Raising a toast to Her Maj

As I write this, tomorrow is the 90th birthday of HM Queen Elizabeth II. You might think that when you’re one of the richest women in the world, with pretty much unlimited medical resources available, reaching 90 is no great surprise. But none of the previous Windsor monarchs made it past 77, and even if you go back to the Hanoverians, even George III and Victoria only just made it into their 80s.

So I was quite happy to raise a glass to Her Maj this afternoon, at the launch of the first Royal birthday-themed beer I’ve seen so far: Greene King’s Purple Reign. If you want to follow suit, Purple Reign’s due to be on 1000 Greene King bars around the country through May and June as one of their seasonal specials.

The beer itself is a fairly average 4.2% malty-sweet golden ale that isn’t going to frighten the corgis. Apparently it includes four different hop varieties: Challenger, Pilgrim, Styrians and First Gold. I found this hard to believe at first, but after a second try they emerged blinking into the sunlight – or rather, into an earthy and faintly herbal bitterness with distant hints of berries.

As to the name, the GK crew alluded to purple as a royal colour, and of course most people will know the song. Or will they? GK might have been thinking of Prince’s Purple Rain, but had they looked further there’s also some rap-crap actually called Purple Reign, with lovely lyrics such as:

If young Metro don't trust you, I'm gon' shoot you
Aye somebody uh, calls somebody get some molly
I need some good sauce, clean sauce

Mind you, you could wonder about the aptness of Prince’s lyrics:

I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted one time to see you laughing

But still – beer, the pub, and the Queen. What more could any decent Brit ask for? 😃

There's chocolate cake in there somewhere!

Greene King's crafty rebrand

Greene King is in the process of rebranding several of its beers with new, more consistent labels in a hand-drawn style clearly meant to look handcrafted. Here's a pop-up exhibition banner showing several of them.

The existing beers getting new labels are St Edmunds, Strong Suffolk (which also now gets the suffix "Dark Ale" instead of "Vintage Ale") and Yardbird. You can (for now) see the original labels and pumpclips here.

Also getting a new label are Twisted Thistle IPA (an ex-Belhaven brand) and Noble - yes, in case you hadn't realised, "Noble Craft Lager" is a GK brew. Even the manager in one of my local GK pubs was surprised when I pointed this out to him!

And there's some new beers coming to this family, including Double Hop Monster IPA, Suffolk Porter and St Edmunds Anniversary Ale.

What do you think - does GK stand a chance, branding these as craft?