FROWN LAGER: The premium beer nobody wants to drink

CROWN Lager is being offered on tap in Aussie pubs for the first time. But without the label, does anyone want it?

Crown Lager in a schooner

IT'S the beer that people drink so that they can be seen drinking it.

It doesn't actually taste better than other beer, but the bottle has a certain cachet associated with it, especially if you clutch it with your small finger extended in an effeminate fashion.

Plus it has a gold label. Not a garish yellow label like that awful beer the commoners in Queensland drink, but a distinctive, distinguished gold label which stamps its drinkers as people of class.

One doesn’t drink Crown Lager. One imbibes it. But take away that gold label and guess what happens? One doesn't drink it at all, that's what.

Crown Lager started a national rollout on tap last month, and the early signs from pubs aren't good.

The rather poetic people at CUB say the beer is delivered "fresh and cold from a beautifully engineered tap that controls the flow rate of Crown Lager into a specially designed glass using nucleated technology to ensure compact and lasting foam."

Whatever that means, it ain’t working. The word from one Sydney local and other pubs we spoke to is that people just won’t buy Crown Lager without that gold-labelled bottle.

The average Australian, whose beer palate is second to none in the world, has long asserted that Crown is Foster's in a gold bottle.

Not true, say the good folk at CUB, who cite a combination of "Pride of Ringwood hops", "A strain yeast" and "a maturation period that is double that of other regular beers" as the factors that make Crown Lager unique.

All that beer mumbo-jumbo counts for nothing, say beer industry insiders. As a commenter on the website brewsnews.com.au wrote:

"I cannot detect anything premium about [Crown]. In a blind tasting with other CUB beers, most cannot tell the difference. I am a qualified brewer and I can’t detect anything superior.

"If CUB were to substitute real pride of Ringwood hop flowers in multiple additions instead of isomerised hop extract at the bottling line, then they would have a good beer."

At the risk of turning this into a story about chemistry, the gist here appears to be that Crown Lager is made with essence of thingamywhatsit, not actual real thingamywhatsit.

People will forgive them for that, but only if they can drink it in a bottle with a gold label.