Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

A third UK brewery in the past few months has removed offensive to Māori beer labels and apologised after being made aware of the fact.

As with the other two cases to date, I used the same letter I originally wrote and modified the names to suit the company and the beer brand. As in the second case, I also had assistance from a third party in the craft beer industry to assist before going public.

Here is a response from Camerons Brewery Limited, Head of Marketing:

Firstly, thanks for getting in touch about this, and for all of the info in your email. It was definitely never Camerons intention to cause any disrespect when we created the Whakanui beer, and I’m personally very disappointed that we didn’t recognise the significance of the name and imagery when we were putting together our guest ales for 2018. 

Production of this beer has now ceased, with us removing the pump clip from our own pub estate and Untappd, and we’ll definitely not be repeating this style of branding on any beers in the future. We’re now reviewing our approach to guest ale branding for the future, and training our team on the subject of cultural appropriation on groups/individuals.

I really appreciate you taking the time to bring this to our attention, and assure you it’s something we’re following up on right away. I’d welcome any advice you could give about how we could make an apology to anyone we may have offended by using this imagery, as we’d like to make amends with anyone who may have seen this.

Kind regards,