On Ice

Something has been bugging me for the past year, but I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps it is time that I either let it go or examined the reasons for my irritation. I speak of that alcoholic phenomenon of 2006 – Magners “On Ice.”

At the start of 2006, Magners’ Irish owner C&C Group got together with Scottish & Newcastle (who own the other big cider brand Strongbow) to decide how they could revive flagging sales.

The top and bottom of it was that cider was seen as the drink of girls and country bumpkins from the West Country. What devilish plan could they come up with to make it appealing to a wider audience?

The answer was to server it colder… over ice for bottled cider or out of super-chilled taps for the draught version.

For some reason this has really irritated me. Surely it is such a transparent gimmick that the Great British public wouldn’t fall for it?

However, fall for it they did in droves - sales of cider in the UK grew 23% in 2006 to 965 million pints.

As reported by the BBC here , even Prince William likes a tipple or two (please avoid the obvious joke that he likes two or three at a time…)

Two things annoy me about the new wave of cider drinkers. Firstly, many claim that they have “always had ice with their cider.” Nonsense – if you had gone down my local and asked for cider with ice in it 18 months ago, you would have left with your head looking like a rotten apple.

Secondly, everyone claims that they have been drinking Magners for years. Again, that is nonsense. It wasn’t imported to the UK at all until 2003 (http://www.candcgroupplc.ie/group_alcohol_long.asp#Magners ) and not available nationally until much later than that.

But what of the drink itself? Why do I dislike it so much?

Perhaps it is the “Oirishness” of Magners itself – maybe it is one of those “Plastic Paddy” type products that claims to have some Irish tradition just to appeal to a shallow customer base? Sadly, it is genuinely Irish (although it is called Bulmers in Ireland, they can not use that name here for trademark reasons). That can’t be why it annoys me then…

Oh yes, there we have it! It is the nonsense, baseless branding behind it!

Here is a quote from their website (http://www.magnerscider.com/about-us/ ):

“Naturalness, Tradition, Heritage and Craft have always been at the core of Magners. Over the years, the brand continues to emphasise that quality and craftsmanship take 'Time' and that emphasis on 'Time' becomes evident in the communication of 'All in its own Good Time' and more recently 'Time Dedicated to you'.”

What a load of pretentious codswallop! If the Campaign for Real Cider had the same sort of teeth as CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) they would tear that to pieces. Wouldn’t they???

Unfortunately it seems that their cider making process does take a long time – certainly it seems to be a more craft-based process than most of the lager brewed in the UK.

I guess that I am going to have to let it go. I’ll just content myself with baseless sneering instead. Just like the very people who are drinking cider on ice these days used to at cider drinkers a couple of years ago.

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