Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog - Lager and the ABC1s, 1989

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Super strong lager was for louts and layabouts; but strong lager, one category across, was the stuff for snobs.

At least that was the conclusion suggested by research from Public Attitude Surveys Ltd in 1989, as reported in the Economist for September that year.
You might remember our notes on a similar piece of research undertaken by PAS for Guinness all the way back in 1963.
We came across this particular article while researching the question of when ABV labelling was introduced and were excited – yes, excited; look, we’ve never claimed to be cool – to find hard statistics on lager consumption by (a) age and (b) social grouping.
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In each case, super strong lagers are those with an original gravity of c.1080 and premium refers to those with an OG of 1040 or higher.
The problem is that the stats don’t quite show what they might seem to at first glance – that is, how much lager was being sold in each subcategory.
What they actually tell us is how much of the total sold was being consumed by people in each bracket.
And that isn’t even the same thing as how popular each type of beer was with people in each category.
You could have, say, 15 people in one category each drinking a pint per week and 15 heavy drinkers in another each drinking ten pints per week. Thus their category would drink more of the total, even if both groups like the beer equally. The preference people in category B are demonstrating is for getting drunk.
The information is still interesting, though, in its own vague way.
We can see, for example, that a much larger proportion of non- and low-alcohol beers were consumed by ABC1s – that is, middle class drinkers – than by any other social group.
A higher percentage of super-strength lagers, meanwhile, were consumed by people over 50 and also by those in the DE social grouping, i.e. non-skilled working class people and the unemployed.
And more of the premium lager sold was consumed by C2s, skilled working class people, than by those in any other category.
All of which, quibbling aside, might be said to reflect stereotypes fairly well on the nose.
Lager and the ABC1s, 1989 originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog


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