4 posts tagged “beer”

Some time a go I entered a competition off the back of a four-pack of beers to win tickets to the Champions League final. And I won!

Not the tickets to the football match, unfortunately, but this crappy green bag, which arrived via courier this morning. It really is a piece of shit. Sorry to be ungrateful but there you have it.

 

What's your favorite blend or brand of coffee or tea?

Enough with the tea-slash-coffee related questions. Can't someone ask something about favourite beers or something (for which my current answer would be the Peruvian blend Cusquena, which is presently being imported to the UK by some clever sods and will no doubt go out of fashion at some point during the next three to six months)?

 

Photo Copyright Martin Wierzbicki, nicked from here.

It is one year today since Bear entered our lives. Since nobody knows his actual date of birth, we have decided this is his birthday. He is officially about 6 today!

To celebrate, we allowed him a little of his favourite tipple last night.

There are a couple of stupid marketing/"rebranding" exercises going on at the moment involving lager.

Firstly, C2, from Carling, which is a new lager with a remarkably pointless 2% alcohol content. The beer market has so far been immune from the metrosexual-isation of products aimed at blokes, until now. C2 is, according to a couple of lager lovers I've spoken to, to be drunk at lunchtime when you don't want to go back to the office pissed. Or it's for drinking on the way back from the gym, when you don't want to "undo all your hard work" (the patronising marketing website backs up these theories). Obviously an alcohol-free lager, a Coke, or, God help us, a half, is too "gay", so you have to be seen drinking a mighty, chest-thumping 2% "mid-strength" lager (in a manly pint-pot, natch) from a brewer whose 4% lager is already deemed by most right-thinking people to be terminally crap. Oh dear.

(An earlier example of the"metrosexual product launch" trend is that of Coke Zero.

Metrosexual man can't drink Diet Coke because it's too girly. But stick the exact same product in a bottle with a black label, advertise it with links to "football" and "girlfriends" and show a load of tight shirt-wearing Tim Lovejoy lookalikes marching along the street and, hey presto, it's a bloke's drink.)

The second thing I've noticed is that Stella Artois seems to be undergoing a move upmarket. There are some new (admittedly quite cool) billboard ads knocking around and the launch of a new product called Peeterman Artois. This is a sister product to Stella, which isn't quite as strong and has none of the wife-beater connotations. (It supposedly has coriander in it, for fuck's sake.) They serve it in a Belgian-style beer glass which just looks stupid. In a spirit of adventure on Saturday night I was unfortunate enough to order a pint of this new 4% brew. It tastes like all other popular 4% lagers (Carling, Carlsberg, Fosters) available in the type of downmarket establishments I frequent. Which is: like piss.

Beck's has also recently launched a 4% lager as well. What the hell is going on? Obviously some brewery focus group has discovered that no-one likes getting drunk anymore and, in fact, we'd all prefer to drink lager that doesn't get us  quite so pissed. Idiots.

Anyway, I'm so annoyed about this that I'm now going to drink eight pints of Stella and put my fist through the kitchen window.