The past week I received a sample package from Island Brands, a South Carolina-based beer/marketing company offering up “clean, better-for-you, super premium beer” — presented in four light lagers (or lager-based beer cocktails). The flagship is Island Coastal Lager, followed by the 88-calorie Island Active, a lemon shandy (Island Lemonada), and Island Summer Peach, a southern peach tea beer blend which I suppose would be another type of shandy.

I’ll have to dig into the brand a bit more as I taste the beers, but it seems one of the company’s longer-term goals is to bring its beer to Cuba:

The Island Brands’ story began on a rum-soaked trip to Cuba when founders Scott Hansen and Brandon Perry discovered that the amazing people in this culturally rich country had limited options to only low quality beer.

They set out on a mission to make better beer more accessible to Cuba, and in the process they discovered that this lack of quality was not unique to Cuba. In the USA and throughout the world corporate conglomerate beer brands are using corner cutting, low quality ingredients to maximize profits all at the expense of the end consumer.

That last sentence is where the marketing/branding angle comes out strongly, with a bit of an unaware-of-craft-brewing, reinvent the wheel vibe. We’ll see how the beers are.