For those of you who aren't that well up on UK drinking culture, I explain. When drinking in a group, rather than everyone buying their drinks individually, each member will take it in turns to go up to the bar and buy a drinks for everyone. That's buying a round.
It works best if everyone is drinking the same, or at least all the drinks are of a similar price. If in a group of five, three are on Mild and two on Bitter, it wasn't much of a problem. In the mid-1970s, the difference in price was just 1p. In 1974 the average price of Bitter was 15p, while Lager was 19p. That's about 25% more expensive.
Should the mix in a group be four Lager drinkers and one Bitter drinker, it's a trickier situation. The lone Bitter drinker would be paying way over the ofdd for his bee: 18.2p per pint. Easier then, to switch to Lager and at least get wwhat you're paying for.
Then there's group pressure. If most are drinking Lager then there's the inclination to switch to it as well, to fit in with the rest of the grioup. And to make round buying simpler. If everyone is drinking the same, ordering at the bar is much easier.
What do you reckon? Do you think round buying was another impetus to Lager conversion?
I'm not sure about the rounds theory, but I think peer pressure would definitely have been a factor, together with advertising, especially amongst young people. You don't want to be seen drinking the same boring brown bitter or mild your dad/grandad sups when all your mates are on the shiny new drink, which your elders probably deride as a fad or con, but what do they know. By the late eighties when I first drank in pubs as a teenager, most of the middle aged guys, the teenagers of the sixties, drank lager, but amongst my own age and social group it was more mixed: bitter, lager, Guinness, cider, and one girl who was seen as a bit eccentric because she always ordered a bottle of Mackesons milk stout.
ReplyDeleteno ,I think it was purely the advertising.Millions spent on tv ads for lager,rarely saw adds for bitter let alone mild when I started drinking in the 1970's.And what adverts for bitter tended to be for big 6 keg eg DD,Red Barrel,Tankard.
ReplyDeleteIt’s funny, in the US, we have the exact opposite situation. Ales or Guinness would be probably 50% more than a bud/Miller/Coors maco lager. I know that if one of my friends was drinking a shitty lager and paying more for it, endless ball busting would have ensued. Here it kind of made sense for people that really didn’t care about beer to go with the lager due to the huge price difference.
ReplyDeleteCan also apply to Ireland, never understood the appeal of buying rounds myself.
ReplyDeleteOscar
I suspect the biggest reason for the move to lager was that some people really like lager.
ReplyDeleteI remember an article in the Sunday Observer (the Sunday Guardian edition) many years ago when I still lived there, it was called "The Bland Leaders" which also happened to be Brand Leaders hence the title.
DeleteThey included Mother's Pride bread, Birds Eye fish fingers and other pointless foods and one of the star examples was Harp Lager.
They summed Lager up as "the product for people who are attracted to the IDEA of beer drinking but don't actually like beer".
In the US it's definitely true when people are buying pitchers for a table.
ReplyDeleteI think that THIS suggestion has more substance to it than the one that you gave us previously from a seventies beer article that you shared. My drinking took place in the late seventies and early eighties between the ages of 17 and 23. I am from a working class area and family. The money that I had for booze came from either my university grant or from the dole. So, "showing off" that I could afford to buy lager was definitely not applicable in my case, even if I COULD afford it. However, getting a round in of 4 or 5 pints that were more or less the same price - YES, that occurred. But if one of those was a lager more expensive than the rest, no one batted an eyelid. My reflections on the ideas that you have been sharing, go along these lines: Where I lived in the South Wales valleys, all pubs were either Welsh Brewers (Bass Charrington) or Whitbread. The bar at my local looked like this, in terms of the taps, from left to right: 1) Bass; 2) Strongbow; 3) Guinness; 4) Black Label, and 5) two taps of Allbright. At any time, at least 1 pint of Allbright was being served. I rarely drank anything other than Allbright there. In the other (Whitbread) pub in my village, it was : 1) Tankard; 2) Skol; 3) Guinness; 4) Woodpecker Cider: 5) Carlsberg. Neither pub had Mild and I only encountered Mild for the first time when I arrived at Aberystwyth University (Banks's Mild). Back in "The Castle" (Whitbread) I would drink Guinness, Skol and occasionally Carlsberg, as I really disliked Tankard.
ReplyDeleteRussell I lived in Cardiff for six years from 1970 and we would occasionally cross the invisible border around about Castell Coch and found ourselves in a very different country. As an SA man I usually had to plump for Worthington E on keg. Actually had some flavour.
DeleteI loved the old skit on the ad "We make E the way you like it, goes down Easy, comes up Easy".
I still think it was down to lack of moral fibre.
ReplyDelete