Mitchell Toy: VB and the man behind Victoria Bitter, Thomas Aitken
Victoria’s hard earned thirst has been quenched by one of the state’s most enduring beer brands for more than 160 years — find out the story behind the Aussie icon, VB.
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This is him – the man who invented Victoria Bitter.
Thomas Aitken was just 19 years old when he arrived in Australia from Scotland, and the lad had no idea how his ingenuity and persistence would shape the face of the country.
And it would get plenty of people off their faces in the process.
Anyone whose spouse is a little too fond of this now-iconic amber fluid can lay the blame at the feet of old Thomas.
Whether you think his beer is the country’s best or the country’s worst, you have to admire the man. He really knew his stuff.
Ask a brewer (there are lots of them in Melbourne these days) and they’ll tell you the most popular beer is the hardest to make.
The Victoria Brewery on Victoria Parade in East Melbourne was the birthplace of one of Australia’s most popular beers in 1854 when Aitken used a wortstream brewing process to craft the bitter lager.
Aitken, who had apprenticed as a brewer since he was a boy, brought decades of experimentation and knowledge to the process.
In those days the beer industry was crowded.
Victoria Brewery was up against Carlton Brewery, Foster Brewing Company, McCracken’s City Brewery, Shamrock Brewing and more.
The brewers formed a cartel in 1903 and formalised their alliance in 1907 when Carlton & United Breweries was founded.
Melbourne Bitter, VB’s cousin, didn’t come along until 1936 and was first brewed by Jack Prendergast and Nick Deheer before it was bought by CUB.
Saying you can’t taste the difference between the two is on the list of ultimate Melbourne faux pas, up there with “instant coffee isn’t so bad”, so I’ll pretend my delicate palate could set Melbourne and Victoria Bitter apart in a blind taste test.
Despite a presence on the Australian market for several decades, VB didn’t reach widespread popularity until the 1960s when the famous wild-west style advertising campaign hit TV screens.
You might say this thing was the exact opposite of the, uh, very modern ad campaign that has seen Bud Light drop a megaton of customers in the US.
The hairy-chested, horseriding, sun-loving image of VB was set to music similar to theme from the Hollywood film The Magnificent Seven.
It catapulted the beer into the national consciousness where it has remained ever since.
Ads including the slogan “A hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer” and “matter of fact I got it now” continued in an unchanged theme for decades until the 2000s.
The taste of VB, the smell of Aerogard and the sound of Richie Benaud on the TV was a winning combination until poor old Richie left us.
Perhaps the most controversial chapter in VB’s history came in 2007 when CUB announced it would reduce the percentage of alcohol from 4.9 per cent to 4.8 per cent.
The plan was to dodge an oppressive tax and save the company millions of dollars.
Maybe they hoped the drinkers wouldn’t notice.
Anyway, they certainly did notice.
Readers of a certain vintage will remember the episode of the Simpsons in which alcohol was outlawed in Springfield and the Duff Beer company vowed to continue with a non-alcoholic product, claiming it was the beer’s taste, not the alcoholic content, that made it popular.
They went out of business the next day.
And the reaction to VB’s alcohol reduction was pretty similar.
An extraordinary backlash from beer lovers saw the extra alcohol reintroduced lickety-split.
Is it really the bitter taste perfected by Thomas Aitken that VB drinkers adore, or the tendency for a few stubbies to send them off the planet?
Maybe it’s both, hey.
These days Carlton United Breweries is owned by international beverage giant Asahi Breweries.
The hipster revolution of the 2010s, during which craft breweries popped up like Scotch thistles in the north and west, barely put a dent in VB’s popularity.
Despite sockless twenty-somethings still deriding it as a bogan brand, see if the bogans care.
They keep downing VB like it’s going out of fashion, which it definitely isn’t.
It seems a permanent fixture in the top five beers in Australia, where its current competitors include Great Northern Brewing Co, XXXX Gold, Carlton Draught and Coopers.
Its many nicknames include “Very Bad” for naysayers, “Very Best” for devotees and, as my dad calls it, “Vitamin B”.
Like the AFL, it is very much an Australian thing.
Ask if someone has VB in the US and they’ll probably think you’re inquiring about a venereal disease.
For better or worse, Foster’s continues to be a wildly popular export brand, but so what.
More VB for us.
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