The rising importance of origins

A recent survey on perceptions of beer authenticity made depressing reading... or did it, asks ANDREW JEFFORD

How much do origins matter? To me, they matter a great deal, which is why I'm an inveterate label-reader and small-print hound. This is partly a quest for quality: the very best of anything nearly always comes from a uniquely-skilled set of people working with fine raw materials in a particular place on Earth. If you want the best, you need to seek it out. But if the best exists, someone is usually trying to imitate it, fake it or cash in on it. Partly, though, the quest has a philosophical dimension: I like products of all sorts to be meaningful and true, and it's only by scrutinising the small print that you stand a chance of sifting the truth from the lies. Viewed in this way, cheap designer goods, reproduction antique furniture, Dutch greenhouse tomatoes, fake Picassos and best-selling 'Indian lager brewed in the UK to a completely different recipe to that used in India, are all points along the same continuum of the second-rate and the insincere.

Mostly, though, I'm in a small minority so why should it be any different here? Life's too short to worry about the small print, right? This possibility was why I was so interested in the results of a recent survey carried out by NoFIBs, which is the artful acronym for the National Organisation for Imported Beers.

The very purpose of NoFIBs is to ensure consumers realise which lagers really are foreign and which are merely using foreign names to sell British-brewed product. (OK, technically it's beers, but we don't import a lot of ale and most of that goes to the label-savvy anyway.) With admirable open-mindedness, NoFIBS decided to see if it was merely scrutinising the contents of its own authentic and original navel, or if the public really cared where its lager came from. The results, with one or two exceptions, look pretty depressing for folk like me.

Stella? French, right? Er, no!

Seven out of 10 of those surveyed, for example, were not swayed in any way by authentic provenance. Most consumers, in other words, simply don't care whether or not a German lager comes from Germany, or a Belgian lager from Belgium. Less than half knew where familiar brands were meant to come from in any case, with many of those surveyed thinking that Stella Artois came from France, Kronenbourg and Grolsch from Germany, and Beck's and Budweiser Budvar from the USA.

Just one-quarter of those surveyed knew that Heineken is now an authentic Dutch-brewed lager; the rest didn't know and didn't care. The only apparently good news was that most of those interviewed were prepared to pay a little more for authentic imported lager, and when asked about the phrase 'premium lager, some drinkers assumed that it meant 'foreign or European.

So are all those international hauliers thundering down Europe's motorways in vain? Not necessarily. First of all, the results mean that three out of 10 drinkers do, in fact, care where the lager they are drinking comes from, which nationally adds up to some muscular spending power, and represents a still-underexploited resource for importers. Second, we don't yet know where the trend is going: maybe it will be four out of 10 in three years, and half of all drinkers in a decade. Britons, after all, are far more internationally minded today than in the past, even if they never leave Droitwich but simply keep tabs on Premiership players and managers, and this increasing consciousness of the world beyond Dover will only serve to accentuate the sense of origin and difference in the future.

Finally, though, I'm enough of an optimist to believe that the 'don't-know-don't-care attitude to food and drink, shown in this survey seems to bring out, is on the wane. It's just that we constantly underestimate the starting point for most British consumers, so the journey for most may be a much longer one than we think.

I know of no other country (France included) where cookery writers, restaurant reviewers and chefs occupy such a prominent position in public life as they do in today's UK; British writers have dominated writing and broadcasting on beer, wine and spirits internationally over the last two decades.

The gravitational field of popular culture, not highbrow culture, is beginning to incite British drinkers to take their beer seriously, just as Jamie, Nigella and Ainsley are urging them to take their food (and, at long last, their children's food) seriously. That will mean more and more drinkers hunting down beers made with skill and fine raw materials in particular places and, perhaps, an end to unoriginality.