Fosters - not so Australian any more

"No true blue dinky di Aussie will ever voluntarily drink a Fosters."

Ash Jurberg

"Fosters is a joke from Australia to the rest of the world, we keep the good beer here!"

Fosters lager is the quintessentially Australian beer - at least that's what I thought until today. Today I discovered via my niece, that Australians don't actually drink much Fosters any more. They drink Stella Artois, designer beers and Carlton Draught and Victoria Bitter, and depending on where they live maybe XXXX and Tooheys Blue. But not Fosters. I'm not quite sure why they don't drink the Fosters as opposed to the Carlton Draught, but nevertheless it was interesting enough to look into. And some of what I found was really quite interesting.

It's apparently not just Fosters. In general Australians drink more wine that beer, and much more than the British and the Americans. So that image of Australians knocking back beer at an Australian barbecue is just not true. And I think I can vouch for that. I actually know very few beer drinkers - maybe on a really hot day, or with a curry, but otherwise it's wine - white for lots of ladies and red for the men and an increasing number of ladies too. Beer - not so much.

Apparently when Australia was first settled by all those convicts they drank a lot of rum - even the children drank it. Not good - and so the powers that be encouraged them to drink beer instead and imported the ingredients (hops) to do it. So gradually it became the preferred drink. Indeed when we first arrived in Australia in 1969 it probably was the prime drink - that and port after dinner. Gee people drank a lot of port. But then the wine industry boomed and eventually wine took over. People do still drink beer - but mostly (I think) out of bottles and frequently it's designer or craft beer. For Australians do make good beer. It's just that it's not Fosters any more. Indeed my niece's boyfriend had never tasted it and so when he saw some in Dan Murphy's he bought a bottle - at almost the price of a cheap bottle of wine, to try it.

Fosters was first made by a couple of American brothers called Foster, back in the nineteenth century. Having made lots of money out of it they sold up and it was taken on by Carlton United Breweries. Lots of mergers and licence agreements later, mean that in England it is made by what is basically Heineken. England being the largest market for Fosters now - it's much more popular there than here. And that popularity probably stemmed from one of Paul Hogan's extremely successful advertising campaigns back in the 80s. This, I think is when the slogan, Fosters - the Australian for Lager, came into being.

Gee he was a marketer's dream that man. He did heaps for the tourist industry and also for cigarettes - and Fosters. But that was then, this is now.

Nowadays it's not much pushed here and, I am told, a little difficult to find.

And perhaps the final words should go to Trevor O'Hoy a very well-known former CEO of the Foster's Group between 2002 and 2008.

"The majors produce deliberately quite bland products that are inoffensive, while craft brewers have spotted a gap and are providing these smaller-run, more exciting products ,... I make no apologies for that because the big, big consumption from consumers are in those western suburbs of the country and they are wanting the big commercial brands – so that's fine."

"The new consumer – and this applies to all products – is experimenting a lot more, which is interesting because I come from a world, a generation, where you stick with one brand for life ... But the new consumer has multiple brands on multiple occasions on the one day. So it's a very different world and the craft brewers are filling a gap that's really been wanting to be filled for some time. And I think it's good news for the total sector because it creates more interest in beer."

So there you have it - from the lion's mouth as it were.