Imported Beers

Lord, don’t we Australians drink a lot of beer? Add up all the Corona, Heineken, Millers, Budweiser, Carlsberg and Stella Artois, plus every other bottle of imported beer sold here, and they don’t even add up to one percent of our total consumption. Sobering thought, that, as Richie Benaud might have said.

So are the importers of beer optimistic or not? My straw poll would confirm an unequivocal and resounding ‘yes’. Imported beers, generally more expensive than even the premium local beers, are essentially a different market to the bulk produced local alternative. That doesn’t upset our larger breweries one bit, for most are actively involved in selling imported beer.

Why? Because there is no better promotion for the beer category than imported beer, and its higher prices mean that we can’t afford to drink it all the time. Imported beers are helping to maintain the domestic beer market, which has enthusiastically responded with a new mid-price category of Australian premium beers, such as Thomas Cooper Real Ale and James Boag Premium.

According to Ken Criswick, General Manager of Carlton Special Beverages, there’s now real growth ahead of imported beers and premium locals. ‘I guess it’s to do with drinking a little less but better, or looking for alternatives. Some brands are still being consumed on premises for their image or fashion statement; today there are all sorts of factors which impact on imported beer consumption. Back in 1980s we had the ‘look at me syndrome’, while today more people are more interested in trying different beers and brands. Travel is certainly a factor, for it exposes people to other brands’, he says.

To choose an imported beer ahead of a local premium is very much a fashion statement or a reflection of individuality; perhaps a result of some genuine product knowledge or an urge to experiment. Imported beers are more likely to be consumed by women than local beers. Around a third of the attendees wandering around tasting from the 450 brewery stands at last year’s American Brewers Convention in Colorado were women.

Beer is almost as complicated as wine. Indeed, Simon Seward, co-owner of specialist beer importer The House of Hops, says he is deliberately setting out to target the wine drinker for his range of beers. The wine drinker, he says, is used to the idea of paying about four times as much by volume for premium wine ahead of base level cask wine and is therefore less likely to baulk at retail prices of $6-10 for some of his rarest and most limited beers.

The choices confronting the potential drinker of imported beer are virtually endless, although the lion’s share of the market is dominated by several well-known brands like Corona and Heineken. There are beers from Austria, Germany, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, England, Scotland, Ireland, New Zealand, New Guinea, Mexico, Canada the United States, France, Norway, Denmark, Japan, Italy, the Philippines and even China. There are Lambic beers, rauchbiers, bocks, pilseners, pale ales, lagers, bitters, weissbiers, stouts, olds, news, lights, heavies and draughts which are served in any number of pots, schooners, glasses, middees, butchers, ponies, pints, halves, yards, steins and tankards. Welcome to beerspeak!

There’s no doubt that the recent recession seriously set back the growth of the imported beer market in Australia, but things are mending fast with 8-10 category growth last year. The beer whose market grew the most is Corona, whose sales are now back to the heady days of the late 1980s, when every freckly young lawyer and real estate agent appeared to be permanently attached to a longneck of Corona. Remember the puckered faces as they tried to get a pull on the bottle, hampered by the mandatory wedge of lemon? Fascinating behaviour, but utterly foreign to any genuine Mexican…

‘You can’t under-estimate the female influence with a brand like Corona, which has now been around for eight years. It’s always had a solid base of female consumers and it’s seen to be a beverage as distinct from a beer’, says Ken Criswick. Factors which contribute to Corona’s year-round popularity include the drinking ritual associated with it, the bottle package and what Ken Criswick describes as the mystique of a Mexican beer.

Marketing is unquestionably the key if your imported beer is to emerge from the strange and exotic to become a true blue chip earner. Budweiser, for instance, is well known to every Australian watcher of American television or Hollywood movies. It’s inescapable. Yet Budweiser, for all its attractions of freshness and low-alcohol content, is not advertised here. Those who sell it say its sales would rocket if it was. Given the greater popularity of the other American best-seller, Miller, which is heavily promoted here, you can see the truth in the argument.

Miller, packaged in a clear glass bottle a la Corona, is strongly supported by CSB with on-premise activity to involve consumers and magazine advertising. Its success has also been helped by its richer flavour profile than other American beers sold in Australia and the ongoing wave of American influence in Australia at the present time, led by the growth in popularity of basketball.

‘The brands that succeed in this market are the internationally renowned brands which are supported by their principals and their distributors – these are the ones which are chugging along very well for CSB’, says Ken Criswick. ‘The rationalisation of the imported beer market has allowed higher turnover brands to deliver the product quality the market requires.’

The other brands which are surely to succeed are those able to establish smaller, but strong niche markets, such as CSB is presently managing to achieve with Asahi in the Asian segment of the premium beer market. ‘The vital ingredient is to establish a correct positioning in the Australian market’, says Ken Criswick. This is the key to the ongoing success of many British beers, such as draught Guinness, Stones Yorkshire Bitter and Bass Pale Ale, which with the increasing number of quality on-premise outlets designed for their consumption with a distinctly British feel, are likely to develop competitive and profitable markets. Please login to post comment