Glass War

‘“A PINT FOR ME AND A THIRD FOR HER,” announces the Sun.

Drinking beer makes you irresistible to women

But this is not another binge-drinking story describing how women neck their pints three times faster than the sorry excuses for modern men. No, this refers to a new plan for pubs to serve beer to women in “wine-style glasses”.

It doesn’t say what a wine-style glass is, but presumably it’s one of those things in which British pubs serve the wine-style liquid that they give you when you order a glass of wine.

The new glasses are the brainchild of the brewers, who hope to encourage women to switch from drinking this wine-style liquid, and drink their beer-style liquid instead.

Nice try, lads, but you’ll have to do better than that. Young women drink pub wine for the same reason young men drink pub beer – to get drunk as quickly and cheaply as possible.

If they have any sense, the producers of “pub wine” will simply retaliate by serving their wine-style liquid in pint glasses.

In special cases, like the pub in Walthamstow where customers like to bring their own beer in carrier bags, they could sell their fortified ersatz grape-juice in lager-shaped cans.

In fact, this pub gives a clue to how the brewers could fight back. The paper reports that “36 per cent of women in pubs have wine but only 14 per cent have lager”.

In other words, even if the wine producers are successful in winning over the beer drinkers, that still leaves the other 50 per cent of women in pubs as a potential market.

If the brewers could adapt their product to these women, whose carrier bags contain meths, anti-freeze, and other specialist beverages, they would have the modern equivalent of the philosopher’s stone.

Trebles all round! And we’ll have it from an unopened bottle if you don’t mind…’

Posted: 8th, March 2005 | In: Tabloids Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink