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Sam Adams Wants to Trademark 'Brexit' for a Hard Cider

Plus, a timeline of recent politically-charged beers

Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images

As Britain stews over Brexit, America plans to brew over it. Boston Beer Company, which makes Sam Adams, may have a Brexit beverage in the works, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The company submitted a trademark application for "BREXIT," and according to filings it will be a hard cider concept. (Seeing as how Sam Adams is named after a founding father, it seems strangely fitting that the beer company would attempt to profit off Great Britain's political misfortune.)

Politically-inclined beers are fairly common, though they more often focus on specific politicians or candidates rather than upheavals of potentially untoward magnitude. Here, a timeline of recent political beers:

2004: Oregon’s Portland Brewing Co. launches Governator Ale to commemorate Arnold Schwarzenegger being elected Governor of California

2011: Under President Barack Obama, the White House brews its very first beer, White House Honey Ale

2015: Iowa’s Exile Brewing Co. launches Chill Clinton; inspired by former President Bill Clinton, it’s infused with hemp seeds and reportedly gets the thumbs up from Hillary

March 2016: Zero Gravity Brewing in Vermont releases the Bernie Sanders-inspired Bernie Weisse; part of the proceeds go to a nonprofit that encourages young people to vote

April 2016: North Carolina brewers strike back against the state’s new ‘pro-discrimination’ bill by launching a beer called Don’t Be Mean to People; 100 percent of the profits go to local organizations serving the LGBTQ community

May 2016: Budweiser goes hyper-patriotic and launches a new can design for summer, rebranding itself simply ‘America’

June 2016: Chicago’s aptly named Spiteful Brewing thumbs their nose at Donald Trump with a beer called Dumb Donald; the label depicts the candidate as a Neanderthal

UPDATE 6/29 3:45 p.m.: Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Boston Beer Company says, "We have a long history of working alongside cidermakers from Britain and source some of our apples from the UK.  We are not sure exactly how we would use the name yet, but it would likely be for a small batch of cider out of our Angry Orchard research and development orchard in Walden, NY."

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