GTA 6 beer: Pißwasser, Patriot and No Mames Vice City have US label approval

Three beer labels bearing Grand Theft Auto VI brand names have been approved by the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. They are filed under Tripping Animals Brewing Co., a brewery in Doral, Florida, and they cover Pißwasser, Patriot and a lager called No Mames Vice City. The certificates sit in a free, searchable federal database, which is where a Grand Theft Auto fan site found them.

Neither Rockstar Games nor the brewery has said anything. No price, no date, no shops, no statement that the two companies have ever spoken to each other.

That gap is the story. On one side a government record that genuinely exists; on the other, silence. The headlines have closed the gap by assumption, and a label approval is a much narrower document than they make it sound.

What has actually been confirmed

What a label approval actually is

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau is part of the US Treasury, and one of its jobs is approving what may be printed on a drinks container. The document is a Certificate of Label Approval — a COLA, issued on TTB form 5100.31. It permits a malt beverage to be bottled, or released from customs, for sale in commerce, and only while what is on the container matches the artwork the bureau cleared. The bureau tells brewers not to print labels at all until they hold one.

Approved certificates are published in the Public COLA Registry. It is free, needs no account, and label images generally appear about 48 hours after approval. The registry also records certificates that have expired, been surrendered or been revoked. All of which is why this leaked at all: nothing was breached and nothing was leaked in the usual sense — a public register did what it is built to do, slightly earlier than a marketing department would have chosen.

So a COLA is a permission, not a plan. It says the government has no objection to those words on that can. It does not oblige anyone to brew anything, it fixes no date, and it is not evidence that a distributor, a retailer or a release exists. Breweries clear labels for products that never ship, and for runs measured in a few hundred cases.

The one thing the certificate does not settle

It does not establish who owns the names. The bureau checks wording and artwork against its own labelling rules; it says plainly in its published guidance that a certificate confers no trademark protection. The filer here is the brewery, and no account of the records describes Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive as a party to them.

So what the database shows is a Florida brewery cleared to sell beer called Pißwasser. It does not show a deal with Rockstar.

The inference that one exists is a fair inference — Take-Two polices the Grand Theft Auto and Vice City marks energetically, and putting them on a canned product without permission would be a conspicuous way to invite a lawsuit weeks before the biggest launch in the industry. Fair is not confirmed, and this site is not going to print it as though it were. The licence has not been published, described or acknowledged by anyone.

The three labels, and a date the accounts disagree about

Those are the dates most write-ups carry. PC Gamer, which covered the find on 21 October, puts Pißwasser on 15 October instead, alongside Patriot. The disagreement is printed here rather than resolved, because the registry entries were not read first-hand from this machine and no account explains where the earlier date came from. It matters only a little: on either version, the first certificate predates Rockstar's launch trailer of 15 October, and all three predate any announcement.

The brewery is in Miami-Dade, which is not a coincidence worth over-reading

Tripping Animals Brewing Co. runs a taproom in Doral, inside Miami-Dade County, roughly ten miles west of downtown Miami. It is a working independent brewery with a draft list, not a marketing shell.

No Mames is already one of its beers — a 6% lager the brewery sells as a core line. The GTA VI label at the same strength therefore looks like an existing product in new clothes rather than a new recipe. The other two names have no prior existence as beer at all.

The geography is worth one paragraph because of what the same county has spent two months doing. Miami-Dade is collecting $975,000 for the WELCOME TO VICE CITY sign on the roof of the Kaseya Center, the sheriff and at least one commissioner have objected in public to the county associating its property with the game, and the board's vote on whether to negotiate anything further had produced no reported outcome when this was written. A private brewery needs none of that. It needs a federal certificate and the rights holder's permission, and a county commission has a say in neither.

Which of these brands is even in the game

Pißwasser and Patriot are series furniture. Both are long-running Grand Theft Auto set dressing — the cheap German lager and the flag-wrapped American one — and both predate this game by a long way. Rockstar has not published a list of the brands that appear in GTA VI, so where either turns up on the shelves of Vice City is something players will establish for themselves on 19 November rather than something that has been announced.

No Mames Vice City is the inverse. It is the only one of the three tied specifically to this game, and it is the one that does not come out of it: a beer the brewery already makes, with the city's name attached.

There is one further thing a label approval has nothing to say about, and that is who a product may be advertised to. Beer in the United States is sold to over-21s. GTA VI is rated Mature 17+ by the ESRB and 18 by PEGI. Nobody has described how a tie-in would be marketed, and as far as anything published shows, the question has not been put to either company.

What is not confirmed

• That the beers will be sold. Three approved labels is three approved labels. No release has been announced by anyone.
• That Rockstar or Take-Two is involved. Likely, unevidenced. The filings name a brewery.
• When, where, or for how much. No date, no price, no distribution area. Whether this would be a Florida-only run, a launch-week stunt or a national product is unknown, and the guesses in circulation are guesses.
• What the labels look like. The artwork is described second-hand in the coverage. The registry publishes images; they were not retrieved for this article.
• The Pißwasser approval date, as above.
• Whether any of the three brands appears in GTA VI. Two are series fixtures and the third is named after the city, which is suggestive and nothing more. Rockstar has published no brand list.

A note on sources. Nothing here was read first-hand: the TTB registry, rockstargames.com and the games outlets this site normally reads are all unreachable from the network this page is written on, so the certificates are relayed rather than seen. The find was reported by GTAVice.net and written up on 21 October by PC Gamer, which is the account followed here; the brewery details, the ABV figures and the two earlier approval dates are carried because several independent write-ups give them identically. The TTB process is described from the bureau's own published guidance on label approval and the Public COLA Registry.

The fictional brands in Grand Theft Auto have always been the part of the world that looks most like the real one. This is the first time the traffic has run the other way, and so far the only proof of it is a form.