Ale should follow lead of golden boy Magners

England may not have lifted the World Cup and Andy Murray may not have won Wimbledon, but in a way this summer has seen something even more astonishing.

The great drinking hit of the year has been cider. Er, Irish cider, with ice. Did you even realise it existed before? If so, you're one up on me. But now, thanks to Magners, we all know. Growth figures of 250% in six months tell their own story. And Magners has had a knock-on effect on cider more generally, with both the on-trade and off-trade reporting a surge of interest. Cider and perry sales even rocketed at Camra's Great British Beer Festival this year, with the cider bar selling out early on Friday and Saturday.

To be sure, it didn't just happen on its own. Magners' owner C&C Group seems to have modelled its approach to the market on that of Gallo, using the shock and awe of lavish advertising (a £20m spend) to soften resistance before putting the sales ball into play. It's worked well, just as billboard-bombing did for the California wine giant. But the bare

fact remains that something previously thought impossible has happened: drinking pints of cider has become fashionable, trendy and cool.

Even more impressive is the fact that the Magners approach is, on the face of it, so naff. All this money has not gone on post-modern, oblique, stylised advertising of the Guinness ilk, the sort of thing that is normally thought essential to propel a consumer product towards the front of the cutting edge. Instead, it's gone on pictures of apple orchards in full blossom, close-ups of the product itself and recycling of old Donovan hits. How much more straightforward can you get? Instead of sending punters running for cover, leaving the air echoing with hoots of derision, it's worked. The lads with tattoos and earrings, and the lasses with studs through their tongues and navels, have queued up to buy and re-buy. Glory be.

Believe in your product

Glory be, because this was precisely what most of those who love great cider have been urging the UK's established large cider companies to do for the best part of two decades. Believe in your product, in other words. Don't trick it up and travesty it; don't apologise for it by heavy discounting; don't blur its edges by misguided alco-pop extensions; don't use its naturally high alcohol levels to make intoxication its primary appeal. Just make it taste good, and sell it with pride and confidence.

We like cider, you see, we British. We're a northerly people, and the apple not the grape, is the fruit of choice in our climate. Beer is wonderful, but its flavour spectrum is a cereal-bitter one, not a fruity one. If we want an alcoholic drink that tastes of fruit, cider has been the ancestral alternative for all but a wealthy elite until recently. Now, of course, we have decent inexpensive wine, too, but wine is a mid-length, sipping drink, not a long drink. If you want fruity flavours in a long drink, cider still has no rival.

What stopped all those drinkers who are now contentedly putting away pints of Magners from choosing cider before? A number of things. First and most importantly, it was the sense that cider wasn't a quality product. Cider-makers had chased the park-bench pound for so long that the whole category had become tarnished by association.

Secondly, all the innovation in the category had gone into creating freaky products (like white cider and ice cider) which did their best to strip away and deny the true apple flavour rather than celebrate it. Cider was the drink that didn't dare to speak its name. The big cider makers regarded the British cider tradition not as something positive to draw sustenance from, but as a source of contagion to be kept at arm's length.

And now? Gaymer (part of the mighty Constellation) has just sent me three single-orchard vintage ciders to try - each with a

different name, origin and blend of apples, but all traditional ciders. I've enjoyed them and they're good products which I'd be happy to recommend to consumers. Glory be. Why didn't Gaymer want to do this a decade ago?

Confounding the pundits

The lesson of the Magners' summer then, is that a simple, confident approach based on the very best of tradition can confound every pundit in town, and help to pull a dithering drink category right back into the mainstream, helping it to reawaken the dormant appreciation that was always there.

So, are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Well, why not? Why shouldn't someone or other "do a Magners" for ale? Why not push a particular brand into everyone's face with confident advertising spend? Why not celebrate the great things it has to offer, like lots of flavour based on East Anglia's fields of gold and Kent's green hop gardens? Why not shove a few ice cubes in it, or assure customers it will never be served any warmer than 9°C? Or why not do something else along these lines that I haven't even thought of, and which Camra members may not like, but which might click with all those drinkers out there who are really rather bored with the staple diet and want something a bit different, a bit new, but a bit good too?

There seems to be a big practical obstacle, which is that real ale requires cellar skills and poses storage problems which kegs of Magners don't.

Yet, as anyone who has ever visited a few American micro-breweries will know, cask conditioning isn't essential for great ale, just for real ale. The two overlap, but aren't identical. If ingredients and brewing are good enough, innovative ales of high excitement can be delivered in keg format. It just requires a little fresh thinking, something the British beer industry hasn't always been associated with in the past.

But perhaps that will change. As the Magners' summer has proved, anything is possible.