Can a copy beat the original?

After a successful introduction in Ireland, Draught Guinness 0.0 is now being rolled out in Great Britain. Both in canned and draught form, it has been one of the most successful beer launches of all time, and Guinness have had to expand production capacity at their Dublin Brewery to meet demand.

One report complained that it was only 55p a pint cheaper than the standard version, but surely that is about the kind of saving you would expect from not paying duty and the VAT on duty. It doesn’t cost any less to make, and indeed may even cost more due to the processes required for de-alcoholisation. Drinkers of alcohol-free beers have no right to expect a subsidy for being virtuous.

I wrote about the canned version last year, and concluded that, while it was “a triumph of the brewing technologist’s skill”, there was something of a sense of expectations unfulfilled about the experience of drinking it.

Draught or canned Guinness is certainly a very distinctive product in terms of its appearance, mouthfeel and taste, and the canned zero-alcohol version does a pretty good job of replicating that. From its look, and the first gulp, it’s just like a glass of standard Guinness. It’s only as you get further down that you realise something is missing, and by the time you reach the bottom of the glass you’re left with something rather dull and forgettable.

You end up feeling rather like this unfortunate cat.

So successful has Guinness 0.0 been that they have been suggestions that, given time, it could overtake the original alcohol-containing product. However, I would suggest this is part of the excessive hype surrounding alcohol-free beer, and there are two key reasons why it’s vanishingly unlikely to happen.

The first is that, however good Guinness 0.0 is, it can only ever be a diminished echo of the original product. It only exists because standard Guinness exists, just as decaffeinated coffee exists because of normal coffee. There are entirely valid reasons why people, in some circumstances, might want to drink alcohol-free beers, but all they are doing is part-way replicating the experience of normal beer.

And, never having known what normal beer is like, it becomes something of a meaningless activity. Someone might drink alcohol-free beer to join in a social occasion with their boozing friends, but there will come a tipping point when they think “Hey, Bob’s now the only one of us who’s actually drinking. Why are we even doing this?”

The second is that, while it tends of be downplayed in marketing and writing about beer, the key reason people drink it is not so much because of taste or refreshment, but because it has an effect on you. Not so much getting drunk as a gentle warm feeling, a slight relaxation of inhibitions and a stimulant to conversation. It can be seen as a social lubricant.

Alcohol-free beer can never do this, and so its original promise is never fulfilled. People are never going to go on alcohol-free pub crawls, unless tagging along with drinkers, and nor are they going to seek out obscure examples of artisanal alcohol-free beers. There are connoisseurs of fine teas and coffees, but those are natural products, whereas alcohol-free beer is by definition highly processed.

There is no doubt some scope for further expansion of the alcohol-free beer market, but ultimately it will inevitably hit a ceiling.

As a complete aside, a good example of the copy overtaking the original is the TV sitcom “Allo! Allo!”, which was originally a parody of the serious drama “Secret Army”, but ended up far surpassing it in terms of longevity and viewing figures.