Heavily invested

I think it’s a measure of how much I love editing drinkstrade.com.au that I almost laughed up a lung when this picture arrived in my inbox yesterday:

I’m not sure it’s quite so entertaining for people outside the drinks industry, but … Carlton & United Breweries has launched The Pub Reopening Ceremony, a pub crawl that will travel to pubs across the country to help support venues as they re-open. The relay kicked off this week at the CUB Brewery in Abbotsford, where CEO Peter Filipovic was joined by Mick Molloy and AFL legends Nick Dal Santo and Campbell Brown to officially light the Tap Torch that will travel to pubs across the country throughout a three-week tour.

Following the lighting of the Tap Torch, Filipovic – dressed in an official beer-inspired tracksuit – officially passed the torch on for it to travel to the first stop of the relay at Melbourne institution The Espy.

From there, the torch will travel through Victoria before making its way to NSW, QLD, WA and SA, delivering free beer kegs to venues along the way.

Genius!

The immediate picture that popped into my head – following the one above – is a group of people sitting around a table brainstorming publicity ideas to promote CUB’s delivery of free beer kegs to pubs, with each suggestion wilder than the next. Until someone pipes up with …

I know! How about we set up a fake Olympic Games torch ceremony and get our CEO to dress in a beer tracksuit and wave a ‘Tap Torch’ around, then we send the torch on a pub crawl around Australia with the free kegs?

Yes! I love it! Whoever came up the awesome idea should get a pay rise. The photo slays me.

It went straight into my weekly Drinks Trade newsletter. I’d been a bit worried about how I was going to come up with eight stories for the newsletter during a short week due to the Queens Birthday public holiday, but heaps of stuff happened. I ended up agonising over which stories wouldn’t make it in.

Most of the stories are probably not interesting to anyone whose investment in alcohol is limited to tapping their credit card at Dan Murphy’s, but they are endlessly fascinating to me.

For example, Squealing Pig is releasing a Pinot Noir Gin. This gets me going because it’s a wine company making spirits. But what makes it particularly cool is that the latest IRI data shows gin and pinot noir have been the two hottest categories during the ‘COVID quarter’.

Squealing Pig must be beyond stoked that they’ve serendipitously anticipated the trend.

Various other things happened, such as Amazon launching an online alcohol store in Australia and cask wine sales surging and other tidbits.

Over the past four years, the ins and outs of the alcohol industry have become as familiar to me as the trevails of Jennifer Aniston’s love life once were, except this time around I have data to back me up. I will miss being a booze news hound when it’s time to move on.

Speaking of heavily invested … my new oven arrived yesterday, along with the AirBnB refund for my Hawaiian holiday, so the two cancelled each other out.

Once I find a spare moment to claim the oven on insurance, I’ll be laughing all the way to Honey Birdette … joke … no more dazzlingly expensive underwear for me for a while, I have toilet cisterns and taps to buy for my mini renovation.

I’m getting a little nervy about the budget, wondering if I’m being extravagant moving the kitchen island bench. Perhaps I should be saving the money for polishing the floors …

Argh, the stress levels … Better go send another angsty email to the builder. Poor him.

Song of the day: Pink “Raise your glass”