Is Lager Expensive?
I recently blogged about how some of CAMRA's marketing towarsd lager was factually misleading. I think it was;
"lager is weak in flavour and usually overpriced"
When I saw this display in Tesco recently I couldn't help myself. Compared to nearly £2 a bottle for 'premium bottled ale', I consider a crate of 24 Stella tins (9L in total) a steal. Please note that I did not take Tesco up on their offer...
posted by Tim at
Friday, May 01, 2009
7 Comments:
Geez, and you wonder why people drink at home!
Lager is more expensive than ales of comparable strength in pubs - it is not in general more expensive per unit of alcohol in the off-trade.
However, there aren't really any mass-market canned 5% ales to compare canned Stella with - premium bottled ales occupy a different market segment.
NO! Most people(I said most)look at it as BEER! Not if it's in a comparable price range compared to a different style of beer. It's a drink you put into a beer glass and get pished up on in your home. It's that simple!
Curmudgeon, Stella is considered a premium brand, and to the majority of consumers - beer is beer. To beer geeks bottled ale is a different market segment, but this is just a created market segment.
Why is ale considered premium in supermarkets, but people grumble at paying more than £2.75 (relatively cheap) for a pint of ale in a pub?
Historically true, perhaps? Still, I suppose the getout for CAMRA is that their statement that lager is overpriced is subjectively true to them.
Personally, I wouldn't pay £10 for Stella, no matter how many there are in the slab. So subjectively, I'd say it's overpriced. If it was Budvar or Pilsner Urqell or Schiehallion or.... you get my drift.
Historically, a central nostrum of the CAMRA world-view is that lager is bland, expensive and only consumed by "victims of advertising".
In the seventies this was largely true (though it is debatable whether patronising and insulting those lager drinkers you would prefer to drink ale is a useful activity).
The trite message "lager is bland and expensive" is still spouted by Camra activists. Their claims don't do justice to the complexities of beer pricing nor to an ill-informed philistine attitude to lager.
Generalisations are usually a bad thing but in the pub context I think it is fair to say that the most wideley available draught lagers, particularly those made in the UK, are pretty bland and comparatively expensive compared to other draught beers (with the exception of Guinness).
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