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Arcade Brewery Kickstarter pushes geek buttons

June 23, 2012 | Filed under: Chicago, IL,Happenings | Posted by: Java

Arcades in Chicago that serve beer include Arcade Brewery

Image by Zachary Brown via Flickr Creative Commons

Local artist Christopher Tourre and online exec Lance Curran teamed up to launch an interesting Chicago-based Kickstarter project, the Arcade Brewery:

“We want to create a deeper connection between our customers and their beer. Our goal is to create amazingly delicious craft beer with the help of our customers. With design challenges posted on our website, our customers will create and choose most aspects of beer creation from packaging/label design to even the ingredients that go into some of our seasonal beers. We want our customers to have greater control over the beer that they drink.”

There’s more in there where they brand it with a geek theme, via gaming and comic culture. The Arcade Brewery website is rendered in 8-bit nostalgia, and ‘Six Pack Stories’ promises that each sixer will feature an original comic told across the six beers.

At first, the idea seems a little gimmicky. The video games/comic books/geek portion of the pitch seems a little Frankenstein’ed on, intended to create space from the explosion of other craft beer makers out there. Can’t geeks just drink normal craft beers like everyone else, do the bottles have to hit us over the head with nerd couture?

Back to the beer, they have their first year list all planned out and it looks promising:

Grapefruit IPA
Honey Ale
OatMilk Stout
Kölsch

That’s a pretty solid start and one that hits the current beer fanboy trends… although there are so many IPA’s out there, offering one more is something I could do without.

So I’m a little conflicted about this one. Crowd-sourcing craft beer ideas sounds intriguing, but the whole geek marketing tie-in is too uncool for school. But then again, I end up looking at the mug as half-full and dive right in! I’ll probably be there next week.