This beer looked so strange that I had to buy it. It's from Sweden, it's named after a 1970's British punk rock record,
and it has a picture on it of some Indian guys hitting each other with
shoes.
I suppose the Indian connection kind of makes sense - the beer is an IPA, and IPA's were originally brewed to be exported to India. But they weren't brewed by the Swedes.
In the olden days of the 18th century, the British were busy colonizing the planet and helping themselves to anything that wasn't nailed down. In India they helped themselves to silk, cotton, tea, opium, and spices, which they desperately needed back home to preserve food and mask the disgusting taste of their rotten meat. But as Pete Brown writes in his rather good book Hops and Glory, the British were adventurers and xenophobes at the same time. They would learn just enough of a foreign language to be able to give orders, but they weren't particularly interested in foreign culture. They surrounded themselves with home comforts, including beer. And the beer they surrounded themselves with in India was India Pale Ale, or IPA.
India couldn't make its own beer because no one had invented refrigeration yet, so IPA's were brewed in the frozen lands of Burton-on-Trent, transported by barge to London, then shipped south past Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, then back north to Bombay. The journey took months, so the beer was brewed heavy on the hops, because hop-heavy beer was supposed to last longer. And hops are what gives IPA's their distinctively bitter taste.
Never Mind the Bollox is not very hoppy. Actually it's not very nice at all. When I first tasted it I thought I might have got a bad bottle, so I looked around on the internet to see what other people said about it. Here are some quotes from beeradvocate.com:
"I found it to be very strange, and not in a good way."
"There is a modest burn of bitterness, but whether it's hops or some unusual chemical process I couldn't say."
"I have to imagine this is what ant poison would taste like."
"This has to be a bad bottle."
Reactions to The Sex Pistols' seminal 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols were similarly disparaging.
The manager of Nottingham's Virgin Records was prosecuted for obscenity after displaying the album in his shop window, but the Defence produced expert witnesses who proved that "bollocks" is not an obscene word, and the chairman of the hearing was forced to conclude:
"Much as my colleagues and I wholeheartedly deplore the vulgar exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature for the purchases of commercial profits by both you and your company, we must reluctantly find you not guilty."
Just before the release of their single God save the Queen, The Sex Pistols annoyed their record label so much that it dropped them. Twenty thousand copies of the record were destroyed. The band signed to Virgin, but when they tried to press new versions, the workers at the pressing plant downed tools because of the song's content. "God save the Queen," sang Johnny Rotten, "She 'aint no human Being / And there's no future / In England's dreaming." When the record finally made it into the shops the BBC banned it, as did all the UK's other radio stations. It was more banned than any song in British history.
God Save the Queen was released during Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee, when she celebrated 25 years as ruling monarch, and we all had street parties, and I dressed up like an octopus.
Most major chain stores refused to stock the record, but it still reached number 2 in the singles charts. Number 1 was Rod Stewart - his fourth week at the top. Apparently there is evidence of vote rigging (to keep The Sex Pistols from being top of the pops) by the British Phonographic Institute, who were supposed to be in charge of these things.
16 years later the BBC banned Rod Stewart. His single Sailing was considered unsuitable for broadcasting during the first Gulf War, along with Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) by Cher, In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins, Killing an Arab by the Cure, Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon, Brothers In Arms by Dire Straights, View to A Kill by Duran Duran, Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles, I Shot the Sheriff by Eric Clapton, I'm on Fire by Bruce Springsteen, Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears, and many, many more…
The BBC had been banning records for decades. In 1942 it banned "Sickly sentimentality which, particularly when sung by certain vocalists, can become nauseating and not at all in keeping with what we feel to be the need of the public in this country in the fourth year of war."
In the 50's it banned religion
In the 60's it banned drugs
In the 70's it banned advertising
In the 80's it banned sex
and politics
In the 90's it banned The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up, and so did everyone else. MTV banned the song's video. Walmart pulled it from the shelves. The record immediately went Gold.
After the BBC banned The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, the album sold over a million copies. Perhaps that is the kind of reaction Dugges Brewery was hoping to elicit with it's beer. But why the picture of Indian guys hitting each other with shoes?
Shoes are used as insults in many parts of the world. It's always fun to throw them at politicians.
On closer inspection, maybe that's not a shoe, maybe it's a knife. Maybe they're trying to chop each others' beards off. In Ancient India beards were treated with great veneration. You could pay a debt with a beard. And the punishment for adultery was to have your beard cut off in public.
That doesn't seem to have much to do with IPA, but neither does Dugges' Never Mind the Bollox.
