Sexist names banned from UK beer festival

Beers with sexist names will no longer be welcome at the UK’s biggest beer festival after the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) imposed a ban on discriminatory labels.

CAMRA has banned beers with “discriminatory names or artwork” at its flagship event, the Great British Beer Festival, which is taking place this week in London.

All of the beers, ciders and perries on pour at the festival this week have been checked to ensure they adhere to CAMRA’s charter and code of conduct, according to an emailed statement.

The festival has also chosen Stonewall as its charity of choice and will be collecting proceeds in support throughout the week.

The announcement comes after some of high profile figures in the UK’s beer industry have put pressure on lobbying bodies like CAMRA to do more to tackle sexism in the trade.

CAMRA national director Abigail Newton said the group needed to “do more to encourage female beer drinkers, which are currently only 17%[1] of the population, despite the fact that they make up more than 50% of the potential market.

A YouGov poll carried out in July found that 68% of female drinkers would be unlikely to buy a beer if they saw an advert for it that they considered to be sexist.

Newton said she found it “hard to understand why some brewers would actively choose to alienate the vast majority of their potential customers with material likely to only appeal to a tiny and shrinking percentage.

“Beer is not a man’s drinks or a woman’s drink, it is a drink for everyone. There is a huge amount of work that needs to be done to overcome outdated stereotypes.”

Jaega Wise, the head brewer of London’s Wild Card Brewery, publicly called for organisations like CAMRA to ban sexist beer labels during a Brewers Congress seminar in November 2017.

She said enforcing a ban would “quickly stop some of the smaller breweries from deciding to have branding with boobs on the front.”

The Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) announced plans to “formalise” guidelines against sexist beer advertising for its own members in February last year.

Industry regulatory body The Portman Group also launched a consultation on its code of practice for advertising and promoting drinks in response to an “evolving marketing landscape”, which included a review of its guidelines on sexism.