The "anti-woke" drinks market is a mess
Plus: The controversial rise of big, honkin’ pastry stouts!
By now you surely know that our thiccest living president1 has been convicted of 34 felonies by a jury of his peers in New York. That Donald Trump is now a convicted felon is very funny for obvious reasons I will not get into here. Instead, let’s take a look at how some of America’s most partisan beverage-alcohol brands have responded to the news that the Republican presidential nominee is a criminal—and what those reactions can tell us about the supposed “emerg[ence]” of this teetering nation’s “anti-woke economy.”
Longtime readers probably know where we’re headed, but for the uninitiated to the bizarro-world booze market that grifters entrepreneurs are semi-seriously trying to build to the right of America’s political center, here’s a quick recap. In 2021, I filed a feature at VinePair about “the Black Rifle-fication of booze,” focusing on a pair of beverage-alcohol brands, We The People Wine, and Armed Forces Brewing Co., that were courting right-wing drinkers with all the grace and subtlety of the pioneering chud-friendly2 coffee company.
Conservative mail-order schemes are nothing new. “Subscriber lists to ideological organs are pure gold to the third-party interests who rent them as catchments for potential customers,” as “chronicler extraordinaire of modern conservatism” Rick Perlstein, wrote in 2012 for The Baffler. So on one hand, this business model’s creep into alcohol had a certain logic to it. On the other, selling alcohol is a lot more complicated than, say, commemorative gold-plated coins or boner pills. As GOP influencers looked to the category to cash in on their right-wing cachet, it became obvious that some of them simply hadn’t thought that far ahead.3
In particular, right-wing influencer and former GOP operative Seth “Conservative Dad” Weathers’ ULTRA RIGHT 100% Woke Free American Beer, a gross bid to monetize the transphobic backlash against Bud Light that Weathers himself helped to trigger in April 2023 has been plagued with laughably predictable production and fulfillment challenges basically from the jump. Now, it’s mired in backorder hell, and in January 2024 earned an F rating from the Better Business Bureau. Weathers’ Instagram comments, meanwhile, are littered with demands from duped transphobes still waiting on the overpriced swill they ordered months earlier. Sad!
I tend to think of these brands, and others like them (American Rebel beer, some of these Troop-Respecting distilleries, Freedom2O water, etc.) as fool-money parting machines of dubious repute. This stuff may not be fraud per se, but it is stupid, lowest-common-denominator shit for a red-assed Republican base too mad that football man no stand up to realize they’re being had.4 The more desperate companies in this mix gave the game away on May 31st, the day of Trump’s conviction(s), posting rage-cope for the Republican base they hope to exploit: