Craft brewery says redefining Britain’s most popular beer style can end binge drink culture for good.
Scotland’s largest independent brewery, BrewDog, has set its sights on obliterating the ‘insidious culture around lager drinking’ cultivated by decades of mass marketing – by launching a beer that takes the lager style back to its roots.
Launching yesterday, This. Is. Lager. is a 4.7% ABV pilsner designed to offer lager drinkers a craft beer alternative to the mass-produced lagers that still dominate the UK market.
This. Is. Lager. is brewed with 100% malt and ten times the hops of most industrial lagers. To demonstrate the difference to those still unfamiliar or resistant to the craft beer revolution, BrewDog offered free 1/3 pint tasters of This. Is. Lager. at all of its UK bars yesterday.
James Watt, cofounder at BrewDog, said: “This. Is. Lager. redefines a beer style that has for so long been defined by shallow, listless beers undeserving of the name.”
“For years, global breweries have spent millions convincing the British public that lager is a beer style best served as fizzy, tasteless liquid cardboard propped up by snappy straplines, glamorous advertising or counterfeit stories of foreign provenance. We hope to perpetuate a movement of craft breweries blazing a new trail for lager, proving it’s a misunderstood, neglected beer style.”
Craft beer is the star ascendant in the drinks market, with BrewDog named the fastest growing drinks brand in the UK within a context of declining beer sales for mainstream, mass-production breweries. The artisan brewer is immediately making This. Is. Lager. part of its headliners range to ‘convert’ those still unfamiliar with craft beer as it plots destroying the binge drink culture that has long overshadowed the industry.
“Lager is often demonised or derided as the choice drink of chavs and louts, which is the result of laddish marketing that diverts attention away from taste and enjoyment and undermines the potential of lager as a creative and artisanal beer style,” he added.
The death of binge-drinking
“If we can redefine lager in the UK, we will redefine our relationship with alcohol. We can actually start to reverse binge-drinking trends currently being tackled by toothless and misguided legislative proposals unlikely to ever see the light of day anyway. With the volume-driven industry leaders trying to pull the wool over drinkers’ eyes and the government trying to legislate their way out of a media-disaster cul-de-sac, it’s time we treated drinkers like adults and gave them an alternative to stack ‘em high sell ‘em cheap beers with no soul or taste.
“Gone are the days of lager being synonymous with extra-cold taps, lads on tour, fake Aussie accents, Burberry baseball caps and pot bellies. That is not lager. This. Is. Lager.” he added.
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