Stone Brewing Has Been Trolling Fans With Upside Down Labels

It seemed like a mistake. It was a ploy.

stone upside down labels
Courtesy of Stone Brewing
Courtesy of Stone Brewing

Stone Brewing has launched its first-ever advertising campaign. That's a deeply anticlimactic sentence. Yay? It wouldn't be particularly notable under basically any circumstance at all. However, the brewery's first ads kicked off with a month-long troll of pretty much everyone drinking its beer, causing a little confusion along the way.

The Escondido, California-based brewery has been printing upside down labels on bottles since mid-June without saying much about the "mistakes." Stone's silence prompted confusion when would-be revelers pulled the wonky beers out of the case. Stone waited until July 13 to announce that the misprints are intentional. The bottles are part of an advertising campaign titled "Leave No Stone Unturned." Eh? Get it? Because you're going to... you know... you turn it to drink... ahhhh, you get it.

The brewery has been fielding social media messages about the upside down labels since they got out into the world. There are plenty of those messages, though it's maybe not as many as you'd expect. It seems that a majority of drinkers saw the label, shrugged, and said, "It drinks."

The campaign was designed to highlight the "collective years of trial and error and error and error" that go into honing Stone's recipes. But it definitely took some people by surprise.

I guess the moral of the story is that if something seems amiss, assume you're being trolled and have unwittingly become part of some advertising campaign. Now that you know, if you're left hoping you could have an upside down beer (at least upside down until you tip the whole thing into your mouth), the labels are going to stay this way on a bunch of Stone's beer for the "foreseeable future." Bottoms up.

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Dustin Nelson is a Senior Staff Writer at Thrillist. Follow him @dlukenelson.