Fox is finally cashing in on the popularity of Duff Beer from The Simpsons by creating the real thing, but it’s debuting somewhere other than the United States. According to The Wall Street Journal, Fox has plans to start offering official Duff Beer first in Chile, with plans to offer it in the rest of South America and Europe in 2016. If you’re curious why Chile gets Duff first, it’s actually because they’ve already been selling Duff knockoffs for years:
It was a case of, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Fox has been fighting the rise of unauthorized versions of the brew in the Chilean market, and has had some success. The company filed an intellectual property complaint that led Chilean police to seize contraband bottles by the tens of thousands. But demand for rogue versions of the beer has continued to ramp up across the region, from Colombia to Mexico, and the company decided to jump in. “Once you see enough piracy, you are faced with two choices,” Mr. Godsick said. “One is deciding to fight it, and the other is deciding to go out [into the market] with it.”
A Chilean professor explained to WSJ that this is a case where “Fox has been essentially forced into the beer business by intellectual property laws that don’t generally protect fictional products,” which is a pretty hilarious start for the official Duff Beer Co. The beer is a premium lager, and it’s described as having a “hint of fruit to it” and a “caramel aromatic.” Sounds kind of fancy for Duff, doesn’t it?
