A Winnipeg craft brewery says it’s changing the art on cans of its Redhanded Irish Red Ale, explaining the red hand image it has used since 2017 has become a “symbolic representation of violence that affects Indigenous women.”
In a statement on its website, Stone Angel Brewing president Paul McMullan says the symbol was chosen to evoke the culturally important and centuries-old Red Hand of Ulster.
But he says in the context of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, seeing a red hand on a can of beer may seem hurtful and disrespectful, and the company was asked to stop using the symbol.
McMullan says future batches of its Irish Red will be shipped under a new name and design, and some of the profits from sales of the remaining cans will go to the Indigenous Women’s Healing Centre.