Golden Shower Imperial Pilsner
Availability: 750 ml and draft - Limited availability
Release Date: March 2006
Golden Shower is brewed with all continental pilsner malt and hopped with the finest noble hops.
This beer is dry-hopped in the conditioning tank for 8 weeks.
Approx 9% ABV
80 IBU
Dogfish Head Golden Shower
The Imperial Pilsner that stands up against fake-pilsner imperialism!
In the middle of the nineteenth century, in a land that is now the Czech Republic, the Pilsner beer style was born. The soft local water, the bottom-fermenting Bavarian Yeast, the local hops and the lightly toasted barley made it beloved the world over.
Unfortunately, the industrial breweries here in America have spent the better part of a century diluting and bastardizing this beer style to its hardly recognizable current state of existence. Over three quarters of the beer made and consumed in America is sold as Pilsner. But it doesn't have the alcohol content or the crisp, bracing, hop character of the old world standard. In fact, it doesn"t even have the same ingredients.
The big breweries have done such an amazing job of telling people what they want to drink through billions of dollars in marketing that theyve convinced the world to drink their beer too cold and too light. They brainwashed most of us into thinking the lighter a beer is the more refreshing and satisfying it will be. The way they make their beer light is by reducing the percentage of the higher-quality, more-expensive base grain - barley, which was the exclusive source of fermentable sugar in the original pilsners. By replacing a large fraction of barley with cheaper sugar sources like rice and corn these brewers could make beer a lot less expensively (which leaves more money left over for advertising). These cheaper ingredients make the beer so light that it couldn't possibly be offensive to anyone. How can something designed to be completely inoffensive to everyone be worth coveting by anyone? Today the average American is bombarded with over a million advertising appeals every year. The big breweries are as guilty of any company in any industry of brainwashing the consumer through the sheer oppressive magnitude and breadth of their marketing efforts. They are selling a brand name and an image with such zeal that they have forgotten about the product behind all of this horseshit and hyperbole - the beer itself.
Dogfish Head Golden Shower is the beer itself. A true Pilsner brewed with 100% Pilsner Barley, and impressively hopped using our self-developed continuing-hopping method. At 9% abv it's also nearly twice as strong as the American, wanna-be pilsners made by the big boys.
The advertising campaign for Golden Shower...
NO ADVERTISING.
As we launch this beer in April of 2006 we are committed to seeing it succeed. We've watched what half-billion dollar marketing campaigns and million-dollar-a-minute ads have done for the Pilsner beer style in this country thus far and we're not impressed. We might be wrong, but, if spending stupid amounts of advertising dollars has diluted the Pilsner to its current anemic state, then we think our best hope to reconstitute the style is to spend zero dollars advertising our Golden Shower Imperial Pilsner. We won't buy an ad, make a t-shirt, a neon, a hat, or a key-chain and certainly not a blimp that promotes this beer. We've made this press release, and we'll send out complimentary samples to the press and to beer festivals but that is all we will do to market and promote this beer. We are confident that we have found the magic secret to selling something that you want people to drink...
INSTEAD OF MAKING IT INOFFENSIVE MAKE IT TASTE GOOD!
Nobody should believe that Dogfish Head Golden Shower tastes good... until they try it. Why should they? Not many people are going to try it because, without a traditional marketing campaign, it's going to be hard to find for a long time. But a small group of people who trust their taste enough to decide what to drink for themselves (instead of listening to the advice of their televisions) are going to find a Golden Shower and try it and we're pretty sure they are going to like it. And we are hopeful that they will tell other good-beer enthusiasts about it and that they will try it and like it too. And then there will be hundreds (but probably never thousands or millions - because our brewery isn't that big) of Golden Showers opened and enjoyed every day in defiance of monstrous marketing campaigns and miniature fake pilsners and the world will be a better place for it.
We have every intention of not advertising for and not marketing this beer& ON A GLOBAL SCALE!!!!
Dogfish Head has shared our recipe for Golden Shower with the 500 year-old Herold Brewery in the Czech Republic - the birthplace of the Pilsner beer style. Using our very aggressive negotiating tactics we've worked out a sweet deal. They are not paying us one cent for our recipe, even though it's a really good recipe (but please don't take our word for it). The only thing we have asked for from the Herold Brewery is that they too commit to spending no money advertising or promoting their version of Golden Shower.
Can a brewery really survive with little or no advertising or marketing?
Yup. Dogfish Head Craft Brewery has averaged over 50% revenue growth for the last three years and we are on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in America. We've achieved all of this even though our beers are among the strongest in alcohol and most expensive in the world. We do this by paying more attention to the quality of our beer then we do about creating an image or buying mind and market-share. We spend about 2% of our annual revenue on marketing or advertising any of our beers or any aspect of our company and yet we continue to grow stronger every day. And we are not alone. In 2005 overall beer sales in America grew less than one percent. Wine sales and Liquor sales were up around 4%. But craft beer sales were up 9% this past year; making ours the fastest growing adult beverage segment in the country. There are over 1400 craft breweries in America that contributed to this growth. Hardly any of us have sizable advertising campaigns to speak of. But then again we don't make our beer with cheaper ingredients like corn and rice either. What we do have is a growing, grassroots army of beer enthusiasts by our sides who have chosen quality over hype and are helping us spread the word. We wouldn't waste our Golden Shower on the kind of beer drinker who decides what to drink based on which brewery spends the most on advertising and the least on ingredients, we brewed it for the rest of us.
Cheers!
