Google must not be too worried about fueling antitrust allegations, as the company is making inroads into yet another industry: The craft brewing industry.
On September 27, just days after Google Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt testified before the Senate Judiciary Antitrust subcommittee, Delaware craft beer company Dogfish Head began serving their new “URKontinent” beer, which combines ingredients on five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Australia) suggested by Googlers from the company’s offices around the globe.
Unlike Google’s last foray into beverages, Google Gulp, this product is actually real.
“Customers loved it,” a bartender at the Dogfish head pub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware told Idea Lab by phone. “Many start out with a half-pint, and then end up ordering full pitchers for themselves and their friends.”
The bartender added that customers had trouble expressing just how the brew tasted, because it was made up of so many diverse ingredients, including honey from beehives on the grounds at Google’s Mountainview, California, headquarters.
“Urkontinent was when people first recognized that all these continents fit together in a certain way, that’s kind of what we do when we bring a beer like this to life and that’s what Google days every day, take a fractured world of information and put it into something cohesive and whole,” said Dogfish Head founder and president Sam Calagione, in the video promoting the new brew.
Urkontinent is German for “Supercontinent,” the name given to the prehistoric landmass we call “Pangea” today, which was first postulated by German scientist Alfred Wegener in 1915.
“Google’s and Dogfish Head’s cultures are actually extremely similar. They call their’s off-centered, we call ours Googley, but the underlying foundations are very similar. Both of us put the user first. All the beers that Dogfish produce, they put it in their brewpub first and really want the feedback. We do the same things with our products: We really want to get it out there and collect that feedback and produce a product that people are passionate about,” says Cameron Carling, a Google Field Tech manager.
But don’t lick your lips at the thought of enjoying a tasty cold Google brew after a long day of Web searching: The beer is right now only available on tap in one place, the Dogfish Head pub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, though the company says that it may “be packaged for full distribution in the coming months.”
Check out more information on the beer at Dogfish Head’s website .
