For the 2nd straight year, Brooklyn Brewery is making a beer for New York Comic Con, the Brooklyn Defender. This dark beer pairs well with the illustration drawn by comic book artist Cliff Chiang.
Brewmaster Garrett Oliver did well explaining how a great beer is more like a comic than you might think. The beers that the Brooklyn Defender is fictitiously fighting don’t necessarily have beginning, middle, and end. They’re more Michael Bay movie than Frank Miller.
Here’s the Brooklyn Defender’s origin story:
The bars of this city need a defender. After years of neglect and false advertising the taps are running muddy with thrifty ideas and cheaper imitations. The “Foam Jobs” are still running amok. You know who they are. Skunk, their “beer turned bad” leader, controls too much of the cities stores. Thin Body, with his frail listless frame, fills bar patrons everywhere with disappointment. Adjunct, with his giant corn costume, replacing any good done by proper breweries with sickly sweet dishonesty. The supervillain group Bureaucracy, infecting their beers with bland tasteless recipes. The Marketeer and his henchman, Propaganda, continue to fill the eyes and the ears of the public with lies and distractions allowing for inferior beers to fill the landscape. Their television addled half dog, half frog, Mascot, constantly searching for approval and waitresses.
The “Foam Jobs” days are numbered. Stalking the shadows waiting to strike the tasteless substitutes that invade our taste buds everyday, the Brooklyn Defender fights with rich complex flavor. Using the the finest German and American dark malts, he brings a strong body to every glass and fight. Finished with the finest American hops, flavor awakens the people’s dulled tastebuds. The Brooklyn Defender strikes, quick and strong, avenging all of those who have been spurned by the “Foam Jobs” and their like.
Retconned into a darker and deeper back story just like our favorite contemporary comic heroes. The Defender strikes fear into the heart of those who would forget the virtues of true beer. And when they look to him for a funnel of flavorless fizz, he will look back and say, “No.” With a dark malt visage that creeps out of the shadows and a powerful hoppy strike to finish his opponents, The Brooklyn Defender is not the beer these people deserve, but the beer they need, right now.