(Courtesy of Vice Media)
The world is changing, and no one knows where it’s going. But Vice is hoping its new beer goes down your throat.
Over the years, the Williamsburg-based media company has devoted considerable bandwith to telling you how to catch a buzz, whether its via hallucinogenic honey or good ol’ fashioned shamanic odysseys. Oh, and apparently the way to live to 110 is to be drunk all the time? Now the brand is actually hooking you up, with the launch of a new beer called Old Blue Last. Before you go accusing them of trying to completely corner the five-panel-hat market by imitating Pabst Blue Ribbon, the beer is actually named after the storied London bar and onetime brothel they acquired in 2004.
The label claims that the 5-percent-ABV beer “might be award-winning,” and some of it is actually brewed in Vice’s Williamsburg offices, where it’s also on tap. (The next time Vice publishes a story suggesting that you eat your own poop and you ask yourself, “Are they drunk?”, the answer might be yes.) The rest is made by the good folks at Blue Point Brewing Company in Patchogue, Long Island.
If you don’t hang with Action Bronson in the Munchies kitchen and you’re not early-adopter enough to have sampled this stuff in Shane Smith’s “drinking room”, don’t worry. Plebes will be able to score Old Blue Last on draft and in cans at Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan watering holes starting this month. After that, distribution will go national and international. Cans come in gold and silver (but apparently not jet black).
Given Vice’s tenacity for branding and cross-promotion, it’s easy to see one of its HBO correspondents cracking one of these smooth sippers on camera to take the edge off of a human-smuggling run or a bad frog-slime trip. Sadly, the launch comes a little too late for drinking and screwing season.