Dark beer emoji

Document L2/15-211, "Letter in support of dark beer emoji"
<http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15221-cerveza-indio-letter.pdf>, is a
request submitted by Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma, a Mexican brewery.

The letter refers to a petition with more than 22,000 signatures
supporting such an emoji, and may have at least some commercial
motivation ("We want the dark beer to be part of peoples
conversations").

As an alternative to this proposal that may provide more flexibility, I
propose adapting the Fitzpatrick skin-tone modifiers from U+1F3FB to
U+1F3FF to be valid for use following U+1F37A BEER MUG or U+1F37B
CLINKING BEER MUGS.

This could be done by establishing a normative correlation between the
Fitzpatrick scale and the Standard Reference Method (SRM), Lovibond,
and/or European Brewery Convention (EBC) beer color scales
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_style#Appearance>.

This mechanism would allow the entire spectrum of beer styles to be
depicted, instead of dividing beers arbitrarily into "light" and "dark,"
in the same way (and for the same reason) that Unicode already supports
a variety of skin tones.

For example, a Budweiser or similar lager could be represented as
🍺🏻 <1F37A, 1F3FB>, while a Newcastle Brown Ale might be 🍺🏽
<1F37A, 1F3FD>. U+1F3FF could denote imperial stout or Baltic porter.
There might be a need to encode an additional "Type 0" color modifier to
extend the "light" end of the scale, such as for non-alcoholic brews, or
for Coors Light.

U+1F37B could be used to denote two beers of the same style, but for
beers of different colors, the mechanism described in UTR #51, Section
2.2.1 ("Multi-Person Groupings"), involving ZWJ, could be utilized. So a
toast between drinkers of the two beers above could be encoded as
🍺🏻‍🍺🏽 <1F37A, 1F3FB, 200D, 1F37A, 1F3FD>. Longer sequences
would also be possible, such as for beer samplers offered in some pubs
and restaurants.

I have no idea whether my proposal is more or less serious, or more or
less likely to be adopted, than the original.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸