Winnipeg craft brewery, Stone Angel Brewing will be changing the art on its cans of Redhanded Irish Red Ale, stating that the red hand image it has used since 2017 has become a “symbolic representation of violence that affects Indigenous women.”
In a statement on its website to Global News, Stone Angel Brewing president Paul McMullan says the symbol was chosen to evoke the culturally important and centuries-old Red Hand of Ulster.
But he says in the context of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, seeing a red hand on a can of beer may seem hurtful and disrespectful, and the company was asked to stop using the symbol.
McMullan says future batches of its Irish Red will be shipped under a new name and design, and some of the profits from sales of the remaining cans will go to the Indigenous Women’s Healing Centre.