A pint of Bare Knuckle and a packet of crisps, please

Those are the brogue-laden words that Anheuser-Busch wants to hear coming out of trendy Irish bars around the US as it rolls out a competitor to Guinness, a stout called Bare Knuckle which will initially be sold only as draught. It's ironic that the brewers of Bud are looking for cachet from having a beer only available on tap, when, as we noted a little while ago, Guinness is trying blasphemous experiments designed at creating a faux-tap delivery system for the precious nectar. The Wall Street Journal has all the details today -- why is it, by the way, that the WSJ does such a good job reporting brewski-related stories? (link requires subs).

Anyway, we have a couple of thoughts on this development. First, we doubt that Guinness is too worried. The American beer market is so vast and with so much scope for shifting between brands of beer that there's plenty of room for both kinds of stout to maintain a healthy market. In addition, Guinness and A-B have a relationship that goes beyond direct competition anyway. If you go into a reasonably traditional pub in Ireland, it's impossible not to notice a clear demographic in which slightly older drinkers work their way to the bar to order pints of Guinness -- past younger drinkers who consider themselves the height of sophistication in ordering Bud. Because it's slickly marketed as American and the ads (in Europe) create a cachet about drinking it from the long neck bottle. And yet, that Bud you drink in ireland is brewed in Ireland....by Guinness. So A-B markets an Irish style stout brewed in America to Americans, and an American-style lager brewed in Ireland to the Irish.

To hit you with a classic piece of Business School terminology to describe what's going on here, A-B and Guinness are engaged in some competition, some cooperation....Let's Play Co-opetition! [trivia: the co-inventor of this word is also the co-creator of the Honest Tea line of iced teas]

Finally, there's the matter of the name of this stout: Bare Knuckle. We're not sure the linking of booze and fighting is such a great idea. It's getting pretty close to a parody of a name for a beer, and the first thing it reminded us of was that funny Billy Dee Williams style ad for Cold C*ck [we live in the age of filters] malt liquor on Saturday Night Live. This site is run by a collector of 40 oz bottles and at the end he lists a few other TV/movie shout-outs to strong beer, with names very much in the Bare Knuckle genre. Maybe it's time for A-B to pioneer the 40 oz draught beer.