World Brewing Congress, cont.

The controversy over MillerCoors’ alcoholic energy drink, Sparks, underlines the claims made by our correspondent Ina Verstl in her paper at the EBC’s “Beer, Nutrition and Health” symposium that for as long as brewers continue to engage in the production of these beverages, they cannot expect that their claims “beer is good for you” are considered trustworthy.

Ina Verstl argued that if brewers promote beer’s wholesomeness, this will only entice the various representatives of the anti-alcohol lobby to accuse brewers of hypocrisy, double-standards, of fogging-up their real (they say, base) intentions – which is just to sell more beer.

“Let me point out something which is so obvious that it should not require mentioning,” she said. “The wholesomeness of beer is an issue that concerns consumers in the first world only. It is a first-world issue. It is of only periphery concern to consumers in eastern Europe, in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Tell an African that beer is good for him and he will say “yeah, don’t you tell me” and order a Guinness. He will order a Guinness for exactly the wrong reasons – not because alcohol consumed in moderation will have a generally positive effect on the human body but because Guinness reputedly has one particular effect: to improve his masculine prowess.

Promoting beer’s wholesomeness in Africa, Latin America and Russia is really beside the point for as long as people – for economic reasons – cannot get enough of it. In Asia, where laws are more lax as concerns making health claims, selling beer as a wholesome product may have some positive effects.”

But do consumers really care if beer is professedly as healthy as some non-alcoholic beverage with ginseng and chrysanthemum?

Ina Verstl made another point: The wholesomeness of beer feeds on primarily middle-class anxieties about body image, diet, lifestyle and illness.

So if brewers go out of their way and research what exactly makes beer wholesome that is a laudable move. But Ina Verstl also issued a political warning: What are brewers planning on doing with their findings?

There are two groups of people to be wary of:

1. consumers

2. the members of the anti-alcohol lobby

Let’s begin with the first group: the consumers

Brewers in the first world have their minds focused firmly on those in the age bracket 18 to 34. In the U.S. because of a different legal drinking age that’s the 21 to 34 year olds.

However, do these consumers really care about beer being wholesome? Recent research by Anheuser-Busch’s marketing department shows that 30 percent of adults do not drink beer at all, and 13 percent drink it so infrequently they are called “past year drinkers” (Anheuser-Busch, 2006, Beer Shopper Fundamentals).

It may not be politically opportune to point this out but if you see how carelessly young people in the first world pop pills to alter their state of mind, whose provenance is dubious and always illegal, you may doubt that beer’s wholesomeness may even enter their minds.

Older consumers – those who are worrying increasingly about their remaining life expectancy - may be more inclined to accept the argument that beer is wholesome. However, the cynics that they have become with age – will they accept research, which says that beer is wholesome, as scientifically valid? Or will they just think: “who’s paid for this research?”

Remember the tobacco industry funding research for decades, which was meant to prove that smoking cigarettes was not harmful. It all came out in the end as a big swindle.

Or does anybody remember the huge marketing campaign for soft margarine in the 1970s which was based around scientific evidence about butter as a major source of cholesterol and as such being bad for the heart? It turned out that moderate consumption of butter is ok.

Next came the eggs, whose consumption was also said to accelerate your early demise.

What came after that? Presumably the finding that three litres of water are good for you. People started knocking back litres of water whether they were thirsty or not only to be told recently – bolstered by new research – that drinking that much water is actually bad for you. In the meantime, the bottled water industry has cried all the way to the bank.

According to Ms Verstl, brewers are taking on an enormous risk if they actively promote beer’s wholesomeness, while disavowing the nature of the controversy between them and the anti-alcohol lobby.

For brewers, beer’s wholesomeness is an argument about scientifically proven safe levels of alcohol consumption. Or even beneficial levels of alcohol consumption.

However, to the anti-alcohol lobby it is something else. They are driving a much more fundamental argument: for them, alcohol is a lethal aspect of our first-world culture. They would like to eradicate a tradition, which, as they see it, has given us nothing but grief and harm. In proper dialectic fashion, they view alcohol as the dark side of our culture. That is why are engaged in a cultural war - and not in a scientific dispute.

If you look at the debate that has evolved in the U.S. over these alcopops with caffeine, you can see the same arguments at work. MillerCoors is taking a legalistic point of view: They argue that they go to great lengths to ensure all of their products are marketed in a very responsible manner to legal drinking-age adults. And MillerCoors’ Sparks beverages have all been approved for sale by the federal government.

However, the underlying message that the public receives, reads: MillerCoors only have their profits in mind.

The attorneys general do not doubt that MillerCoors is law-abiding. Yet, they take the moral high ground (and defend it well) that these products nevertheless harm young people.

Now who will win this argument? Certainly not a brewer who might feel inclined to promote beer’s wholesomeness.