All the beer you can drink! (Or so you'd think...)

It’s something that every blurry-eyed soak with the wherewithal to dream wishes for: the day somebody says he will pick up every bar tab that comes before him till the day he drops dead. Paying for one’s beer-guzzling habit is undoubtedly the least appealing aspect of heavy drinking (next to the dry heaves) and the wish to drink as much as possible on as little money as possible explains why when it comes to mass producing beer, there are no standards too low if a cheap price-tag can be slapped on at the end. (This fact also explains why people say they love their home-brewed beer even when they didn’t have a clue what they were doing when they made it and resent having to drink such cheap slop).

Croucher Brewery Company in New Zealand recently drew international headlines and more free publicity than it could have hoped for* when it offered a “lifetime supply” of beer to the person who returned a laptop that someone had spirited off its premises (Full story here). The laptop contained information the young brewery deemed valuable, including its design and financial info, and, while no media outlet has suggested this and we are going on a ledge of pure conjecture here, proof that the moon landing was done on a Hollywood soundstage.

Now before all of your tongues drop to the floor in one Homer-Simpson-like thud, consider what this brewery considers a “lifetime supply”: 12 beers a month for the rest of the recipient’s natural life.

Twelve a month! We here at TheSharkBook are frankly insulted by that stingy offering on behalf of the petty thieves of New Zealand, as between the two of us we use about that amount in the various beer-based stews and beer-battered dishes consumed on a monthly basis. The twelver is known throughout the drinking world as woefully inadequate for the purposes of serious drinking on a good night and the brewery’s offer makes one wonder if they truly know their target demographic (for anecdotes related to the backbone of their industry we refer them to The Shark Book).

*Editor's Note: For the price of one case of its promising looking beer sent to each of us, we hear at TheSharkBook.com are willing to discuss changing every 10^th noun we use in blogs to the name of the brewery’s favorite label.