Lager... in a minute

Now then, lager: it's probably the strongest drinks category in the world, isn't it?

Well there was a time, but you can increasingly look towards the likes of imported whisky, vodka and light wine for that accolade.

But it still refreshes the parts other categories can't reach?

Not entirely. While mainstream lager presses ahead, draught premium sales were down 1.1% in the year to November and premium packaged lagers, once the lime-stuffed darlings of the style magazines, fell 3.6% says AC Nielsen.

Does it help to be "the genuine article"?

If you mean brewed in the country that the beer originally came from, it would appear so, with sales of imported beers increasing by 17% year on year. That's not to imply that using that line in your ads means the beer does actually come from its historical source, of course. Tiger, Budvar, Hoegaarden and Leffe are among the crop of imports making some decent headway.

You seem to know lager, are you a Skol-ar?

No, and fewer and fewer people are. The once proud brand took a back seat to Carlsberg in the merger-mad 1990s and has slid down the sales charts along with other brands such as Heineken, Harp and Hofmeister.

The message seems to be to avoid having a brand that starts with "H". Clearly ­ people wouldn't rather be Hemeling.

You might have a point, especially as the "H" in Hoegaarden is silent when you say it in Dutch. Heineken's still heavily-supported, just having trouble winning the trade round to its strategic reinvention as a 5% abv brand in these Stella and Grolsch saturated times. Harp took a back seat because of Diageo's Guinness and spirits vision of the future, but it's crawling back through a licensing deal with Manchester brewer Hydes. Or maybe they should call it 'ydes.

I couldn't give a XXXX, frankly. Anyway, I'm running out of lager ads now. I know, "dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum, Car-ling Black Label".

You really must try to keep up.