Tag: lager

The lager boom: advertising or weather?

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 5th November 2012
14 Comments on The lager boom: advertising or weather?

Graph mapping UK temperatures against lager sales 1959 to 1978

From about 1960 onwards,The Financial Times repeatedly ran articles attempting to explain the boom in lager sales in the UK, and debating whether they would keep rising, and how far. One of the reason most often given was the weather. A hot summer in 1959 saw imports of lager rise to a peak of 270,000 barrels, after which point lager production in Britain took off in earnest.

One British lager brewery reports that half its production is sold in the 17-week summer season, and another that it sells three and a-half times as much in its best months as in the bleak mid-winter. (FT, 14 May 1959.)

Guinness reckon Harp Lager acquires an increasing market share in the summer and manages to keep its new customers loyal in the winter months, albeit in reduced volume. (FT, 10 August 1974.)

As those quotations suggest, breweries certainly believed hot weather made a difference, and some reports suggest that lager briefly took a 40 per cent share of the market during the heat wave of 1976.

In our amateurish way, we’ve mapped percentage share of the market for lager against mean summer temperatures as recorded by the Met Office (see above). We can see a bump around the 1959 heat wave; again with the warm summers of 1969 and ’70; and once again with hot weather in 1975 and ’76.

On the other hand, commentators from the CAMRA camp were of the view that marketing was also a major driver, as expressed by Roger Protz in his 1978 book Pulling a Fast One, which you might have noticed we’re finding to be a gold-mine at the moment. He says lager advertising budgets were £268,000 in 1967; £3.2 million in 1974; and £9.8 million in 1977. Here are those budgets (in ‘millions of pounds’) plotted against sales:

Graph mapping brewery marketing budgets against lager sales 1967 to 1977

Now, that looks to us like marketing budgets rose in response to the market share for lager increasing: it was about making sure that, if people were demanding lager, it was your lager they bought.

Hmm. Ponder ponder. At some point, we’ll have to look at stats on foreign holidays mapped against lager sales, too.

DISCLAIMER: This post is strictly for the purposes of entertainment. These cobbled together numbers and graphs not to be used as a buoyancy aid.

Tags 1970s, lager

Beer history marketing

Ersatzsteiner Pils

While bigger breweries have tended to license European or global lager brands, regional and micro brewers have often turned out their own product under what they imagine to be a Germanic-sounding name. Here are some we’ve come across in our rambles.

Davenport’s Continental Lager. Let’s start with easily the laziest attempt to imply a European heritage we’ve come across. Could they not at least have called it Continentalbrau? (c.1973.)

Elgood’s Iceberg. Clever this one — a suitably Germanic word, but also an early use of coldness as a marketing angle. (Frank Baillie said it had ‘a pleasant flavour’.) (c.1973.)

Firkinstein. This seems to have originated in 1986 at the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol, which David Bruce sold off to Allied in 1988.

Litchborough Litchbrau. It wasn’t long into the microbrewery boom of the 1970s before an ersatz lager came along, from Bill Urquhart’s Litchborough Brewery, founded in 1974. Bill’s daughter recalls it selling quite well.

Greenall Whitley Grunhalle. One of our favourite names. It was strong, apparently. Is it the same Grunhalle conceived by Randall’s of Jersey and licensed to other brewers? Or did great minds think alike? (c.1973.)

Hall and Woodhouse Brock Lager. Sounds a bit like ‘bock’, nice Germanic ring, but also another word for badger, from the Old English. Nicely done. (c.1973.)

Hilden Hildenbrau. ‘A distinctive brew which undergoes several weeks conditioning’, said Brian Glover in 1987.

Ruddle’s Langdorf Lager. Brewed at Langham. Geddit?

Samuel Smith’s Alpine Lager. AKA ‘man in a box’. Bore the Ayinger name under license for a while, but now back under it’s original, retro, 1970s name.

Taddington Moravka. We remember this being launched in, we think, 2008. Not ersatz Germanic, in this case, but faux Slavonic, and very coy about its Derbyshire origins.

Vaux Norseman. Apparently ‘passed through a cooling unit’, according to Frank Baillie, so could have been called Norseman Extra Cold, if they’d thought of it. (c.1973.)

Young’s Saxon. Young & Co. produced various lagers over their lifetime. Saxon was on sale in the early 1970s, but we remember seeing the plainly-named Young’s Pilsner on sale c.2004. Not fondly remembered.

Have we missed any corkers? And does anyone remember drinking the obsolete beers listed above?

Of course, continental brewers have also been known to apply Ersatz English names to their attempts to brew ales...

Tags lager

marketing

When Did Lager Become Ordinary?

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 18th June 2012
16 Comments on When Did Lager Become Ordinary?

Another nugget from the BFI pub documentary collection: “When lager first appeared in quantity in this country in the early sixties, it was regarded as a luxury drink, and expensive drink,” says a voiceover in A Round of Bass (1972). Not very much more expensive than any other drink, and not just for women, he adds.

Watch the clip from a 1974 episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads above (from 3:25). Terry (James Bolam) is down-to-earth and resolutely working class; Bob (Rodney Bewes) is a well off office worker struggling upwards into the middle classes. Terry drinks bitter while Bob, of course, has a bottle of lager. So, at this point, lager was still the classy choice — a symbol of Bob’s social status.

The first recorded use of the phrase ‘lager lout’ appears to have been in about 1988. At some point in between, lager lost its ‘posh’ reputation. Stella Artois managed to cling on to ‘poshness’, we reckon, until about 2000.

With the emergence of Greenwich’s Meantime and, more recently, Camden, posh lager is back, but we don’t think that, these days, a person’s broad choice of lager, bitter or wine says as much about their social status or aspirations as it used to forty years ago.

Maybe these days, the distinction is between those who choose brands and those who (think..?) they don’t.

Hmm. Ponder ponder.

Tags brands, lager, posh beer, stella artois

beer reviews Blogging and writing

Change of mind but Google never forgets

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 11th June 2012
7 Comments on Change of mind but Google never forgets

Google result for a beer-related search.

This weekend, we decided to give Cornish brewery St Austell’s Korev lager (“with soul“) another go having written it off last year. As we’d hoped might be the case, knowing that the head brewer is a meticulous perfectionist, it has improved enormously. It seemed lighter, cleaner, drier and snappily bitter. It’s still not the world’s most exciting lager but it’s certainly not nasty — a Bitburger, perhaps, rather than a Foster’s.

Unfortunately, our previous review, with the dismissive ‘blech!’ in the title, looms high in the Google results for ‘Korev lager’. It was an accurate summary of our feelings at the time and, having praised St Austell’s others beers fairly consistently, we figured it wouldn’t hurt to give some honest public criticism of this one.

On the flipside, we had an incredibly exciting couple of bottles of the IPA Marston’s brew for Sainsbury’s — it blew our minds — only to find it bland on every subsequent occasion. Our gushing comments based on that first experience, however, are there for all the world to see and, again, appear on the first page of results from Google when we search ‘Marston’s sainsbury’s IPA’.

We think we’re always clear that any reviews are our impression of the product as we experienced it; and every post is dated. Everyone knows that beers change over time, from pub to pub, bottle to bottle; and we acknowledge that our palates change, too. But what if people only read as far as ‘Korev lager — blech!”?

We don’t want people not to buy Korev because we didn’t like it a year ago, or to feel cheated buying Marston’s IPA because we had a couple of good bottles once. It’s fortunate, then, that so few people Google brands before deciding what to buy at point of sale and that even fewer would base their decision on the word of one poxy blog.

Tags Google, lager, marston's, st austell