A Kingston brewery has created a new beer named in honour of the Reddit group that catapulted GameStop stock prices over the last several weeks.
Kingston’s Daft Brewing Diamond Hands is named in honour of lingo used on WallStreetBets, the anonymous chat room on the Reddit platform that is widely credited — or blamed — by commentators for driving the investor pileup into GameStop and other stocks that have seen wild volatility recently.
“The idea of diamond hands, in the context of WallStreetBets, is that you hold on to the stock almost no matter what to reach your end goal,” Adam Rondeau, co-owner and CEO of the brewery.
Shares of GameStop, a struggling video game retailer, were up more than 1,000 per cent since the beginning of the year at its peak, a surprising rise many have credited to collective efforts of traders organized on the anonymous social media platform. Those stock prices have since collapsed from their highest peak.
Rondeau said he and other members of the brewery have been following along with the story, as many others have, and when they had a new beer coming out, they thought it might be interesting to name it after this “unusual” moment in time.
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“We name a lot of our beers based after popular culture references and things that are happening in the world around us,” he said.
News about the beer actually ended up being posted on the WallStreetBets subreddit, which now has over 8 million followers and received thousands of likes.
Rondeau said ever since, Diamond Hands has been in high demand, and he believes they may run out of the current supply by the weekend.
“We’ve had tons of people reach out to us from the States to see if we can deliver it there, and even within Kingston, people are coming in because they saw a post on Reddit about this,” he said.
The boost in his fairly new business has been welcome since the coronavirus pandemic and recent lockdowns have made things tough.
“Right now, it is a slow time, so every penny counts and it’s nice to see that we try to do something and it worked out for us,” he said.
— With files from Global News’ Erica Alini
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