Rehash by

Rehash by
William Flew

Saturday 11 June 2011

Homer's Duff Beer

Fat, balding and cerebrally challenged, Homer Simpson is not an obvious brand ambassador. Across Latin America, however, a product tirelessly championed by Springfield’s most famous loafer is doing a roaring trade.
Homer may swear by the stuff, but in the fictional world of The Simpsons his beloved Duff Beer has little else to recommend it. In an episode where Homer tours the Duff brewery, Hitler’s head is seen floating in a passing bottle, to be missed by quality control. “Ah, beer,” observes Homer on another occasion. “The cause of and the solution to all of life’s problems.”



In South America, drinkers seem unperturbed by the satire. From the bars of Bogotá to the restaurants of Rio, a real version of Duff Beer is proving a hit. Its makers do not have permission to use the brand, but claim that they are fulfilling a demand fuelled by 24 years of The Simpsons on TV.
“Two generations of young people have been raised on The Simpsons,” Enrique Robles, the owner of the Chilean Duff franchise, told the El Mercurio newspaper. “What we have is an unsatisfied fantasy.” This year is the first he is offering Duff, and hopes to make £450,000, he said. The beer was first produced in 2008 in Tijuana, Mexico, by Rodrigo Contreras, a marketing man with an eye for a gimmick.
He founded the Simpsons Brewing Company — a name he insisted was a coincidence. Since then he has started exporting the beer, complete with packaging that mimics that seen in The Simpsons, to Europe.



It seems likely that Homer would approve of Duff being made available as widely as possible, but whether everybody will be impressed is in doubt. The rights to The Simpsons, including the Duff brand, are owned by Twentieth Century Fox. The company is not known to have given permission for the Duff monicker to be attached to a beer, but has attached the brand to a soft drink. It did not return our calls yesterday. Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, is said to fear that bringing Duff Beer into the real world would be tantamount to pushing alcohol on children.
Mr Contreras has said that he tried to contact Fox before starting his brewery “to reassure them that I wasn’t a thief and I didn’t want to steal their ideas”. Receiving no reply, he said that he opted to push on.
His company declined to speak to The Times yesterday. Workers said that they were not permitted to speak to Western journalists.
Production of the beer has had some unforeseen consequences. In April, the Lithuanian publisher of the official The Simpsons comic was fined for breaching laws regarding the advertising of alcohol. The fine came after a government body observed that Duff Beer was being sold in Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Portugal and Germany.

No comments:

Post a Comment