Aldi has given a word of warning to Vault City brewery which has just launched a new deep-fried Caterpillar cake beer to celebrate their sixth birthday and their X post has notched up 100k views. Aldi’s light-hearted post read, “We’ve got a business card for a lawyer you might need”.
After finding out about the new birthday beer, Aldi took to X to poke fun at the German retailer’s highly publicised copyright dispute with Marks & Spencer around their Colin the Caterpillar cake designs, which ended in a settlement in 2022. The drink itself was inspired in response to a Portobello chip shop that deep fried a Colin the Caterpillar cake – and the ensuing outrage. The DDF Caterpillar Cake, at 14.5% ABV, is described as a decadent deep-fried cake stout inspired by the birthday delicacy.
Vault City Co-founder Steven Smith-Hay is not new to dealing with a corporate giant following its “Iron Brew” beer, he said, “Thanks Aldi – we’ll take heed! Colin the Caterpillar cakes are synonymous with birthdays in Britain, so we just couldn’t resist.
“We love experimenting with flavours, and we couldn’t imagine anything better for our sixth birthday than creating a quintessential birthday beer to share with the world.
“After our neighbours at a Portobello chippie deep fried a Colin the Caterpillar cake, we saw a post on X asking if anything was safe from Scottish chippies. We thought, why not make people ask if anything is safe from Scottish breweries?”
The brewer has launched a range of beers to mark it birthday and earlier this year, Vault City announced plans to move into a new home seven times the size of its previous Portobello brewery. A crowdfunding campaign through the company’s webstore, as well as through bars, bottle-shops, and export sales, raised the £330,000 needed to purchase the new site at BioCampus, Scotland’s first dedicated national bio-manufacturing campus located within the Midlothian Science Zone in Edinburgh.
More than a third of sour beers consumed in the UK are produced by Vault City.