The entrance to Brewdog’s Edinburgh craft beer bar Photo : 22kay22 ( iStock )

Remember the Pink IPA, courtesy of U.K.-founded brewery Brewdog? Last spring, in a well-meaning but lost-in-translation P.R. gesture, the brewery rebranded, recolored, and rereleased its flagship Punk IPA as the Pink IPA. The idea was that the Pink IPA would be sold at a 20% discount to women, compared to men, in order to draw attention to the ongoing global wage gap. While Brewdog intended the release as an opportunity for both raised awareness and charitable giving, concerns generally arose that the brewery was perpetuating the sort of inequality it sought to combat.


It also opened a sad but probably inevitable door for some opportunistic dipshit to cry “anti-male discrimination,” and now, here we are. Mirror tells of Dr. Thomas Bower, a 27-year-old software engineer who went to Brewdog’s Cardiff bar to purchase the Pink IPA. The bar instead server Bower the Punk IPA, and charged him £5 for the beer, which prompted him to challenge the searing inequality of paying an extra Euro as a man.

According to Bower, who’s telling on himself in a way that would be mortifying if there was even the slightest impression that he cares:

After a bit of a back and forth [with the bartender] with me protesting this, I felt forced to identify as female and was then able to get the drink for £4. I complained to the company about this and they said it wasn’t discrimination because the price difference was part of a national campaign to raise awareness about the gender pay gap. Not satisfied with this, I complained again to Brewdog stating that I was intending to take them to court over this but would rather resolve the problem outside court. They ignored this.


Sure enough, Bower took Brewdog to small claims court over the alleged discrimination (after stating that a public apology would be enough for him to drop the claim), where the judge concluded that “it is clear that in this case the claimant has been directly discriminated against by the defendant because of his sex.” The judge added that Bower could have been “humiliated” by the experience.

Since a collection of GIFs of people making jerk-off hands isn’t an acceptable conclusion to a Newswire, we’ll just take this opportunity to point out that while Bower was apparently within his legal rights to pursue and win a lawsuit, he also basically engaged in the intellectual and legal equivalent of a toddler going “nyah, nyah, I’m not touching you” while flailing his limbs in Brewdog’s face.

If ever there were a time for this expression, it’s now, for the type of guy who exploits gender fluidity to make a tedious and tired point: You’re not necessarily wrong, you’re just an asshole.