SUIP!

Remember Chick Beer? That pink and black polka-dotted light craft beer, the one that panders to the huge subset of females who are drawn to party typefaces and six-packs shaped like handbags? The one with a bustier silhouette taken from clip art and no information about its brewing technique or provenance? The one that doesn’t use just pink, but metallic cerise?

Yeah, I know. How could you?

A couple days ago, indybeers.com did a great interview with the makers of Chick Beer, which is brewed by a small independent company at Minhas Brewing Company in Maryland, USA. Having been relayed a number of questions and negative comments from Reddit’s r/beer community by the indybeer.com writers, Chick Beer’s creators’ are mostly indignant in the face of criticism:

Chick Beer has never been about making a brewing statement.  Chick Beer is making a cultural statement.  The fact is that – whether you like it or not – light American lager is by far the most popular style of beer in America. Chick Beer is merely acknowledging that women aren’t a niche market.  At 25% of the market, they are more like a Grand Canyon.  Women choose to drink Chick Beer because it is a brand that is for them.

But sometimes their beer crusade seems rather quixotic:

Beer has been around for thousands of years.  Women have been around for even longer.  So how is a beer for women a gimmick?  Is beer a gimmick?  Are women?  Can we agree that the major light beers are marketed directly to men, what with all of the women in their commercials being bimbos and the charges that the drinkers are “unmanly”?  Market segmentation is clearly not concept invented by us.

“How is beer for women a gimmick?” Phew – it seems someone’s in a bit of denial.

In any case, this interview is great reading, as is the rest of indybeer’s craft beer interview series. Highly recommended.

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