While it wasn’t planned to run two articles about Stones Brewing in a row, this is too good to pass up on.

UK self-appointed alcohol industry watchdog The Portman Group has found offense with Stone’s beer Arrogant Bastard.

Here is Stone’s co-founder Greg Koch’s response.

Dear Portman Group,

Thank you for your letter. We’re sorry to hear that our beer, identity, and labels offended you. Since Arrogant Bastard Ale has been around for 23 years (a year before Portman was formed), and has been distributed in the UK for over a decade, the most devastating news may be how long it took you to identify your feelings. It would be insensitive for us not to recognize that this must have been a difficult emotional process. And clearly it was emotional, as your letter contained a lot of emotional words.

So, due to this highly emotional place that you must be coming from, we felt it was important to give you time to fully process before we responded. We recognize that you’re going through some changes, and change can be difficult for any person, organization, or watchdog group.

All that being said, we believe you deserve a truthful response. And that is: Your letter strikes as both random and arbitrary.

Random, because you specifically describe it as such with your sentence “Zenith Global were asked to collect a random sample of 500 alcoholic products on sale in the UK off-trade.” One might think that if a goal is to protect the public from themselves, the mission would not be satisfied via a random process, but rather a thorough and exhaustive audit of every single product available for sale in the UK off- and on-trade. Being not in the watchdog business ourselves, this is admittedly not our bailiwick.

Arbitrary, because it seems the definitions you’ve chosen are arbitrarily applied to our Arrogant Bastard Ale. By suggesting your actions are arbitrary, we’re being polite and giving you the benefit of the doubt. Because the other possibility would be that you did it intentionally, and that would be irresponsible. We believe in you, Portman, and believe you wouldn’t be intentionally be irresponsible. But we’ll get into that shortly.

Every aspect of Stone Brewing is built on best practices. We consider them at every stage of growth, and in our goal to improve the world of beer. We invite you to research our company’s standards and ethical values. We believe them to be worthy of your inquiry.  

We actively rail against the evil things in Portman Code 3.2—violence, aggression, dangerous behavior, anti-socialism, and illegal activities. We do, however, struggle to understand the inclusion of the offense that we’re being accused of—“bravado.” Hopefully understanding the Arrogant Bastard story will convince you that we are not being bravado-y, and that “bravado” itself may not be a very useful criteria by which to judge a beer, brand, or person.

For the rest of Greg Koch’s response, go here, which also has a link to The Portman Group’s letter.