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Home > Is Beer The New Wine ?
Is Beer The New Wine ?
It's the weirdest thing. Pubs are shutting all over the place – about 40 a week at the last count – yet sales of quality beers are on the up. And it's not just sales of bottled beer either, but keg and cask beer, too, which you drink in pubs. I can't work it out.
My new favourite local brewer, Hepworth & Co in Horsham, is brewing around the clock in order to keep up with demand. Sales are soaring, up 18 per cent on last year, according to the company's head brewer Andy Hepworth.
"We concentrate on making beer that a few people rave about, rather than beer that a lot of people don't object to," he says. "This seems to strike a chord with our customers, along with the fact that we source everything as locally as possible. Our barley and water are local, and our hops come from Christopher Daws's farm at Bodiam in East Sussex. In the current climate, people like that."
I first came across Hepworth's Sussex Golden Ale in Marks & Spencer, of all places, where it is part of the store's range of British bottle-conditioned beers. It's light and citrus with a crisp, bitter finish and is deeply refreshing. At only 3.8%vol, it's what Hepworth grinningly describes as a fine breakfast beer. "It's a traditional style of bitter," he says. "Farmers would drink it as a thirst-quencher after which they would go back to the plough. It needed to be light in alcohol to ensure the furrows remained straight and the farmer didn't end up in the ditch."
Even my wife, Marina, likes it, although commendably enough, she usually waits until lunch or at least midmorning before getting stuck in. In fact, she has developed quite a taste for beer of late and, now I think about it, I'm surprised that more of her girlfriends haven't.
After all, beer comes in all manner of styles and flavours. It goes well with food, it's fat-free, cholesterol-free and it has fewer calories than wine (and less alcohol), as well as being low in carbohydrates (a pint of beer has half the carbs of an apple). So what's not to like? It's almost as if beer was designed specifically with women in mind.
"Quite right!" exclaims Kristy McCready of the BitterSweet Partnership, a multi-million pound investment funded by Molson Coors Brewing Company to encourage more women to drink beer. "The difficulty is persuading women what a great drink it is. We drink more than 26 million pints of beer every day in Britain, but only eight per cent of women say that it's their preferred drink, while 77 per cent say they never touch it."
BitterSweet's research has shown that women see wine as aspirational and chic but beer as unsophisticated and unstylish. They believe beer is fattening and worry about what other women will think of them if they drink it. Apparently, women have more taste receptors than men and are more likely to enjoy the wide variety of flavours that beer offers, but are somehow conditioned to think they won't.
"Nobody likes their first taste of beer," says McCready. "But for guys, it's a rite of passage, a ritual, after which they're all part of the gang. For women, there's no such reward because all their friends will be drinking wine and they think they'll stand out as unsophisticated and 'chavvy' among their peers, with the added risk of developing an unbecoming beer belly."
The trouble is that most beer is made, advertised and sold by men for men. Women just don't get much of a look in. Happily, though, that is starting to change as more women enter the brewing industry – and not just to pull pints in a low-cut top. The head brewer at Marston's (which makes Marks & Spencer's Staffordshire IPA) is Emma Gilleland and the assistant head brewer at the St Austell Brewery (which makes the M&S Cornish IPA) is Paola Leather, who must surely be unique – a qualified female brewer from Colombia with an MBA to boot.
"Beer is my passion," says Leather. "I never drink anything else at home and can't understand why more women don't do the same. There really is a beer for every occasion and I think the female market is largely untapped. Next year we'll be bringing out our first lager specifically with women in mind."
Sales at St Austell are booming and, like Hepworth, the brewery is at full capacity. Sales are up 32 per cent on last year, which itself was up 30 per cent on 2007. It can't all be drunk by men.
"Once women get beer, they really get it," says Kristy McCready. "They just need some persuading. You can't just make it pink, put a straw in it and call it beer for girls."
Glassware is the key. The breakthrough for Marina came with the realisation that she didn't have to drink beer out of pint mugs. Some Innis & Gunn Blonde Lightly Oaked Beer served in a wine glass is all it took to convince her that beer could be hugely enjoyed. That and some Kasteel Cru in a champagne flute. Oh, and some Worthington White Shield in a tumbler, some Lindemans Framboise in a martini glass, some Brew Dog Paradox in a brandy balloon, some…
Reproduced from Jonathan Ray article at Telegraph.co.uk javascript:void(0);/*1255382424036*/
