Do you remember Carling Premier? Or Fosters Ice? Or Peeterman Artois? (The last one a not entirely convincing attempt by Stella to steal some of the Pilsner Urquell market.) Or, worst of all, Budweiser BE: all the magic of Bud but with added caffeine, sugar, ginseng and guarana, just like Red Bull. These beers arrived in a blaze of promotional merchandise, expensive-looking bar pumps and TV advertising, and were then quietly dropped.
I was reminded of these lost beers by a flurry of recent activity from Guinness. In the last year it has launched, by my reckoning, four new beers: Dublin Porter, West Indies Porter, Golden Ale and Blonde American Lager. I haven’t tried the Blonde as it’s US only. The West Indies Porter is pretty good but the other two are instantly forgettable. I wonder why they bother. I can remember the rise and fall of Guinness Bitter, Guinness Red and a real-ale version of Guinness Stout that was briefly available in the late 1990s (actually this last one sounds lovely). The last successful new Guinness product was nitrogenated stout, which was pioneered in Irish pubs in the 60s. This gave Guinness its now-trademark creamy consistency. It was launched in cans as Draught Guinness in the 80s. So successful was it that every other brewery launched its own creamy beers: it was applied to lager – Carling Premier; and even cider – Strongbow Smooth. None were as successful as Guinness Draught.
What these failed products have in common is that they’re an attempt to cash in on the success of other drinks. Witness the craze for ice beers. There was a lot of guff about smoothness and ultimate refreshment, but actually the ice process removed flavour from the beer. Tiny particles that contained beery tastes were frozen and filtered out. The brewers had created something for those who found even the likes of Sol a little too characterful. Sol is still going strong; ice beers aren’t.
If you want to launch a mass-market beer, you need some seriously good advertising. Those lager ads from the 80s – Carling Black Label, Castlemaine XXXX and Heineken – were the wittiest things on TV. The Golden Ale ad, in contrast, is a lumbering attempt to bolster Guinness’s authentic credentials by showing how the new beer was invented by a team of enthusiasts at a microbrewery. Not convinced? But look at all the beards! Beards are now so synonymous with craft beers that there’s even a beer and pizza restaurant in Bristol called Beerd. Guinness has a proud advertising record from the Toucans of the 30s to those thrillingly pretentious adverts from the 90s, but the new Guinness campaign is as insipid as its new beer. Without a doubt, Golden Ale will be going the way of Carling Premier et al.
