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Never let it be said that the guys at BrewDog don’t like a publicity-garnering gimmick, but their latest one is particularly perplexing: they are making the ‘world’s first transgender beer’.

How does that work, you might rightly wonder. And for most of us — who have never considered our beer to have a gender — it is a fairly confusing concept.

The answer is that the Scottish brewery's newest beer, a German-style Kölsch named No Label, is brewed using hops which have changed sex prior to harvesting.

This change — known as sequential hermaphroditism or dichogamy — is actually not all that uncommon a process and is something which occurs in many fish, snails and plants.

Traditionally, only female hop plants are used in brewing as their male counterparts don’t form the full cone shapes desired. But the brew in question uses Jester hops, a variety naturally prone to a change of sex, which have grown male flowers.

The sex change won’t have much effect on the taste of the hops, but does make for a nice bit of marketing. Especially given the launch coincides with the opening of BrewDog’s new flagship London bar in the heart of Soho, an area associated with sexual diversity and experimentation.

Being a Kölsch style of beer adds further to the analogy — typically described as a pale lager, it definitively identifies as neither a lager or an ale but rather hovers somewhere in between.

The beer is set to do some good to the wider community as well as lining BrewDog’s pockets. The brewery has partnered with LGBTI event organisers Queerest of the Queer and will be donating profits from sales of No Label to charities which support transgender youth communities.

A man who knows how to reel off the spiel is BrewDog co-founder James Watt, who said: “Producing this non-binary, post-gender beer has been a long and careful process and we’re sure that many so-called beer purists will question its legitimacy; but we care more about freedom than labels. Diversity makes everyone and everything richer.”

BrewDog Soho officially opens on November 6 at 21 Poland Street, W1F 8QG. It will stock No Label from the start.

Follow Ben Norum on Twitter @BenNorum

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