Ukraine Craft Brewery Moves From Beer To Bombs

A Ukrainian brewery has switched from brewing craft beer to making Molotov cocktails in the fight against advancing Russian troops.

Responding to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call to take up arms staff at the Pravda brewery in Lviv began transitioning beer bottles to bombs for the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces a reservist group who are now in the fight of their lives.

“We do this because someone has to,”  Yuriy Zastavny,” the owner of Pravda brewery, told France 24. “We have the skills, we went through a street revolution in 2014,” said Zastavny, referring to Kyiv’s pro-Western uprising that ousted a Kremlin-backed regime. “We had to make and use Molotov cocktails then.”

“You have to wait for the cloth to be well soaked. When it is, that means the Molotov cocktail is ready,” one smiling employee told AFP as he stuffed the cloth deep into a beer bottle filled with a mixture of oil and gasoline.

Amid fears that Russian tanks will roll into the western city of 720,000 residents near the Polish border, Pravda began producing the incendiary weapons on Saturday and they haven’t stopped since.

And this isn’t the first time that the brewery has taken an anti-Putin stand. One of the brewery’s most popular beers is called “Putin khuylo” which is commonly translated as “Putin is a dickhead,” a slogan that started as a soccer chant in March 2014 on the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

According to Wikipedia, “the phrase has become very widespread throughout Ukraine among supporters of the Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity and, more generally, those who do not like Vladimir Putin in both Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking areas of Ukraine”.

With a mission “to make the world’s diversity of styles available in Ukraine,” the Pravda Brewery launched in 2014. They are an an award-winning brewery committed to melding “various international styles with a specific Ukrainian spirit.”

And nothing is more spirited than what the Pravda Brewery is doing now.

Putin khuylo!

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(All images courtesy: Pravda Brewery)