At least, that's what I thought a week ago. But, since I started trawling through The Brewers' Guardian, I've changed my mind. There's so much I realise that I'd missed. Just as well I'm not in a rush to publish.
I'm reminded of a quote about putting together electronic tracks (something I did myself way back in the 1990s). Knowing when to stop was the thing. Resisting the desire to further tinker and say: "That's done". It's advice I think I should have carried over into my writing.
In the march 1970 issue of The Brewers' Guardian there's a feature on Lager made up of several articles. And they've given me a great insight into exactly why brewers were so keen on Lager in the 1970s. This pretty much sums up the motivation:
"While the beer market as a whole is only expanding by three per cent, the sales of lager have been leaping forward at a 30 per cent increase every year for the last four years."
Brewers' Guardian, Volume 99, March 1970, page 39.
I'd been thinking that Lager really took off in the mid-1970s, but it seems the process started a good bit earlier. Which brewer wouldn't be attracted by the possibility of 30% growth every year?
People today have mostly forgotten that, initially, Lager didn't appear very manly An important factor in its growth was a change in its image:
"Socially, the image of lager has undergone substantial change in recent years. It used to he regarded as a rather fancy expensive drink for women and young people served in an overdressed bottle at a foreign temperature. What put paid to that view was the arrival of draught lager on a large scale in the middle sixties. From being a socially exclusive drink it became, for some, the ordinary man's regular pint."
Brewers' Guardian, Volume 99, March 1970, page 39.
In the 1960s, then, Lager moved from being a niche product to one firmly in the mainstream. And what was one of the reasons for this change in perception? The growth of draught Lager.
"The key growth point is the sale of draught lager which is shooting away at a rate of growth of 50 per cent a year.
By 1975, it is estimated that 75 per cent of all lager sold will be draught. In Scotland three out of four bars have draught lager dispensers. Lager is becoming well entrenched in the great clubs of the North and Midlands and the trend is moving south fast."
Brewers' Guardian, Volume 99, March 1970, page 39.
The future for Lager was looking very rosy.
"If anything in life can be assured, the demand for lager in Britain appears definite enough. Nobody knows what the percentage of the whole beer market it may be in 1980, perhaps 15 per cent, possibly nearer 20. The factors favouring growth appear convincing. In the first place, the growing number of dispensing fonts in pubs, clubs and hotels where draught is served. Even though it costs the breweries at least £65 a time to put in the whole plant and cooler, once established they tend to draw customers. Lager, as we mentioned at the beginning, is now accepted as a masculine pint, and there is an untapped market in the South of Britain waiting to be exploited. A generation of youngsters weaned on lager, perhaps first on foreign holidays, are growing up with adult thirsts. So by AD 2000 ale may well be an old man's drink."
Brewers' Guardian, Volume 99, March 1970, page 40.
Did Lager manage to achieve a market share of 20% by 1980? It smashed way past, hitting 30.7%.* And Ale, at least the sort that was around in the 1970s, is now an old man's drink.
* “The Brewers' Society Statistical Handbook 1988” page 17.
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7 comments:
Looking forward to reading the book, Ron.
I'm not quite convinced by the foreign holiday theory for the rise of lager, especially amongst young people. It seems more likely to me that it was because it was a new product, cold, fizzy and sweet like the carbonated soft drinks they were used to drinking, backed by major advertising campaigns and, crucially, different to what their dads drank. Of course the teenagers of the seventies are now pensioners and mass market draught lager is now well on the way to becoming an old man's drink itself. Amongst the young people I know, a few don't drink at all, some only do so at home, and of those that go to pubs and bars their drinks choices are split between Guinness, cider, wine and spirits as well as lager and other beers.
I'm curious to what degree marketing played a role in the acceptance of lager as a man's drink.
In the US in the 1970s light beer took off in part because hugely successful TV ads with former athletes managed to convince people that funny tough guys liked it, and not just timid calorie counters.
I have no idea if something similar was going on with lager with, say, Geoff Hurst and Jack Charlton involved, or championship rugby teams paid to pose with lager.
I'd agree with Matt regarding foreign holidays. At the beginning of the seventies, aged 18, I spent a week in Germany, and later the same year three weeks in Scandinavia. I was introduced to lager and loved it, but on returning to England I found the lager available totally inferior and quickly reverted to drinking bitter. Even lagers that were nominally the same, such as Carlsberg and Heineken were just not up to scratch.
After that, I would enjoy lager on trips overseas, but rarely touched it at home.
'Served...at a foreign temperature' is very funny. For me, both warm lager and cold bitter are awful, which I find odd - habit or sone chemistry at play?
As someone who is twenty similar process in Ireland my father’s generation typically drinks pale bland lager a lot of my generation are mixed but stout seems popular and I love a good pint of independent red ale (aka Irish mild) and stout.
Oscar
Oscar, there was apparently a similar split in the sixties when Guinness introduced their nitrokeg draught stout to Ireland, with younger drinkers going for the new product and older guys sticking with or switching to the bottle conditioned variant.
I know my great grandfather the father of my father’s mother was a bottled Guinness drinker. Though in Dublin city and Belfast casked stout survived until 1973.
Oscar
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