Good news: Delta Airlines just announced that they’ll be serving up a variety of craft beers on many of their flights!
Typical news: They’re doing it in a way that’s more complicated than figuring out how to use your frequent flyer points
Bad news: You have to fly with Delta Airlines to participate. (Sorry, this one was too easy – because it’s true!)
Delta has just issued a press release saying they will be offering local craft beers on select flights in a move that “continues the airline’s focus on bringing regional food, wine and now beer to the in-flight experience.”
Many of the breweries involved are widely known like Stone, Lagunitas, Brooklyn Brewery, and Ballast Point, while others (looking at you Newburyport and Blue Point) are beers with smaller regional followings.
It all sounds nice enough, but just wait until they try to explain which flights will be offering up the beers. From the press release:
The selection of regional craft beers are available on Delta’s West Coast Shuttle between Los Angeles and San Francisco; between New York-LaGuardia and Boston, Washington-Regan National and Chicago-O’Hare; on Delta’s transcontinental routes between New York-JFK and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle; and on flights between Atlanta and New York-LaGuardia, Washington-Reagan National and Dulles, Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa and New Orleans. Samuel Adams is available on all other domestic routes in the U.S.
Got all that? This passage makes up almost half the text in the press release, so you know they thought it was important to share, even if it’s almost impossible to parse.
Thankfully, they also created the image you see above that lays out which beers are available on which routes in a fairly simple way. Unfortunately, they’ve made the image and text so small that it’s almost impossible to read. Even at the largest size provided by the airline, the image of their overly complicated regional craft beer offerings is a poorly conceived blur of maddening missteps.
Just like flying with Delta. ;)
Maybe they should do what other airlines have done – offer up a selection of craft beers from the city where they’re headquartered. Frontier does this with Colorado beers, and Sun Country Air out of Minneapolis offers brews from Surly on their flights.
Then again, Delta is headquartered in Atlanta, so maybe they don’t have a lot of local breweries to choose from. There’s Sweetwater (whose 420 is being served on certain Atlanta-based flights) and…uh…Terrapin?
At any rate, it’s nice to see them try, and it’d be great to have the option of drinking a Ballast Point Sculpin IPA on the way to San Diego. I just wish they weren’t so “airline-y” about the whole thing.
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Tip of the hat to none other than Brother Don for posting this news to Facebook – now I wish he’d post something here!
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Filed under: Beer, News Tagged: Beer, beers on a plane, craft beer, Delta airlines 
