Tag: Cider

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Stella Cidre: a footnote

I don’t like returning to the same theme twice.  It smacks of overkill, flogging a dying horse.

But for pity’s sake, I’m only human.

Yesterday I invented a pisstake interview with Stella Artois, the brand, as a comment on the launch of Stella cidre.  I’m gratified that people found it amusing.  Then, yesterday afternoon, AB-Inbev CEO Stuart Macfarlane gave a real interview to Justdrinks.com.
It’s even funnier than my pisstake.
To demonstrate this, below are six quotes: three from my pisstake interview, three from the real interview with Macca.  See if you can guess which are the genuine quotes and which are the parodies.  And remember – I wrote mine BEFORE the real interview was published.  I’m not taking the piss out of Macca here.  If anything, he’s imitating me.  
Of course, you can cheat by following the link to his interview, and/or just scrolling down to read yesterday’s post.  But you’d only be cheating yourself.
Here goes – answers in tiny type at the bottom:

“When you’re the nation’s favourite alcohol brand, consumers have raised expectations of everything. We’ve worked hard to make sure that our cider is significantly ahead of the industry benchmark.”

“Stella Artois is dogged by an undeserved reputation as loopy juice, and some people even call it ‘Wifebeater’. Giving our drinkers permission to create Stella snakebite seems like the perfect way to rid the brand of this entirely undeserved reputation.”
“Stella Cidre can be the flywheel for cider category growth. We will bring more premium drinkers into cider than any other brands can do, because they don’t transcend other categories like Stella does.” 
“The Stella Artois brand can do what none of the other brands can do. This is game-changing, we are the first beer brand to move into cider.”
“If more companies sought to find opportunities and to innovate more, they’d be more optimistic. I urge the people in our industry to find that opportunity. Other brewers need to start acting more like FMCG companies.”

“As a company, we are leading innovation in drinks. Actually, I could argue that A-B InBev is leading innovation in the entire FMCG sector.”

Answer: 
I lied.  Number two is mine.  Unbelievably, the rest are all genuine quotes.

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Some cheap shots and infantile musings on the launch of Stella Cidre

Several people emailed and tweeted me yesterday with the news that Stella Artois is to launch a cider brand.  I don’t know why you think I would be interested, but it seems some people are keen to hear my thoughts on the matter.

No, wait – this is going to blow your freakin’ mind.



The thing is, Stella owners AB-Inbev and I are not on speaking terms at the moment.  I no longer get press releases from them, and I certainly don’t get invited to events such as the launch of Stella Cidre, which happened yesterday.

Was it something I said?

Anyway, in the absence of any facts, I’m left with no alternative but to fabricate an utterly spurious and quite unfair conversation about this latest marketing triumph.

Hello, Stella Artois!
Hello, Pete.  You’re not going to be mean to me are you?


Of course not.  I’m just going to ask you some questions.  So what’s this latest launch of yours then?
Right, you’re not going to believe what we’ve done.  As you’ll know from what we’ve done to Stella Artois over the last ten years, we don’t actually like the taste of beer.  Hops make us gag.  We’ve managed to get rid of as much of the flavour as possible, but even when we use these ingredients in homeopathic quantities, you still get a bit of a taste.  So we were thinking, like, what if we could invent a drink that’s kind of like beer, but is made of something else and doesn’t have to have horrid hops in it at all?  And then we had a flash of genius! You might not know this, but apples have fermentable sugars in them.  So we’ve invented this new alcoholic drink that’s a bit like beer except it’s loosely based on apples, and we’ve called it – cider!  Except we wanted to make it sound a bit French, so we spelt it wrong.  Cidre!!


But cider’s existed since at least Roman times.
Has it?  Bollocks.  


Yes.  And it’s really popular just now.  There are loads of ciders on the UK market, they’re doing really well.
Well, it sounds like we got here just in time then!  But never mind that.  We decided to do something that no one else has EVER done before.  You’ll never guess.  This is going to fuck with your brain.  What we’re doing, right, is launching this ‘cidre’ in a pint bottle and get this – we’re suggesting people drink it in a pint glass full of ice!  Now is that innovation or what?!


Well, no it’s not.  Magner’s introduced that concept to the mainstream UK cider market five years ago.  And every big brand has copied them.  You’re kind of late to the party here.     
No, you must be mistaken.  Look here, our CEO says this is “another demonstration of our commitment to innovation and investment in Stella Artois”.   Innovation means new, right?


OK, moving on.  It’s been pointed out that the launch of this product means the Stella Artois brand now provides both ingredients for the infamously intoxicating cocktail, snakebite.  Any thoughts on that?
Absolutely.  Stella Artois is dogged by an undeserved reputation as loopy juice, and some people even call it ‘Wifebeater’.  Giving our drinkers permission to create Stella snakebite seems like the perfect way to rid the brand of this entirely undeserved reputation.  And as an added value proposition, our consumers can also now interface with Stella Artois ‘Snakebite and Black’? Heh heh!


Yes, but in this context, the word ‘black’ is short for ‘blackcurrant’.
No it’s not.  Not if we say it isn’t.


Fair enough.  So what’s in it then? What percentage apple juice is it?
Look, even if I knew or understood how cider was made, you know I wouldn’t tell you.

Finally, most marketing theory advises against launching endless line extensions when the parent brand is in decline.  Positioning, The Battle For Your Mind, by Ries and Trout, is a marketing classic that refers to this as one of the most common positioning traps in marketing, giving countless examples of how, 90% of the time, it results in failure that can also further weaken the parent brand…
Ooh, get Mr Swotty here with his fancy marketing speak.  I don’t know what any of that means, but let me tell you mister, we don’t use the word failure around here.  Artois Bock?  Peeterman Artois? Eiken Artois? Stella Black?  Successes.  Every last one of ’em.

So no qualms about wilfully confusing what Stella Artois stands for and diluting brand equity rather than exploring Belgium’s genuine cider making tradition and creating an intriguing new brand that just might have an air of authenticity about it then?
None whatsoever.

OK, until your next – what did you call it? – ‘innovation’ then, cheers!

Thanks to Chris Ainger for the snakebite observation, and to Chris G for the Snakebite and Black gag.  

There really is a Belgian cider making tradition.  Stella Artois Cidre will be brewed in Belgium.  Whether or not there is any connection between these two facts, we’ll have to wait and see.  I will try Stella Cidre when I come across it, and if it tastes nice, I’ll say so.

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It’s time we talked about cider

Because I’m something of an expert on beer, many people believe I know about cider (and perry).  It’s quite flattering I suppose, that they just assume I know loads about a drink that isn’t beer and that I don’t claim to be an expert on.  But it’s been going on for so long now that I feel obliged to learn a little.  I’ve been extending my consultancy activities into cider over the last couple of years, and this summer I’ve been boning up my product knowledge so that I can incorporate it into my tutored tastings, food matching and writing.

This image was created by someone looking to promote cider.  Not take the piss out of it.  Hmm.

Not many of the beer people I know talk about cider (or perry) that much – I get the impression that they treat it with disdain as inferior to beer, or that it’s a guilty secret.  For those among us who feel a little defensive about being called a beer geek, the bumpkin image of cider (and perry) makers and drinkers means there’s someone one rung down from us who we can turn on.

For those who’ve argued with CAMRA that they should support all quality beer rather than just cask ale, cider is a bone of contention – the organisation that responds to criticism about beer with “The clue is in the name: what is it about the Campaign for Real Ale that’s so difficult to understand?  That’s what we’re about, and that’s all,” cider (and perry) is an example of breathtaking hypocrisy, supported wholeheartedly by CAMRA at festivals and throughout the organisation despite the fact that it is clearly not real ale.

Cider is a sophisticated, quality drink.  No, it really is.

But if that’s all we think, we do cider (and perry) a disservice.

I wrote recently in the Publican about the ‘joyful anarchy’ of cider, how cider (and perry) producers all seem to have a great time and many seem to operate at a slight angle to reality.  ABVs tend to be approximate.  Labelling and packaging often seems a little rough and ready.  It’s gloriously shambolic.

But there’s also refinement at the other end of the spectrum.  We have this positioning problem with cider in the UK, in that we consider it a direct alternative to beer.  We see a farmhouse cider at 8% ABV and sigh and go, “Shit, a pint of this is going to get me arseholed,” and we shrug and order a pint anyway.

But why?  Cider is made from fruit, not grain.  It has a flavour range from dry to sweet, rather than bitter to malty.  Does that remind you of anything?  Yep, cider is a closer cousin to wine than beer.  Indeed sparkling perry was apparently the inspiration for champagne.  Cider is a hybrid, halfway between wine and beer, and yet different from each.

I’ve been enjoying the diversity and complexity of cider a great deal this summer, at least until what was shaping up to be a beautiful long hot summer got washed down a storm drain about two weeks ago.

I’m not a purist about cider, same as I’m not a purist about beer. If it tastes nice, I’ll drink it.  But I do have one rule: it’s ostensibly made out of apples.  Therefore it should taste of apples.  Or pears.  It doesn’t have to be be squeezed on a nineteenth century press by a yokel in a leather jerkin and come out unfiltered and filthy to be cider.  It can be carbonated, balanced, blended, contain sulphites and stabilisers, come from big manufacturers, be served over ice from a pint bottle… I don’t care.  So long as it’s recognisably made from what it’s supposed to be made from.  And tastes nice.

You would.  I bet you would.

I was helping an ad agency pitch for Magner’s last year.  I organised a tasting of the big commercial cider brands, and got a bit of a surprise.  We took Strongbow, Woodpecker, Magner’s, Bulmers, Gaymers and Westons Organic and tasted them next to each other.  As you’d expect, the Westons Organic was by far the most pleasant drink.  What surprised me was just how bad the others were – with one curious exception.  They didn’t actually taste like apples.  I’ve had cider lollies from ice cream vans that taste more of cider than these drinks did.  They were sweet, fizzy and synthetic, the sweetness artificial with no discernible link to anything that’s every been outdoors, let alone on a tree.  They weren’t cider: they were alcopops repacked as cider, cheap, nasty alcohol in a new set of clothes to suit changing mainstream trends.

The exception?  Magner’s.  Say what you like about it – and I know it certainly doesn’t look natural – but it tasted of apples.  It wasn’t a patch on the Westons, but it belonged in the same group, a class apart from its more commercial peers.

On a hot day I’ll take an Aspalls or an Addlestones over beer.  Hall & Woodhouse sent me a case of their Badger pear cider and it’s almost stupidly drinkable – shamefully I was hiding my last few bottles from people when we had out summer barbecue last month.

And if you’re lucky enough to encounter Dennis Gwatkin – probably the most celebrated cider maker of the moment – you’ll find stuff there to delight any craft beer enthusiast.  His cider aged in whisky barrels was one of the best drinks I encountered all last year.  Served in a wine glass, lightly chilled, it beats rose wine at its own game on long summer evenings.

So I like cider (and perry).  I’m drinking more of it/them.  I’m doing an event on (perry) at the Abergavenny Food Festival next month.  (I’m also doing one on Welsh microbreweries with a bit of cheese – but that’s already sold out!)

I’ll be cramming for this event on Bank Holiday Monday at the Alma on Newington Green, North London.  Fresh from the success of their first ever beer festival, they’re doing a cider festival over August Bank Holiday Weekend.  There’ll be twenty different ciders (and perrys) from five producers, including fruit ciders, perry, rum-oaked, whisky-oaked and wine-oaked ciders, and cider and food matching.

I think I’ll be on the Rioja-matured scrumpy myself.  Just don’t take the piss if I’m drinking it from a wine glass.

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Drinking from the Green Cup.

When you’re knee-deep in shit and you realise you’re not actually capable of making the effort fo walking for 45 mins to catch that band you were wanting to see; when you queue 20 minutes for a cup of tea, 30 for a carboard tray of noodles and 45 for a toilet, sometimes you want to cauterize yourself from your surroundings.
Enter, Brothers Pear Cider, a Glastonbury institution since 1995. The Brothes bar is near the Jazz World stage at Glasto, and there’s a nice flat area full of flags flapping in the breeze where you can sit down and savour.
Brothers Cider is 7%, bone dry, tastes of next to nothing and yet is incredibly moreish. Pints disappear in minutes. Most drinks at Glastonbury are served in the same white paper cups from the Workers Beer Company, festooned with the logo of which ever is the official beer. Brothers Cider is the only product with its own paper cups, whic are a distinctive green.
And whenever you see a real victim at Glastonbury, the people who think it’s a good idea to strip down to their undies and mud surf; those who unzip their flies and start urinating into the slime that is the field in front of the Other Stage; those who in the middle of the afternoon can be found lying prone in the mud, face down – they always have a green cup next to them.
A couple of years ago this led us to invent a new euphemism for extreme drunkenness. Whenever you see someone so drunk they have lost control, when you look into their flat, lifeless eyes and realise that most higher order brain functions have shut down, leaving only the basic motor functions running, you can say they have been “drinking from the green cup”.
Most of the time, I value my sanity. One of my favourite phrases that I have ever coined in my writing, which I try to use as often as possible, is “surely the best nights out are the ones you can remember.” For all the drinking I did in Three Sheets, I was only ever properly pissed about three or four times. For these reasons, I’ve always given the Brothers a wide berth. But on Friday at Glastonbury 07, when we realised it was going to be yet another mud bath, having never missed a muddy Glastonbury but having missed most of the nice ones, it all became a bit too much.
We approached the Brothers bar, which had a crowd almost as deep as the crowd around the Jazz stage.
We got our pints.
And I decided to get my notebook out.
Here, unedited, is what I decided to write in it:
“What was I thinking about? I have no idea – I’ve succumbed to drinking Brothers Cider. Like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, I know what’s going to happen: I know my mind is forfeit, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The next bit seems to have been written later, because the hand becomes much less steady. And because the content has taken an alarming turn in the direction of bollocks:
“The workings of the mind become a succession of frozen shards with no forward narrative, no way to make any sense of sequential thought. It’s a bit like being let into some kind of seceret brotherhood – feeling the base plates in my mind shift, and knowing I won’t be able to remember any of this tomorrow. Liz, after half a pint, falls asleep. Chris, after half a pint, gets up and starts dancing. I, after half a pint, start scribbling shite. One foot is squelchy; the other is perfectly dry.”

Christopher Gittner, doing the dance of the Green CupI don’t remember writing any of this. Some time later, I’ve attempted to write in hieroglyphs I can just make out:”African fellas on the jazz stage. It wouldn’t be quite the same if we went to Mali and played them On Ilkley Moor Bah’t ‘at, would it? Is it just that it’s diff? Or is it just better?”I think we know the answer to that one.The last thing I wrote that afternoon was:”Wake me up when someone gives a shit.” I guess it was only a few seconds later when this photo of me was taken:
Kids, just say no.

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Cider – the end of the moment

They say that we leave the world as we entered it – bald, incontinent, wrinkled and without much of a clue as to what’s going on (OK, I might have taken liberties with the elaboration of that piece of wisdom, but the sentiment is as it was meant).

In the same way, many a pisshead starts his drinking career as he ends it – supping extra-strong cider from a big plastic bottle, that he’s got someone else to buy him, because he can’t get served in pubs.

When I was a teenager cider was what you got the older boys to buy you from the off-licence. As soon as you could get served in pubs you left it behind, a symbol of your virginal, young-shaving years, and switched to adult drinks such as, er, lager and lime, or if you grew up in the south of England, “lager top”. In the marketing end of the beer business we use many a hideous phrase to navigate the world of pubs, and a universal one is the “bar call” – it’s a shout, and you’re saying something about yourself when you’re calling for a particular drink. “Call” for a “lager top”, and the message you’re sending about yourself is “I’m desperate to prove my mature masculinity, but I can’t let go of my mother’s apron strings. I want to drink beer in front of my “mates”, otherwise they’ll question my sexuality, but it tastes horrid, so I’d like some lemonade in mine”. But I digress.

If you’re about 27 or under and you grew up in the UK, you didn’t follow the path I outlined above – the drink you got someone else to buy you from the supermarket wasn’t cider; it was Hooch, or Bacardi Breezer, or Two Dogs, or WKD, or Smirnoff Ice. Even sweeter – even more like the drinks you had as a child. And then you could circumvent beer altogether and go straight on to hard spirits. This is why the UK currently has a drink problem – but that’s another story.

What’s important here is that cider wasn’t naff in the mid-90s to mid-00s – it was beyond naff, it was totally invisible. So now, as the alcopop generation matures, it doesn’t have the negative baggage my generation did – cider is a clean slate.

So I loved it when Magner’s came in and introduced the pint bottle with a pint glass full of ice. It was immediately attractive to beer drinkers, especially those who had grown up with the cinema chain/McDonald’s buckets of iced Coca Cola. Ritual is vital in drinking, and here was one that didn’t necessarily need a branded glass to make it work – just a pint glass. All the other brands who’d been languishing in the moribund English cider market for years immediately copied Magner’s in an attempt to negate its advantage. And a general growth of interest in cider lead to a ‘halo effect’ – craft-brewed ciders, such as the wonderful New Forest Cider, suddenly started to get noticed too. Even if you’re a lifelong drinker of quality ciders who hates the taste of Magner’s, you have to admit that this is a good thing for anyone who likes cider. Except, no, hang on, some elements within the Campaign for Real Ale condemned it, unable to compromise for one moment and accept that even if they didn’t like Magner’s, the brand was drawing more people to “real”cider than if it hadn’t been there. But then, those people have no concept of what the twenty-first century is.
But again, I digress. Love it or loathe it, Magner’s has been the mid-noughties success story in the drinks business.
But it’s going to peak before September 07, and enter a decline as steep as its rise.
Why?
It’s all about the ice. Magner’s relies on bar staff chucking in an awful lot of ice with every bottle they sell. The ice is why people buy it – you can’t put ice in beer, that would be horrid – but you can in cider. Get everyone in the bar drinking Magner’s instead of lager, and suddenly your ice requirement increases a hundredfold. And you may well have cocktails, G&Ts etc. that need ice and have a far higher margin, so you hold some ice back for them. Either way, sooner or later someone orders a Magner’s and they don’t get that pint glass full of ice. And then they start wondering why they’re paying a premium, not to mention why it doesn’t taste as nice. Their pint doesn’t look like it does on the adverts. They feel cheated.
The higher the demand, the more likely this point will be reached – and demand will be huge this summer.
I’ve already seen it happen, and in decent pubs too – the kind of pub that always makes sure to serve you the right beer in the right branded glass. Two guys in the only vaguely middle-class pub in Portland (my writing haunt last week) picked up a chess set from the bar, ordered their pints of Magner’s, had them served with no ice… and switched to Guinness for the rest of the evening, before their ciders were even finished.
Pubs can’t produce enough ice to keep pace with the demand for Magner’s. It’s a victim of its success. This is the year the bubble bursts.

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