Chick Beer: because those other beers are for dudes.

OK, so we all know that beer marketers have a terrible history with selling their products to women. Mostly this isn’t a huge problem for me because the Big Two brewers who get the most air time (MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch) make terrible beer that I’m totally OK not being sold. You keep your Coors Light, really, I don’t want it.

It seems that that’s what the makers of Chick Beer were thinking, too. Except, well…something seems to have gone dreadfully wrong. In an attempt to even the market and create a beer that isn’t all about Manly Men Doing Man Stuff (Like Drinking Beer And Looking At Hot Ladies), Chick Beer has swung the pendulum entirely in the opposite direction, creating a beer that doesn’t just market to women, but stereotypes them in the most ridiculous way possible.

Take, for instance, the bottle: it’s made to look like a woman in a little black dress, which is cute, I guess. But it’s also “uniquely reflective,” which I think means you can see yourself in it. Because we ladies just can’t do anything without stopping to check ourselves out, amirite?  Not to mention, the six-pack is shaped like a “hip” purse, because lord forbid ladies be seen carrying an actual six pack—or worse, a CASE—of beer without something dolling it up.

Things get really fun when it comes to the beer itself. It’s pink (duh), lightly carbonated to prevent “that bloaty feeling” (ladies don’t burp), “smooth” (which apparently ladies like), and “low carb with only 97 calories” (wouldn’t want to blow your diet on a drink). I’ve gotta say, Chick: this beer does not sound even a little bit appetizing. In fact, it sounds exactly like every other crappy light beer on the market, except dyed pink.

In general, a gross beer with a bad marketing scheme wouldn’t even be on my radar, but in this case I’m actually pretty offended as both a woman and a beer-drinker. Instead of offering a high-quality product and addressing the issues of sexism among beer marketers, brewers, and consumers—and trust me, there is a LOT—Chick is instead offering a second-rate product fancied up with cheap marketing gimmicks and insisting that dying it pink and slapping it into a purse-shaped box somehow makes it appealing to all women.

On their web site, Chick asks “What’s wrong with being a Chick?” And the answer, of course, is nothing. There’s nothing wrong with being a woman, and there’s nothing wrong with being a woman who drinks beer—but Chick isn’t challenging any of those notions. Instead, it’s creating a separate beer for women, insisting that we will only like it if it’s pink and smooth and not too manly. That’s not helpful, it’s just reinforcing the same “most beer is for men” mentality already pushed by beer marketers.

–Melissa

P.S. I can’t be sure (I’m awaiting an answer), but the Chick distribution page and Twitter suggest that Chick is brewed by Anheuser-Busch, so by buying this beer you might still be contributing to the regular kind of ridiculous sexist beer advertising–A-B owns Bud and Bud Light, some of the worst sexist beer commercial offenders.