It's at its most distasteful, though, when the companies themselves are rorting the copyright - and it's the customers who are being sold a dummy, legally.
Yes I'm fucked off about Euro beers being produced badly under licence again.
Serious though. It's fraud. It's fraud to brew a piss-ordinary facsimile of Becks and put it in a green bottle with a bit of authentic looking silver foil on the top with a small-print insignia reading 'GERMAN PRECISION' on it. Instead of the slightly more truthful 'WE ACTUALLY BREWED THIS SHIT IN FUCKING LIDCOMBE.' Only a desperate bogan fucktard could drink that shit and actually consider themselves ahead of the curve, as persuasively outlined here.
The above rantage ain't brand wank or culture cringe, it's the result of extensive back-to-back testing. (Extensive.) Fact is, Australian-brewed Becks, like Australian-brewed Heineken, Stella and Carlsberg, is grievous fucking crap. There is no legitimate case to make that these are even close to the genuine article. Visit your local Unky Dan's, buy a slab of the imported cans and a six pack (wouldn't trouble your wallet to waste any more than that) of the locally brewed bots, have a taste comparo in your two least grody schooner glasses, and be underwhelmed by the impact of shit-quality Australian water, B-grade hops and crappy malt. The same dubious bait-and-switch is carried out in NZ, with the same dubious results. If being sold an inferior product under the aegis of a superior products branding isn't fraud, what the fuck is?
The inherent craven cretinality of this is that Australia (and NZ, of course) make fucking fantastic beers of their own volition, without needing to slavishly Xerox a bunch of pre-made foreign templates. Monteiths, Mac's, Emersons, Coopers, Boags, Cascade, Jimmy Squires, Matilda Bay, Little Creatures - stack them up against anyone you got, anyone in the world, they hold their own. The advent and rise of craft beer in the Nineties and Noughties was meant to signify the maturation of the Australasian beer consumption market, the rejection of the six-o'-clock-swill mentality and the blind stupefying allegiance to brands like VB and XXXX, no matter the dismal undrinkable quality of the output. But all we seem to have done is swap generic local swill for generic local swill under a foreign label, with the pleasure of paying an extra ten bucks a carton for the privilege.
Fuck 'em. Spend an extra couple of bucks and buy the proper shit direct from the importer. Parallel-imported Becks and Stella at one of the bigger indie bottle-o's this week for $20 a dozen... all over it like Tiger on a cocktail waitress.
Beer me.
The Doctor is OUT.
8 comments:
TOOOOO FKN TRUE and the number of muppets I know who buy the " IMPORTED" thats, VERY FKN NOT!, the real thing shit and think it is , is fkn massive.
I've been known to partake in the consumption of rather ordinary beer, especially when the boss lady heads on down to the bottle shop, tasked with getting me some Carlton Draught, which BTW is about as low as I go. Its not a BAD beer, But wanders home with 4 fkn slabs of VB....AND AINT IT FKN SHIT!.
Its boags or Draught here, unless, as you know, we lash out and get some Grolsch, otherwise, ..shit...Cascade..yeah it gets a run as well.
As for the issue of KNOCK OFFS of everything else, those fkr should be capped, the shit banned from being imported . GOOD JOB..Beside ya, GUN IN FKN HAND!
Go get 'em tiger.
Drink less, drink better is what I do: but it's not like I've got much choice.
I think I might mail order in some Red Oak for my birthday.
Superb rantage as always.
H - nothing wrong with good cheap beer. In fact I'm a connoisseur of it - hard to go past Tasman Bitter from Liquorland (which is actually Boags Original in a different bottle - sort of the reverse of putting shit in a pretty bottle and calling it Becks-berg-eken-Artois). Got no shame about buying cheap beer - Speighs over here. Also love good beer. But cheap beer pretending to be good beer pisses me off - like when BWS is asking $40 a carton for VB or New, or worse, beer made the same way as VB or New pretending to be something its not. If yr gonna buy Euro beer either buy the stuff that isn't made locally like Grolsch or Pilsner Urquell or get the genuine imported stuff I reckon.
Nat - I agree with every word of what you said apart from the 'drink less' bit, but we shall agree to disagree on that.
Fosters. Australian for beer. Brewed in Milwaukee. 'Nuff said.
(Not that Australians actually drink Fosters, I know. Maybe import the Milwaukee-brewed instead...)
Don't drink much beer, know to partake of the odd glass of guinness. But it seems ridiculous to spend any money just for a name, especially as what you are buying tastes so bad and for the same price you could buy a good tasting local brew.
a full bodied rant.
The 'imported' Sapporo always makes me laff. It's imported for sure - from a licensed brewer in Canada.
YD - best leave Fosters alone entirely I expect - though the most (only) drinkable Fosters I've ever had was off tap in a London pub on a 30 degree day (90-odd in old money). They brew it in Scotland or Newcastle I think.
Barnes - zactly - wasn't going to be two beer rants in a row but didn't have the headspace analysis* required for the Homebake retrospective I was planning
*could be a very clever chromatography reference, isn't
Albion - yeah I've seen that. Partaken occasionally. It's not terrible stuff but I dare say it's similarly not a patch on the orig.
Yeah I've reformed.....ahem.
In broader terms tho, I'd rather drink a six pack of quality than a slab of shite these days...ya know?
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