IRON MAIDEN Trooper Beer Launch Halted In Sweden Due To Concerns Over Skull Label

According to The Local, the sale of IRON MAIDEN's Trooper beer has been halted in Sweden by the country's state-run liquor store monopoly Systembolaget due to legal concerns over the skull and crossbones motif on the label.

"There has been a discussion about the label. The alcohol law stipulates how it can look. We therefore don't yet know when it can be launched," Therese Elmgren at Systembolaget told the Aftonbladet newspaper.

The label on the 4.8 percent-strength Trooper's packaging is taken from IRON MAIDEN' single "The Trooper", which was released in 1983.

"Trooper was the blindingly obvious thing to call it," IRON MAIDEN singer Bruce Dickinson recently said. "We have a tremendous piece of artwork — it's one of the world's most tattooed images. And it's like Spitfire. It's in the great tradition of British military prowess — well, military disaster in this case."

In 2010, Systembolaget suspended sales of the U.S. beer Founders Breakfast Stout over concerns about the use of a child's face on the bottle's front label.

More recently, in April 2013, a brewery in Denmark was forced to change the label on its Lust beer after Systembolaget deemed the depiction of a topless women to be too sexy for Sweden.

The Trooper beer was officially launched on Thursday (May 9) at Robinsons Brewery in Cheshire, with a reception attended by brewing trade representatives from both the U.K. and internationally.

As fans may have read recently, the unprecedented upfront demand for the beer meant Robinsons had to brew three times a day, six days a week for the first time ever in the brewery's 175-year history to cope with pre-orders in excess of 300,000 pints. Robinsons were overwhelmed by the number of enquiries they'd had from all over the world and sent the band a comprehensive listing of whereabouts the interest had been — from a staggering 184 countries.

Trooper is now available to order online throughout most of Europe, and Robinsons are working to ensure it will be available to the rest of the world as soon as possible.

For updates on when Trooper is coming to a pub, bar or supermarket in your town/country, keep checking www.ironmaidenbeer.com.