The Navy SEAL who shot Bin Laden is hyping a new brewing company. We tried their beer so you don’t have to
Last week, we expressed our amusement at the video advertisement for the Armed Forces Brewing Company, featuring former SEAL Team 6 operator Rob O’Neill as its centerpiece and spokesperson. Task & Purpose had some fun roasting the Dollar Shave Club-esque video production style, the use of MiG-29s for a patriotic American flyover, and the fact that they had the same woman digitally cloned several times over. But besides all the cheesy marketing, the question still stands: Is the beer actually good?
(For those who have been living under a rock, or something, O’Neill is widely credited with firing the shots that killed Osama Bin Laden during the May 2, 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan.)
In the video, O’Neill states that “this beer is for everybody to drink. It’s not some pretentious asshole beer for some slackster or coffee-house misanthrope,” right before he performs a Vulcan nerve pinch on a flannel-clad hipster in a bizarrely nerdy cultural reference given the messenger and the target audience. The can itself continues the promise of this being an all-American beer, with the slogan “liberty deserves a great beer” which sets expectations high. So it’s time to be the exact sort of person Rob O’Neill would Vulcan nerve pinch, which is why I’m doing the taste test of this beer in full gucci-tactical PPE to protect myself. You’ll never catch me lackin’, Rob.
The Navy SEAL who shot Bin Laden is hyping a new brewing company. We tried their beer so you don’t have to
The author on his fourth can of the Armed Forces Brewing Company ‘Special Hops’ IPA (Matt Sampson)
The release for this beer is very limited, primarily constrained to Maryland, Virginia, and Rhode Island, but I found some for sale near me at my local Total Wine store, which Task & Purpose provided to me for the purposes of this review. In total, the beer was roughly $12 for the six pack, which is on the high side of where I start to expect quality, and consistent with the pricing of the other IPA offerings from the brewery that actually makes this beer, but more on that later.
Unboxing
The cans come party-ready in a disposable plastic six rack, allowing you to rip cans free as you go while keeping the others secured in your off-hand as you walk around the rager that you threw in Iraq, or whatever it is that you do when you drink. Each can comes wrapped in a black and gold paper label, printed with the legally required Surgeon General’s warning on it, the aforementioned something about liberty and beer slogan, and a paragraph of text that says “I WILL NOT FAIL (line break) In times of war or uncertainty, there is a special breed of warrior ready to answer our nation’s call. Seawolf Brewery’s SPECIAL HOPS IPA is an IPA that’s bold and adventurous. A refreshing tribute to America’s most elite force” and then there’s an eagle holding a scroll that says “ethos.”
The Navy SEAL who shot Bin Laden is hyping a new brewing company. We tried their beer so you don’t have to
The Armed Forces Brewing Company ‘Special Hops’ IPA (Matt Sampson)
This actually brings me to the centerpiece of the label, the logo, which features a fireteam of wetsuit-clad men, backed by a shield, flanked on the left by text that reads “SPECIAL HOPS” and topped with the Seawolf Brewing logo. I say “a fireteam of wetsuit-clad men” instead of “a fireteam of SEALs” because, despite clearly being an edited version of the famous photo below, which is the fifth result when you Google “Navy SEALs,” nowhere on the can does it say anything about SEALs, Naval Special Warfare, or even the United States Navy on it. This is possibly because the Department of the Navy has some sort of copyright on these specific terms, but there are plenty of brands that use terms like “UDT” and “Frogman” as ways around this possible restriction. But since this is left up to interpretation, I’m just going to choose to believe that this is referring to America’s real most elite force: forklift operators.
The can also features a line of text that reads “Brewed and canned by New Realm Brewing Company, Virginia Beach, VA.” This is very interesting, considering that New Realm is very well-known and well-regarded in Virginia, and is exactly the sort of brewery that O’Neill derides in his commercial, aimed at a hip, urban millennial crowd who do things like take photos in front of breweries at 10am on a Sunday with their purebred organic corgis or whatever. I reached out to Armed Forces Brewing to ask them what their relationship with New Realm is, and they responded that the New Realm “is Armed Forces Brewing Company’s contract brewer.” The response came back from an email address associated with Marchcorp Marketing, an agency that specializes in marketing brands that specifically target the veteran market, or as they call it, “Generation V.”
So, you have a brewery (Seawolf Brewery) that doesn’t brew beer, and is a sub-brand of a brewery (Armed Forces Brewing Company) that also doesn’t brew beer, but that contracts a hip craft brewery to make beer to sell people under the guise that it’s a beer for people who are anti-hipster. This would likely explain why Rob O’Neill was walking through a generic beer warehouse in the video advertisement, and why their website is very focused on attracting investors to the “$19 billion in spending power…untapped market where we can dominate” that is the veteran consumer base. Selling hipster beer to people by telling them that they’re not hipsters as long as their IPA is wrapped in the American flag would be brilliant if it was better executed.
