15 years of Punk IPA: the revolution derailed?
Brewdog are currently running a publicity campaign marking 15 years of Punk IPA. Interestingly it is fronted up by Martin Dickie who has been remarkably absent from the many recent controversies regarding the Scottish brewer.
He rightly is credited with being the brewer back in 2007 but unfortunately the anniversary seems to be going no further than PR. There don’t appear to be any plans to re-brew the original Punk, or a 2022 version of it for example.
I checked back to discover when I first had the beer. This is a partly random task as I certainly didn’t keep a diary of when I drank it or anything else. Rather I’ve had to rely on twitter. I can see I definitely drank and enjoyed it at the Cambridge Beer Festival in May 2010. This would have been the 6.2% cask version.
It was indeed this original version that made Punk’s name as a beer and led the way for it to escape from a craft beer niche to the mass market beer it is today. Of course its not the same beer and it hasn’t been on cask for many years. Its now a 5.4% keg beer.
Making a beer like the original punk for a mass market would be problematic I suspect not only in terms of getting hold of an appropriate quantity of hops, but also whether the robust hoppy character it had would really be a mass market beer.
I still drink Punk very occasionally. On the rare moments I find myself in a Wetherspoons and there is no interesting cask on (Spoons invariably has cask on but sometimes rather dull beers) I’ll have a pint of Punk which they sell in many of their pubs. The price is usually around £2 a pint cheaper than in a Brewdog bar which I suspect means more is sold and the beer is fresher as a result.
Punk now is a perfectly drinkable well made beer for mass consumption. 15 years ago that was not something you could easily find reliably. Is it therefore progress? Perhaps. Is it what Martin Dickie had in mind in 2007? One wonders…
Leave a Reply