While ride-share companies are controversial in some ways, one undeniable net good is that they give anybody with a smartphone and a credit card the ability to get home without driving drunk. Lyft, knowing that a fair chunk of its market is people who head home after the bar closed, has decided to cash in in a clever way — with a beer that gives you a discount on your ride.
Lyft has hired Baderbrau Brewing out of Chicago to make Five-Star Lager, which is a mildly presumptuous name. The beer, however, is designed to be a nightcap both in the sense that a lager is a lighter beer on the tongue, and also the can comes with a discount code for a standard Lyft ride; sorry, Lyft Line fans. The beer itself is a rebrand of Baderbrau’s South-Side Pride, intended to be a “beer-flavored beer” and generally seen as a solid if unexceptional beer from the beer-loving masses.
That’s by design, however:
[Baderbrau cofounder Rob] Sama said he envisions Five Star Lager penetrating the kinds of sports bars where craft is still fairly rare. That’s why they decided to use Baderbrau’s easiest-drinking beer for the project. “For the guy drinking a Miller Lite or PBR the shift isn’t that dramatic,” Sama said.
This isn’t all that unusual, truth be told. Many breweries are happy to do a “private label” run of beer, even highly respected ones. If you’ve bought “house beers” from Trader Joe’s, you were actually drinking beer from notable breweries like Gordon Biersch or Firestone Walker. And it’ll be interesting to see how this experiment goes in Chicago bars. Lyft has committed to 24,000 cans of the beer, and it’ll evaluate after they hit the market.
If nothing else, it’s nice to see a commitment to keeping people who’ve had a few off the road.
(via The Chicago Tribune)
