Deftones frontman/guitarist Chino Moreno has once again taken the time to talk about the band’s newly launched beer, Phantom Bride IPA. His latest conversation on the beverage took place with Forbes.com and he mentioned that jealousy was in part responsible for the band moving into the world of beers. He said of putting out the brew:
“We’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Obviously there are other groups that have done it and I’ve always been jealous because when I see other bands’ name on there I think, ‘Man, I want to be that.'”
When asked who he was jealous of, he replied:
“Mastodon, they’ve had a couple of great beers. And Iron Maiden had a huge beer called The Trooper, four or five years ago, I remember having it when overseas. And, no disrespect to them, but I didn’t think the beer was great at all. It was just the fact they could have their own beer and I thought, “What if we can have our own beer and actually make it great and a beer that we would enjoy I would love to turn people on to?” So I think that was the mindset.”
When asked of why he decided to go with an IPA for the beer, he replied:
“For me, that was a preference. IPAs are my go to usually and they’re pretty much a big staple in craft beers. And there were a few different hops that I’m really into and so talking with them, collaborating on which ones, was a neat part of it. I’m still pretty green to a lot of this stuff, but it’s just very interesting how the process is done.
So yeah, it was really cool. Another thing which I thought was cool, we have a single, “Phantom Bride,” that’s out at radio at the time. And there are the age-old ways of marketing a song — you go to radio with it, then you do all these meet and greets for the radio station, you try to get them to play the song on the radio, you usually make a video for the song and spend a lot of money doing that. And we were just trying to think of unconventional ways to market the song, get the song’s name and awareness of the song out there without doing just a typical marketing campaign.
And creating a beer around the name of this single was, I just thought, a no brainer. Since the beer’s come out in the last two weeks it definitely draws awareness to the song itself and then it gets people to look it up.”
For more from Moreno on the beer, head to Forbes.com.
