March 13, 2009 / Perspective / The Brooklyn Angle

Kelso brewer discovers that no good pint goes unpunished!

The Brooklyn Paper

The Brooklyn Paper / Aisha Gaward

Kelly Taylor, the brewmaster for Kelso of Brooklyn, came up with a great idea to spur blood donation — but the NY Blood Center said thanks but no thanks.

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Who said you shouldn’t drink and donate?

Actually, the New York Blood Center, which has pulled out of the Kelso of Brooklyn’s “Pint for Pint” blood donation drive after reading about the brewery’s effort in The Brooklyn Paper.

“They said we degraded the process of giving blood,” said Kelso of Brooklyn brewmaster Kelly Taylor, whose company promised blood donors a free pint of beer after they donated a pint of blood at a blood center facility.

“They read the story in The Brooklyn Paper and went all PC on us,” added Taylor, saying that the Blood Center demanded that he remove the group’s name from any announcements about the “Pint for Pint” promotion.

“It was like, ‘We don’t want to encourage people to give blood and drink beer.’ Well, why not? These are adults,” Taylor said.

The irony, of course, is that I’m probably to blame for the all the boiling blood in the Blood Center’s corporate office.

Of course, Taylor is not actually encouraging people to give blood and then immediately replace the missing fluid with beer. That was our angle!

As we reported last month, one pint of Taylor’s potent Kelso Nut Brown Lager gets a 160-pound drinker to a blood-alcohol level of .03 — a level at which drinkers would experience that pleasantness of “lowered alertness,” according to a medical textbook.

But if you’ve relieved yourself of a pint of blood, that same beer will get you to a .04 blood-alcohol level, which produces “disinhibition” and “extroversion.”

“As we say in our DUMBO newsroom, ‘Boo-yeah!’” the article reported.

Then, the New York Post followed — using our same “booze for blood” angle — and the Blood Center had a figurative heart attack. Taylor still doesn’t get it.

“What’s wrong with beer, anyway?” he asked. “The families that need blood don’t care how we get the blood. They just want the blood.”

And I want the beer, so on Saturday, I did what any solid, albeit cheap, citizen would do: I printed out the “Pint for Pint” coupon from Taylor’s Web site and then headed to the Blood Center van on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope to do my bit for society.

A few pricks later — I’m talking about the needles, silly! — and I had given the gift of life.

More important, I had the Blood Center receipt that would entitle me to my free pint.

The Blood Center did not return my calls — though the group appears to be the only agency that’s queasy about the Kelso effort.

“After your article came out, a few more bar owners called and said they wanted to participate,” Taylor said. “I had nothing but positive feedback until the Blood Center suddenly objected.”

Taylor is pushing on with the promotion, offering coupons that will result in a free beer when coupled with a blood donation receipt.

But because the Blood Center objected, instead of providing a direct link to a list of local donation centers, Taylor’s Web site,www.beerhelps.net, instructs people to do a Google search for “blood donation locations.”

The same New York Blood Center list typically comes up, he said.

So give from the heart — then lift a toast to yourself.w

©2009 Community Newspaper Group