55 PER CENT BEER BREWER GETS HAMMERED BY ANIMAL ACTIVISTS
A DOLLOP of mirth for the City yesterday as it emerged that independent brewery BrewDog is up to its record-breaking tricks again.
BrewDog, which has twice before held the record for the strongest beer in the world, yesterday unveiled its latest offering, a 55 per cent proof blond ale retailing at £500 a bottle, which it dubbed The End of History.
BrewDog’s Scottish founders James Watt and Martin Dickie have happily courted controversy before over their super-strong beers, drawing criticism from the likes of drinks industry watchdog the Portman Group and Alcohol Focus Scotland.
This time round, though, it’s the animal rights activists who are up in arms, due to the firm’s decision to sell their latest offering encased in the bodies of dead animals. That’s right: only 12 bottles of the lethal brew have been produced, and the bottles have been made using seven dead stoats, four squirrels and a hare.
Cue a volley of outrage from animal charities and the aforementioned Alcohol Focus Scotland, which said the stunt was “another example of this company pushing the boundaries of acceptability, all in the pursuit of cheap marketing tactics”.
BrewDog, for its part, remains calm in the eye of the storm. “We wanted to do something a little shocking, and open people’s minds to the potential of beer,” Watt tells The Capitalist. “This is fusing art, beer and taxidermy – but we obviously don’t want to kill any animals. All the animals we used were roadkill…” Appetising stuff.
BOOZY LUNCH
All too rarely do we hear these days of a proper, old-fashioned City lunch – the type when a well-oiled bunch of co-conspirators roll into the restaurant at 12.30 and are still there at closing time. Thank heavens, then, for Arden Partners boss Jonathan Keeling, who celebrated 25 years in the City yesterday with just such a lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze restaurant in Mayfair. Keeling was joined by SWIP’s head of UK equities Peter Cockburn, Schroders fund manager Andy Brough, Aegon’s head of UK equities Steve Adams, and Ben Levenstein and Rob Rees from USS.
Salmon, steak, Louis Roederer champagne and an extensive selection of wines later, and the boys were onto the sambuca and the kümmel – which explains why The Capitalist was told that Scotsman Adams would be on the “9 o’clock air ambulance out of City airport” yesterday evening. Needless to say, the others didn’t make it back to the office either, though a couple of sore heads this morning are a small price to pay for a cracker of a silver anniversary celebration.
BRAND POWER
A record oil spill, botched clean-up operation and untimely gaffes from chief Tony Hayward might have sent BP’s corporate reputation lower than that of Goldman Sachs, but it seems all is not lost.
An email pops into The Capitalist’s inbox claiming that an astonishing 90 per cent of brand experts reckon BP’s brand will recover completely over the long term, while 57 per cent would relish taking on the challenge of masterminding the turnaround themselves. Perhaps there’s hope on the Horizon still.
SWANNING AROUND
Business secretary Vince Cable and his fellow Twickenham locals can rejoice after one of their favourite local pubs was saved by a group of crusading City folk.
Former Humberts Leisure property consultant Anthony Miller heard about the fate of the White Swan pub, on the south bank of the river Thames, and decided to invest in its future by buying it out from owner Enterprise Inns.
He and a group of fellow Humberts investors acquired the freehold interest and appointed their own management team three months ago, and have since been busy refurbishing the pub’s interior, installing a piano for locals to showcase their skills and putting together a menu and selection of real ales and lagers.
Nice work if you can get it, eh?
HOME COMFORTS
Anyone ever wondered what top-flight bank bosses put in the luxury homes in which they spend barely any time? Well, we now have the answer, thanks to the Luxist blog – which has posted an array of pictures of the interior of JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon’s home on the Chicago Gold Coast.
Dimon’s palace has a sizeable rooftop terrace, state of the art gym, eight bedrooms and
all the glitz and old-school luxury you could want, as well as a painting of a suited torso that looks suspiciously like a self-portrait (see for yourself at http://tinyurl.com/2dxlxug).
Dimon bought the house in 2000 for $4.7m, though the price has dipped from $13.5m to just $9.5m since he first put it up for sale a couple of years ago. Damn that pesky credit crunch.