ARCHIVEGay Beer Raises a Glass to World Pride With Its First TV Ad
Gay Beer's 'Gay Beer World Pride 2019' is a short-form television film created by Brooklyn-based independent agency Quirk Creative and published in the United States in June 2019, depicting a same-sex couple sharing a domestic sports-viewing moment to mark World Pride Month and introduce the brand's first-ever television campaign.
Gay Beer launched in December 2018, according to reporting by The Drum, making the June 2019 World Pride campaign one of the earliest major brand communications the label produced. The brand is brewed for Loyal Brands in partnership with Butternuts Beer and Ale, based in Garrattsville, New York — giving it a genuinely regional craft provenance that separates it from the performative rainbow-washing more commonly associated with large multinational brewers. The single media asset at the centre of this campaign carries a deceptively simple narrative: one man watches a game, asks his male partner for a beer, and receives it along with a kiss. The scene is unhurried and domestic, which is precisely the point.
The campaign tagline, 'Brewed this way,' is a deliberate nod to Lady Gaga's anthem 'Born This Way,' as confirmed by coverage in The Drum. That cultural reference anchors the brand firmly within LGBTQ identity rather than treating Pride as a seasonal marketing moment. In the United States, where mainstream beer advertising has historically centred heterosexual social rituals, the choice to stage intimacy between two men around the unremarkable act of watching sport is a quiet but legible statement. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 55 out of 100, reflecting the film's conceptual clarity and cultural positioning offset by the limited scale of a single-asset execution from a brand still establishing its footprint across the US market.
Gay Beer positions itself as the first beer brand to customise a product specifically crafted for the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. That framing, stated directly by Gaelan Draper, Creative Director and Co-founder of Quirk Creative, as reported by clapboard.com, is more than a marketing claim — it identifies a structural gap in the US alcoholic drinks market that larger competitors have historically ignored or addressed only superficially.
The competitive context matters here. In the United States, brands such as Bud Light and Coors Light have run Pride-adjacent campaigns, but those efforts originate from within corporations whose core consumer identity remains rooted in broad mass-market positioning. Gay Beer's founding premise, by contrast, is categorical: it exists for a specific community. Jason Pazmino, Co-founder of Loyal Brands and co-creator of Gay Beer, addressed the underlying assumption driving this gap directly. As reported by The Drum, Pazmino stated that 'the connotation that queer people and women don't drink beer is ridiculous,' a sentiment that functions simultaneously as brand philosophy and competitive critique. The creative goal for the World Pride 2019 campaign, per clapboard.com, was to feel 'authentic and true to their diverse market' — language that implicitly acknowledges how often LGBTQ consumers have been treated as an afterthought in Food and Drink advertising rather than a primary audience.
In the United States, the craft beer segment had been growing steadily in the years preceding the campaign, with independent breweries expanding their share of consumer attention alongside consolidation among the largest players. The five largest brewing groups globally — AB InBev, Heineken, China Resources Beer, Carlsberg, and Molson Coors — accounted for approximately sixty percent of the global beer market around the time of the campaign's release, according to market analysis reported by clapboard.com. Gay Beer's decision to partner with Butternuts Beer and Ale rather than compete on volume reflects a deliberate positioning at the craft and identity end of the spectrum, where authenticity carries more weight than distribution scale.
Quirk Creative, the Brooklyn-based independent agency behind the Gay Beer World Pride 2019 campaign, took a restrained creative approach. The film contains a single scene: a domestic interior, two men, a sporting event on screen, and the exchange of a beer and a kiss. There is no heightened drama, no parade imagery, no explicit Pride iconography beyond the emotional logic of the scenario itself.
Gaelan Draper, Creative Director and Co-founder of Quirk Creative, led the campaign. Draper's stated creative intent, as documented by clapboard.com, was to produce work that felt authentic and true to Gay Beer's diverse market — a goal that the execution pursues through deliberate ordinariness. The scene does not signal its own significance. The same-sex couple is not framed as exceptional; they are simply watching a game and sharing a beer, which is exactly the kind of representation that LGBTQ consumers in the United States have noted as absent from mainstream alcoholic drinks advertising.
The tagline 'Brewed this way' does significant conceptual work for a single phrase. As covered by The Drum and confirmed on Ads of the World, the line references Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way,' a song that carries specific cultural weight within the LGBTQ community, particularly in the United States. That intertextual reference lifts the film beyond a product demonstration and positions Gay Beer as a brand that shares its audience's cultural fluency. The decision to deploy a film format — rather than static print or digital display — as the first-ever television execution for the brand reflects an ambition to reach the broadest possible audience within the community during World Pride Month 2019, when LGBTQ visibility in US media was at a calendar peak. Ariel Utin is credited in connection with the campaign via clapboard.com; full production credits beyond Gaelan Draper's creative direction are not comprehensively documented in publicly available sources.
ARCHIVENo verified performance data for the Gay Beer World Pride 2019 campaign is publicly available in terms of view counts, earned media reach, or sales uplift attributable to the film. The absence of disclosed metrics is consistent with a newly launched brand — Gay Beer had existed for fewer than six months when the campaign aired — operating through an independent agency without the reporting infrastructure of a major advertiser.
Structural analysis offers a more durable form of assessment. The campaign achieved a genuine first: it is recorded as Gay Beer's debut television execution, as confirmed by The Drum and clapboard.com. For a brand whose founding argument is that LGBTQ consumers deserve a beer made specifically for them, the decision to mark World Pride 2019 with a film rather than a social post or print ad signals a real commitment of resource and intention. The trade press response was substantive enough to generate coverage in The Drum under journalist Kyle O'Brien's byline, as well as archival placement on Ads of the World — both credible indicators of industry recognition in the United States advertising community.
The Clapboard Score of 55 out of 100 reflects a campaign that succeeds in its cultural positioning and creative economy while being constrained by the realities of a single asset from a young brand. The tagline lands, the scenario is legible and resonant, and the LGBTQ advertising intent is unambiguous. What limits the score is the absence of a broader campaign architecture — no supporting media, no documented amplification strategy — that might have extended the film's reach across the US market during one of the highest-visibility Pride periods in recent memory, given that 2019 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Inn uprising.
Gay Beer's World Pride 2019 campaign is the brand's first television advertisement. Created by Quirk Creative and published in the United States in June 2019, it features a same-sex couple in a domestic sports-viewing scene and carries the tagline 'Brewed this way,' referencing Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way,' as reported by The Drum.
Quirk Creative, a Brooklyn-based independent agency, created the campaign for Gay Beer. Gaelan Draper, Creative Director and Co-founder of Quirk Creative, led the work. Jason Pazmino, Co-founder of Loyal Brands, co-created Gay Beer itself. The campaign was documented by clapboard.com and covered editorially by The Drum.
The tagline 'Brewed this way' directly references Lady Gaga's anthem 'Born This Way,' a song with significant cultural resonance in the LGBTQ community. As confirmed by The Drum and Ads of the World, the phrase positions Gay Beer as a brand sharing its audience's cultural identity rather than simply targeting them as a seasonal market.
Gay Beer is brewed for Loyal Brands in partnership with Butternuts Beer and Ale, located in Garrattsville, New York, in the United States. The brand was co-founded by Jason Pazmino and Jon Moore and launched in December 2018, according to reporting by The Drum and documentation on clapboard.com.
Gay Beer's World Pride 2019 campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 55 out of 100. The score reflects strong cultural positioning and a clear LGBTQ advertising identity, offset by the campaign's single-asset format and the absence of a documented broader media strategy to extend reach across the US market during World Pride Month.
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