You Can’t Have Beer for Breakfast! Oh, Wait

A different kind of morning brew stirs up controversy

  • Share
  • Read Later
142285939
GETTY IMAGES

With Cold Turkey, you don't have to choose!

It’s happy hour somewhere, right?

A Scottish brewery wants customers to pair its latest drink with their morning meal. Earlier this year, Black Isle Brewery released Cold Turkey — a rich beer with a malty coffee base and hints of berries and grapefruit. With oats, barley and wheat, the amber ale “has all the malty taste of multigrain cereal,” Black Isle said on its website.

(LIST: We Tried These: Mountain Dew Kickstart and Other Morning Beverages)

At 2.8% alcohol by volume, a pint or two of Cold Turkey won’t give you the spins with your morning cereal. But in a country where drinking is prevalent (Scotland has the eighth highest alcohol-consumption level in the world), some Scots are concerned the move will promote alcoholism. Richard Burkitt, director of For the Right Reasons, a Scottish charity that helps people overcome drinking problems, told the Scotsman that the beer sends a negative message.

“I would not encourage people to drink alcohol at breakfast time,” he said. “If you are drinking at breakfast time, you have a problem and you are an alcoholic. And you need to seek help.”

(MORE: New York’s Ale Awakening: How a Cocktail City Learned to Love Beer)

Burkitt has a point. But Black Isle owner David Gladwin said that with such low alcohol content — most beer contains 3% to 7% alcohol by volume — Cold Turkey is meant for people who want a quality drink after the graveyard shift.

“Unfortunately, if you mention breakfast and beer in the same sentence, people do jump to rather predictable conclusions,” Gladwin told trade publication the Drinks Business:

“But there has been a lot of positive reaction to it as well. It’s worth remembering that one man’s breakfast is another man’s lunch. Some people who have been up for four or five hours prior to 9 o’clock in the morning might have a drink as it’s their lunch.”

However long you’ve been up when you drink a Cold Turkey, one thing’s for certain: it’s a breakfast of champions.

MORE: Unsurprisingly, New Zealand Health Experts Say ‘Breakfast Beer’ Is a Bad Idea