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Food

Scots Pissed After Trump Bans Their Favorite Orange Soda at His Golf Resorts

Staff at the resorts are concerned that Irn-Bru could stain the carpets orange. Ironic, innit?
Photo via Flickr user Ninian Reid

It’s hard to get an accurate count of the number of individuals, organizations, countries, and regions that Donald Trump has managed to piss off in the months since the largest crowd to ever assemble on Earth watched him give his inaugural address. Regardless, if Scotland wasn’t already on the list, it is now—all because he’s banned a soft drink.

According to increasingly angry reports from across-the-Atlantic news outlets, the sale of Irn-Bru has been banned at Trump Turnberry, the President’s swanky golf resort. Given Scotland’s long-standing devotion to the Day-Glo orange soda, this is a little like saying, “We’d prefer if you didn’t carry your circulatory systems onto the premises.”

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The Guardian reports that the unwritten Irn-Bru embargo was discovered when guests asked for it to be served at an event at the resort, but were told that the drink would no longer be available because it might discolor the carpets. “We can’t have it staining when to replace the ballroom carpet would be £500,000 alone,” Turnberry’s general manager, Ralph Porciani, said. “We have villas here with Irn-Bru stains in the carpets which I can’t let.”

The response to the ban has been typically understated. JK—it’s been more along the lines of, are you fucking kidding? The news has been met with balled fists and real anger. The Scotsman called the decision “an unfortunate stain” on the President’s reputation. “[Trump] still appears a touch unpopular in the land of his mother’s birth,” the paper’s opinion page read. “The decision to set up an Irn-Bru exclusion zone around Turnberry will only exacerbate such feelings.” Meanwhile on Twitter, some have called it “a war on Scotland,” while others said that our eternally tangerine Prez is just jealous that the drink “is a good shade of orange.”

Irn-Bru’s ads have said that the drink’s rusty, nuclear-fallout shade of orange was because it was “made in Scotland, from girders,” and honestly, that might be safer. Some of its unmistakable combination of artificial colors have been “technically banned by the Food Standards Agency”—and they’ve also been cited by professional carpet cleaners as being impossible to remove.

“Irn-Bru is not only the most popular soft drink in Scotland but is also the hardest to clean up,” Ian McCormick, a stain-removal expert, previously told The Scotsman. Another cleaning technician said that Irn-Bru spills are so notoriously difficult to scrub out, people have been known to pour it out on purpose, in an attempt to con their insurance companies into replacing their rugs.

“It’s more or less the colorants that make it so difficult to remove,” Sidney Friend said. “It just goes straight into the carpet and you can’t get it budged, but we’ll probably never know for sure because of the secret recipe. You just wonder what it does to your insides.”

We hope you’ll pour one out for Irn-Bru, Scotland. Preferably somewhere on Turnberry’s upholstery.