Elixir of Invincibility

Some time ago Vitesse Noir was banned by The Portman Group. The award winning duo Boak and Bailey, in their book, ¹suggested that we had contrived it as a publicity prank.

"(Hardknott) even had its own rather contrived dispute with The Portman Group"

Elixir of Invincibility

Now, it is important to me to take this opportunity to state that we did not, on that occasion, intend to poke The Portman Group with a pointy stick. They genuinely got a complaint from a member of the public, we simply milked the PR opportunity. It was all a bit of fun for us. Sport, even.

Yes, this however, is a contrived attempt to bait The Portman Group. If it works, we'll get some free PR.  There is no doubt that last time the positives significantly outweighed the negatives. If they don't bite then we can be satisfied that they have learnt their lesson and will leave us alone.

When we recently decided to make a 7.3% double IPA we wanted to catch the attention of people. The beer itself was to be made all with Southern Hemisphere hops, Scott had researched the optimum dry hopping rate, and we got along with brewing it. This beer is now ready to send out in bottles and kegs.

Meanwhile a talented young artist, who is doing A level art, drew me a picture reminiscent of various fantasy type stories. The various Middle Earth movies were shot in part in New Zealand, which has stunning scenery. I'm a fan of The Disk World stories myself. A load of tenuous links perhaps, but we came up with the name "Elixir of Invincibility" and got our very good friends at Lemon Top to finish off the design of the label.

And then we decided to go up into our local mountains and film a sort of adventure, a tenuous story, and some great views. I was going to try to incorporate wizards, dwarfs, trolls and magic into the video, but as it happened, The Chinese New Year has resulted in the resident Cumbrian dragon being unavailable for filming.



Elixir of Invincibility from Hardknott Brewery on Vimeo.

¹It is important to note that I am not in anyway upset at the comments in their excellent book. Indeed, if anything, I am quite flattered.