Delaware-based brewery Dogfish Head is helping Google expand its reach to your local public house with the launch of URKontinent - a beer that took Google employees from all over the world and the entire Google Apps suite to brew.
The story of URKontinent’s origin is laid out in a thirteen minute-long YouTube video, where you get to see how Google+ Hangouts and the rest of Google’s collaboration suite helped Dogfish Head pool suggestions and come up with the beer’s recipe.
The Belgian Dubbel style beer includes ingredients that were suggested by Googlers in offices all over the world, including Australia, South America, Europe, and, of course, the primary Googleplex itself in Mountain View. And a select few Google employees were actually allowed to actually participate in the brewing process itself for the first batch of URKontinent.
If you want to try it, the Google-powered beer has been on tap at the Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats pub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware as of September 27th. But Dogfish Head is also reportedly preparing it for limited nationwide distribution based on the response. Personally, I’m going to save a bottle so down the line I can celebrate my first safe ride in a Google Driverless Car.
Just to be clear, Google has no financial stake in URKontinent: this is really just a one-time marketing move on Google’s part designed to promote its collaboration tools, and doesn’t represent the search giant’s entry into the beer market at large. But it was clever to combine its pitch with something that many people care about very deeply: beer.
