Beer Radar
By John Krüger
(First published by Wine Business Magazine in 2008)
Real beer fans prefer brunettes.
If we had a visiting team of beer marketers in our office, we’d smack them on the noses with rolled up newspapers and rub their noses in their directionless campaigns and misinformation. One of many irritants in recent beer marketing to us is the label ‘blonde.’ For about a century, ‘blonde’ has been used to describe a lighter coloured beer, and all was well. Now ‘blonde’ is somehow associated with a low carbohydrate content. We’re still to work out the connection.
Doctor Trent Watson from the Australian Institute of Accredited Dieticians says the low-carb option is far from the ideal choice for those consumers watching their energy intake. “Carbohydrates should be 40-50% of our total energy intake, and that the average full strength beer has about as many carbohydrates as half a slice of bread (~7gms)” he says. So it’s like ordering a diet soft-drink to go with a bucket of fried chicken. It’s not the carbo’s in beer that’s the nutritional problem. Most beers are low in residual sugar but it’s the alcohol that’s really the culprit. If you’re like us, you’d prefer to think of alcohol as a handy solvent that happens to make us happy on it’s otherwise ineffectual trip through the body. Unfortunately we’re very much deluded when it comes to nutrition. Our bodies happen to be damn good at metabolising the depressant alcohol which is almost immediately stored as fat in our livers.
A healthier alternative is low or mid strength beers, or our favourite: drink less, but drink well. Considering our preference for bar stools over bicycles, the scariest thing we learned from Dr. Trent is that each full strength beer holds around 600 kilojoules, which takes about 30 minutes of walking to burn off. That’s right, it’d take 3 hours of walking to burn off a 6 pack of beer, or around 2 hours for a 6 pack of light. There’s no way in hell a 6 pack of light beer is ever going to be worth 2 hours of walking in our minds. Maybe it’s time to get a carton of Coopers Birell (0.5%abv) before my WiiFit instructor starts calling me fat again.
