“It wasn’t so much that we were trying to give Fentimans a black eye,” he said. It is not a laughing matter in Houlton, Maine, where Police Chief Butch Asselin asked the state’s liquor licensing authorities to determine whether the lemonade could legally be sold to minors. “Maine is, of course, where our puritanical forefathers went because Britain was not strict enough, and it has been said that Puritans are people who are always worried that someone, somewhere, might be having fun,” he said, adding that he found the whole flap amusing. The concerns raised in Maine reflect the prudishness of the devout men and women who left England in search of the new world, said Fentimans managing director Eldon Robson. “We do occasionally get inquiries about the alcohol content, and we are concerned about underage drinking, but it is legally classified as a soft drink.”Ī person would need to drink about 28 bottles of the lemonade to consume the amount of alcohol found in a typical pint of beer, Ms. “It looks to us like utter hysteria, the fact that the principal contacted the police and the substance abuse officials got involved. “We see it as slightly absurd,” said Tiffany McKirdy, operations director at Fentimans, a specialty brewer in northern England. In England, company officials said the brouhaha in Maine is much ado about nothing. “This is a very historical process that’s been going on since 1905,” Mr. Maine is the only place where anybody has raised a stink, Mr. division of Fentimans, Greg Warwick, said the company’s full line of beverages is deemed OK by the U.S. “Fentimans Lemonade cannot be sold to minors,” said spokeswoman Kate Simmons. On Thursday, the Maine attorney general’s office said it has determined that, in Maine, at least, people have to be 21 to buy the product. Anti-alcohol groups got involved, sending out warnings about the potential perils of the highbrow brew. Police referred the matter to state officials to determine whether the zesty beverage could be sold to minors. Not wanting to get in trouble, he showed it to school administrators, who called police. By contrast, a typical American beer usually contains about 5 percent alcohol. It all started at a high school in Maine when a student consumed half a bottle of Fentimans Victorian Lemonade, then looked at the label and discovered it contained small amounts of alcohol, listed as less than 0.5 percent. The Americans find the Brits morally lax and too willing to bend the rules. The Brits think the Americans are puritanical and somewhat batty. Call it a culture clash, trans-Atlantic style.
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