AND UNION Saturday lager - 330ml cans (6 pack)

Product Information

It’s hard not to think that it simply suited police authorities, lobbying for funding increases and greater power, to present all this as a surging, terrifying trend. Lager lads, who are louts… So close. At any rate, this, we suspect is the ultimate source of the phrase as it began to appear during 1988. (John Patten, the Home Office minister, was known to be a real ale drinker.)

This will mark the first time since 2016 that the Boks host Australia in Pretoria, and the first time since 2013 that they take on Argentina in in Johannesburg, with South Africa having won both those fixtures, by 18-10 and 73-13 respectively. We respect the time beer needs to be produced, developing little by little inside the tanks. You just can’t rush craftsmanship, and that's why our traditional brewing processes can take up to 8 weeks. We obsess over flavour and aroma, and therefore we fight the quantities of mega production and economies of scale. In the following decade, though lager’s share of the market continued to rise (4 per cent in 1968, 10 per cent in 1971, 20 per cent by 1975), competition grew with it. More brands emerged – genuine imports, foreign brands brewed under licence in the UK (Carlsberg, Holsten), and home-grown ‘faux’ lagers such as Greenall Whitley’s Grünhalle. Television presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, formerly a Labour MP on Merseyside, captured the hysteria when in August 1987 he wrote a rather hysterical op-ed for the Times entitled‘Riots That Go Unremarked’: The Rugby World Cup quarter-finals will be played on the weekend of 14/15 October, with the semi-finals on 20/21 October and the final on Saturday, 28 October.

The problem for British brewers was that lager sophisticates were drinking imports. Ind Coope had a British lager in its roster, Graham’s, but it was Carlsberg that had the credibility. In 1959, though, Graham’s was relaunched and rebranded, as explained by Martyn Cornell in this 2012 blog post: The arrival of the police, the observers noted, was sometimes greeted with cheers from crowds simply excited that something was happening. In 1988 the problem only seemed to escalate and the baiting and assault of police officers attending such incidents seemed to intensify, as reported by David Leppard in the Sunday Times on 27 March that year. We are on course in terms of finalising our planning for the season and we are excited about returning to the training field,” added the Springbok coach. Lager was chic. Lager was beer’s answer to Swedish cutlery, Danish chairs, and Italian scooters. There was no suggestion of soot or grit in lager, which spoke of clean living and the cool grey north. Lager was smart. And so were lager drinkers.

At 12.15 am there was a loud noise and shouting coming from the Hamlet Road direction, and people ran from the Chinese towards the noise… As we rounded the corner into Hamlet Road we were confronted with a group of approximately 200 people moving towards us… The group walked up to the Chinese take-away and re-gathered outside the Job Centre. At this point the large police van arrived… The mass divided into smaller group and some made their way home. Two remaining large groups were herded towards the Wimpy and the Pightle, with one police officer on each side of the road, walking slowly behind them. This took another 15 minutes, and involved a lot of jeering and baiting of the police officers. Though the report was sensible and far from fearmongering it made clear that the problem was real and that something worrying was going on Britain’s towns on Friday and Saturday nights. Warm Dregs At around the same time Guinness was in the process of launching its own lager brand in Ireland. In a recollection published in The Guinness Book of Guinness in1988, Guinness executive Arthur Hughes recalled that brewing in Ireland was always a test for roll-out into the UK market. And if Skol was brewed on Scandinavian kit, Guinness’s new lager was to be brewed by an imported German, Hermann Münder, for reasons Hughes explains:Let us be clear what we are referring to. We’re talking about gangs of hundreds of drunken white youths, often wielding knives and machetes, rampaging through otherwise peaceful towns and deliberately seeking battle with the police.

And of course others with their own agendas leapt on the bandwagon. Anti-drink campaigners, for example, saw an opportunity to protest newly extended pub opening hours, to call for tighter restrictions on pubs, and to argue for regulation of alcohol advertising. When we started our journey the goal was to show that beers made the traditional way can be awesome too. We started to work together with different brew masters from small, regional Bavarian, family-run breweries, one of them being almost 500 years old. We wanted to create crafted lagers and ales with a sense of provenance and a respect for traditions, that our customers would love drinking. South Africa will launch their Rugby World Cup title defence on Sunday, 10 September, against Scotland in Marseille, which will be followed by pool matches against Romania in Bordeaux (17 September), Ireland in Paris (23 September) and Tonga in Marseille (1 October). The ACPO report itself wasn’t made public – they thought a list of towns where violence was a regular occurrence and the police were struggling might act as a kind of catalogue for mobile yobs – so we can’t know if it mentioned lager. Certainly the attendant newspaper coverage based on the press release does not seem to have flagged lager as a particular problem, and wine, as in wine bars, got mentioned more often. Reflecting on moral panics and the need for scapegoats in government and the media as we worked on this piece we got an uneasy feeling. Surely craft beer will get its turn in the doghouse, won’t it? There is, after all, a cycle new beer styles or market segments seem to go through:Nienaber said the national coaches have been hard at work with their planning for the international season where they will look to build on an encouraging 2022 season: “The coaches have hit the ground running this year and we’ll continue to put in the hard yards as we attempt to ensure that we leave no stone unturned before the World Cup.

Further reading: Pete Brown is particularly brilliant on this subject, with Stella Artois as his case study, in 2003’s Man Walks into a Pub.) It is the image of lager, exuding its message, ‘Stay young; stay with the herd’, which is so malign. It is the content and colour of the product which allows it to be used this way – uniformly banal in taste and texture, and brewed as a lowest common denominator mass product. But then herds are all given the same feed… When the lager lad says that beer is an old man’s drink, the reply is to ask if they have ever thought of growing up?… Lager is a candle to the moth for these people. It lubricates the louts as they lurch to the football terraces…

Disclaimer

The Campaign for Real Ale, of course, had a field day. For some time it had been re-orienting its guns from keg bitter, the great scourge of the 1970s, towards lager, and in an article for What’s Brewing in December 1988 Tony Millns gloated over lager’s new image problem: But perhaps it was also more (or less) than that, because the word ‘lager’ had begun to crop up in a certain type of news story, like this from the Guardian for 11 May 1984: Previously placid towns, villages and suburbs up and down the country were suddenly awash with mob violence – the kind of thing people expected in forsaken inner cities but which seemed newly terrifying as it spread to provincial market squares and high streets. In September 1988 at an informal press briefing John Patten MP, Minister for Home Affairs, pointed the finger: the chaos was a result of ‘the Saturday night lager cult’ and ‘lager louts’.