Ridiculous! Icelandic Whalers Now Marketing ‘Whale Beer’

Brace yourself for a major WTF moment, Green Monsters. As if the behavior of the Icelandic whaling industry has not been outrageous enough lately, they have now decided to begin concocting and marketing “whale beer,” to coincide with the mid-winter festival of Thorrablot, an occasion when hearty and sometimes unusual food is served in honor of the Norse god, Thor.

Dabjartur Arilíusson, owner of the Steðjar brewery, boasts, “This is a unique beer, brewed in collaboration with Hvalur hf (an Icelandic fin whaling company). Whale beer will include, among other things, whale meal. Whale meal is very protein rich, and has almost no fat in it. That, along with the fact that no sugar is added makes this a very healthful drink, and people will be true Vikings drinking it.”

Strange. We were under the impression that in order to be a “true Viking,” you needed to live in a Scandinavian country at some point during the eighth to eleventh century, use wooden longships as your preferred mode of travel, and have a taste for raiding and pillaging neighboring countries. Were we mistaken in that? Perhaps.

Kristjan Loftsson, Iceland’s most infamous whaling crusader, is believed to be the brains behind this ludicrous “whale beer” idea.

According to Vanessa Williams-Grey of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, this fine specimen of humanity is “always on the look out for a new marketing angel to offload his fin whale meat – and is invariably happiest when in so doing, he can provoke outrage from the Conservation community. This is a man who boasts of running his whaling vessels on fin whale oil and who kills fin whales to make treats for dogs in Japan. Surely, then, we cannot expect him to feel a shred of remorse for turning a beautiful and endangered whale into an ingredient on the side of a beer bottle?”

Arilíusson, too, is unrepentant, and says, “Doubtless some people won’t like it, there is a certain risk and we are aware of that [but] we hope Icelanders will like it as we’re naturally addressing it to Thorrablot, when people eat and drink various things which they normally wouldn’t.”

Here’s a newsflash for you, Arilíusson: Icelanders who care about the well-being of their country’s marine animals won’t like it. And we at One Green Planet and mostly likely many Green Monsters certainly don’t like it either.