bar just drinking lager and the staff trying to trade you up with merchandise every time you bought a drink.

The exception was possibly Brewdog Berlin which seemed to have a better atmosphere, however, we only stopped in briefly on the way between Mikkeller and The Castle and it was still full of English-speakers on Christmas parties.

'dead pony club' and 'elvis juice' basically just make me think of landfill leachate

http://www.neonfiller.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/fatima-mansions-viva-dead-ponies.jpg

quite enjoy Elvis Juice but it tastes much more like grapefruit juice than beer

this feels like a strange topic for a thread revive as I can't recall Brewdog doing anything publicly stupid or even noteworthy for several months

never met anyone who is vocally enthusiastic about Brewdog's image - it feels like something you either ignore or are put off by - but presumably they exist somewhere

thank you aldo for your fine reportage

Punk IPA is pretty bog-standard "3 bottles for a fiver in Tesco Metro" stuff these days, and AFAIK, most of it is not made by Brew Dog but under licence by other big non-punk breweries.

One of their early battles was with CAMRA. Although they used to make (very good) real ale, they fell out with CAMRA (or pretended to) about something or other, and stopped, claiming their kegged, pasteurised products were far superior to cask stuff. They then went back on this, and started making it again, except they don't call it real ale, obv. they call it "Live Beer", and it's the future.

Apols if I've got any of the details wrong here, I'm not an expert.

The Oatly ones all around town have been driving me up the wall

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHhBnkYXgAASKuk.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIaKeouVAAEKPJh.jpg
https://i.redd.it/mt8x2ez96piz.jpg

wankers.

passive-aggressive advertising seems to be what the Innocent twee aesthetic is morphing into

I mean one of the things that the craft beer thing has been really good for is providing cold beer in the 3% range that isn't pisswater so I'm fairly grateful to Dead Pony Club and the like for that.

XXp I am waiting for someone to finally make a poster with a picture of the product and "will this do?" handwritten next to it, it can't be long now

Thanks for posting those now I know to avoid this product.

There's some brass neck on that ad campaign seeing as literally no one in the history of the world has been "interested in an oat drink" before. I don't even know what one would be like.

i'm imagining a texture like lumpy yoghurt

thanks to these ads i'm never gonna find out, that's for sure

Yes, I would probably have avoided this muck anyway because a drink made out of oats? Get tae France!

Vegan daughter loves the chocolate one as a milk alternative.

Oat drink is fine, not lumpy, just a perfectly normal not particularly interesting drink

hate2deej but there's a thread for all this

Yes, it's this thread about shitty ad campaigns/packaging.

fine, fine

well, my 2c: brewdog is generally extremely boring and if there are other options they should probably be taken. their marketing is kind of staid but it seems to work among the alt normies or whatever we're calling them. btw if you want level 6 beer hipster cred go to bermondsey's bottle room, i did so the other day and they have the best beer selection i've ever seen

also anyone saying 'no fruit in my beer' is just embarrassing themselves. go and have a boon kriek for starters, and we'll work from there

boon kriek sounds like some dastardly plan to drop michael elphick dvds on innocent londoners

Something onomatopoeic about it.

come to think of it, wasn't boon kriek a charli xcx song?

I just want to say that I’ve spent a very long time avoiding this thread, because I thought it was an ILM thing about a cutesy little record label for musicians I wouldn’t like anyway, like Sub Pop but for self-important bands from England. I had even gone so far as to imagine their irritating aesthetic, which was a cross between lo-fi Belle & Sebastian and St. Etienne.

I just think you should know this.

that's exactly their sound though

i have a friend who swears by oat milk but i'm not sure if that's what "oat drink" actually is

tbh since we have been saying "ugh fuck you" to advertisers for as long as we have (i mean the world at large, not ilx) it doesn't really surprise me that they're saying it back

more ukeleles

adverts that say "haha advertising speak is pretentious twaddle that we're deconstructing for you. until we go back to using it" are more or less the worst

tired: oat milk
wired: tiger nut milk

aaaand we're back to pony cum

"it is good not bad"

pony cum is good not bad, raves ilx poster mark s

btw if you want level 6 beer hipster cred go to bermondsey's bottle room, i did so the other day and they have the best beer selection i've ever seen

i'd rather repeatedly slam my balls in a drawer tbqh

I hear the bermondsey beer mile has already become colonized by stag parties. If anyone can unconfirm I'm all ears as would like to go.

There's some brass neck on that ad campaign seeing as literally no one in the history of the world has been "interested in an oat drink" before. I don't even know what one would be like.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 31 January 2018 10:19 (one hour ago)

FWIW this Costa Rican oatmeal drink http://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/ct-oatmeal-shake-irazu-20140925-20140925-story.html is one of the best things I've ever drunk.

As regards that Bermondsey beer bar, and also for whatever its worth, I find the pop-up-boxpark aesthetic even more irritating than I find the Innocent Smoothies aesthetic.

Yeah it's fucking full of them and most of the establishments aren't exactly conducive to drinking in comfort at the best of times. (xpost)

Tim otm. Even the words pop-up make my skin crawl, but the combination of that with something which is clearly an ongoing endeavour is particularly loathsome.

Actually, Brewdog bars are maybe the Venn diagram crossover of this.

the bottle shop is as much a shop as it is a bar

i guess that place we went to in milan might have had an even better selection, but it's close

what is the appeal of "pop-up" as an adjective besides when it precedes "pirate"?

Yeah I really try not to succumb to wewantplates/Grumpy Old Men mindset but my reaction to the popup phenomenon is one of honest confusion and distrust. People pay extra to eat in a car park?

is it just that it sounds spontaneous and dynamic

beer discourse seems to oscillate between hubris and loathing but is consistently wretched ime

I think it's supposed to convey guerilla consumerism, sticking it to The Man who would never let us open such a shop or The Bankers who wouldn't lend us the money. So we got our parents to give us the money instead because we learned all about ancient Melanisian cuisine at uni and travelling during our gap year(s) and the West is really missing out because they just know so much about living in harmony with nature, yeah?

Or it could just be getting your excuses in in advance for when it fails. "Yeah, it was never meant to be a permanent thing. Only a pop-up."

/grumpyoldman

thinking about it, I know someone who had a pop-up restaurant, which was making good use of an otherwise empty place that probably couldn't prosper long term. it's the desire to dub already existent things like regular social events "pop-up" which is more unsettling

AIUI the Bottle Shop is a specialist beer wholesaler who open up a bit of their warehouse for on and off-sales (nothing edgier than vertically integrating yr supply chain, after all). I can imagine using the shop - I very much enjoyed visiting a warehousey beer store in Ghent the other week, but I am fully done drinking in places that look like this, at least while there is still a pub left in London.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2316/8401/files/Bermondsey_Large_dd6e3632-6a39-45b4-978c-823419c03985.jpg