"Kid Beer" isn't a product roadmap

For decades, the consensus position in American society was that beer is not for children. The beverage-alcohol industry—no paragon of propriety—mostly agreed, correctly recognizing that even the appearance of courting underage drinkers could jeopardize its social license to operate. It was such a taboo, in fact, that The Whitest Kids U’ Know’s cult-classic sketch “Kid Beer,” featuring a boardroom brainstorm at the extremely fictional “Coorheusen Brewing Company,” was almost too far-fetched to really land when it first aired in July 2010. Almost. Have you seen it? It’s an all-timer:

If “Kid Beer” verged on absurd at the turn of the Aughts, it had started to feel decidedly more real by the turn of last decade, when Big Soda giants and their willing joint-venturers in the beverage-alcohol business rushed out soft-to-hard crossover drinks in hopes of capitalizing on the American drinking public’s newly revitalized taste for corporate brands and commodity flavors. Another half a decade later, with booze firms of all pedigrees and market capitalizations having strip-mined nearly every piece of intellectual property from the consumer-packaged-goods sector, the WKUK sketch watches more like an internal product roadmap than line-stepping fringe comedy. Now it’s the bev-alc industry that’s verging on the absurd. And that way, trouble lies.

This is not an April Fool’s Day spoof. And two recent kid-friendly releases from not-small market players mark the latest depths in the trade’s recent descent into penny-wise, pound-foolish alcopop madness.

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