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Strategy March 29, 2018

‘Imprinted’ Beer Foam Of Yankees’ Players Gets The Kibosh

By  Christopher Ruvo

Imprinted products that promote beer – commonplace. But promotional images imprinted in beer itself? That, we confess, was something unknown to us. That is, until we learned of beer being served with the faces of New York Yankees’ players “imprinted” in the brews’ foamy heads. The personalized pints were served during a Monday media day event at the Bronx Bombers’ stadium, and featured the foamy faces of Yankees stars Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, Giancarlo Stanton and Aroldis Chapman.

It wasn’t just player faces that got the sudsy treatments.

Alas, the fun police have put the kibosh on the player beer head branding. Once Major League Baseball found out about the prints, officials “slammed the brakes on the possibility of fans gazing into the foamy eyes of Aaron Judge and other stars before chugging them into their bellies, telling the (Yankees) and (their) concessionaires they cannot imprint images of players into beer foam,” wrote Mike Murphy of MarketWatch.

As Newsday reported, MLB doesn’t institute a policy barring players from participating in advertising related to alcohol. Even so, if an initiative involves sales, “the player, team and potentially MLB would have to sign off,” a league spokesman told Newsday. The spokesman said the Yankees were unaware of the foamy prints. For their part, the Yankees said, “Our hospitality team took Monday’s event as an opportunity to test the image machine with various Yankees-related logos and photos. However, the Yankees have no current plans of incorporating this decorative element on concessions items this season.”

Various media outlets reported that sculpting Yankees’ stars in brew froth was accomplished using a machine from a company named Ripples. The technology reportedly combines 3-D printing mechanics and inkjet printing technologies. Ripples also offers a machine for printing in frothy drinks like lattes, nitro-brewed coffee and cocktails.

Both Ripples and Anheuser Busch InBev-owned Blue Point Brewery (whose branding and tweets were all over the publicly shared Yankees’ beer foam images) denied involvement in the printing. We’re just sad we won’t get to see the Ripples’ machine (below) at work at Yankees Stadium this year – and even sadder that we won’t get to slug down a nice cold glug of brew with Aaron Judge’s likeness in celebration of him slugging a 500-foot homer. It’s okay, though. We’ll hopefully get to console ourselves with a 28th World Series.