Edinburgh’s Caledonian Brewery is to satirise local city news in a huge billboard in the Haymarket area (a few minutes from my home, which is near the brewery, as it happens). Its part of a new advertising campaign to promote the Caley’s Deuchars IPA (my personal favourite pale ale) which will start in the brewery’s native city then go UK-wide.

The billboard will apparently make comments about locals news stories and in Edinburgh this probably means the tramworks (the area by the billboard being a major disaster site of works right now, works which also claimed a century old pub which was demolished to clear space – for shame! No travel network is worth a good pub); according to the Edinburgh Evening News the Caley also plans to use the fact that huge numbers of readers of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh-set detective novels know Deuchars as the favourite pint of Inspector Rebus (normally downed in his – and the author’s – haunt of the Oxford bar, a fine, no-nonsense proper pub in the New Town, a recommended watering hole) and try to reinforce the association of the ale with Edinburgh the way Guinness is associated with Dublin.