By October 1988 suited officer workers in the City of London were also being described as ‘lager louts’, accused of terrorising fellow commuters at Liverpool Street Station. And of course others with their own agendas leapt on the bandwagon. Anti-drink campaigners, for example, saw an opportunity to protest newly extended pub opening hours, to call for tighter restrictions on pubs, and to argue for regulation of alcohol advertising. An announcement on the venues of the Tests in New Zealand and Argentina, as well as the Boks’ training camps will be made in due course. This will mark the first time since 2016 that the Boks host Australia in Pretoria, and the first time since 2013 that they take on Argentina in in Johannesburg, with South Africa having won both those fixtures, by 18-10 and 73-13 respectively.

In the following decade, though lager’s share of the market continued to rise (4 per cent in 1968, 10 per cent in 1971, 20 per cent by 1975), competition grew with it. More brands emerged – genuine imports, foreign brands brewed under licence in the UK (Carlsberg, Holsten), and home-grown ‘faux’ lagers such as Greenall Whitley’s Grünhalle. Andrea Gillies, the new bright young editor of Campaign’s annual Good Beer Guide, spoke yet more harshly of lager brewers at the launch of the 1989 edition of the book, as quoted in the Guardian for 25 October 1988: Nienaber said the national coaches have been hard at work with their planning for the international season where they will look to build on an encouraging 2022 season: “The coaches have hit the ground running this year and we’ll continue to put in the hard yards as we attempt to ensure that we leave no stone unturned before the World Cup.Reflecting on moral panics and the need for scapegoats in government and the media as we worked on this piece we got an uneasy feeling. Surely craft beer will get its turn in the doghouse, won’t it? There is, after all, a cycle new beer styles or market segments seem to go through: What was really happening, we can see from 30 years on, is that a whole lot of unconnected social problems, most of which had nothing in particular to do with lager, were being lumped together. We are on course in terms of finalising our planning for the season and we are excited about returning to the training field,” added the Springbok coach. Lager lads, who are louts… So close. At any rate, this, we suspect is the ultimate source of the phrase as it began to appear during 1988. (John Patten, the Home Office minister, was known to be a real ale drinker.) South Africa will launch their Rugby World Cup title defence on Sunday, 10 September, against Scotland in Marseille, which will be followed by pool matches against Romania in Bordeaux (17 September), Ireland in Paris (23 September) and Tonga in Marseille (1 October).

We respect the time beer needs to be produced, developing little by little inside the tanks. You just can’t rush craftsmanship, and that's why our traditional brewing processes can take up to 8 weeks. We obsess over flavour and aroma, and therefore we fight the quantities of mega production and economies of scale. They must take a lot of blame for the promotion of lager and its violent consequences… My argument is not with lager itself, but with the big boys who are marketing ruthlessly to the wrong people… You can make even more [money] if you convince boys that drinking 10 pints makes them even more macho, but this results in the violence we have seen in the shires. One so-called ‘lager lout’ riot, for example, actually involved 600 middle-aged line dancers scrapping with local gypsies in the foyer of a village hall.And when Watney’s launched UK-brewed draught Foster’s in 1982 the attendant advertising campaign was fronted by comedian Paul Hogan, swaggering and frank, in T-shirt and jeans — the ultimate Australian male.

Though the report was sensible and far from fearmongering it made clear that the problem was real and that something worrying was going on Britain’s towns on Friday and Saturday nights. Warm Dregs The Rugby World Cup quarter-finals will be played on the weekend of 14/15 October, with the semi-finals on 20/21 October and the final on Saturday, 28 October. The hysteria in the papers died down and the police moved on to fretting over ecstasy and illegal raves, and then alco-pops, and then happy-slapping and then… A second group of youths — those who stood around adding bulk to the intimidating mobs but simply watching while their harder peers actually put the boot in — were quite different: smarter, more articulate, actively pursuing careers, and sometimes even public school educated. Further reading: Pete Brown is particularly brilliant on this subject, with Stella Artois as his case study, in 2003’s Man Walks into a Pub.)

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John Foreman is a postman and, on the face of it, not much to write home about. He is light, slight, with neat blond hair and a downy moustache. He seems meek — and each Saturday afternoon on the streets of some football town, he inherits the earth… In his terrace tribe there is a ritual and a sort of code. Each ‘good day out’ follows a similar pattern; invariably the violence is fuelled by a mixture of lager and cider. Fist fights are acceptable, knife fights are not. Lager was chic. Lager was beer’s answer to Swedish cutlery, Danish chairs, and Italian scooters. There was no suggestion of soot or grit in lager, which spoke of clean living and the cool grey north. Lager was smart. And so were lager drinkers.

At the same time lager’s image began to change in line with a general cultural shift which saw the first wave of ‘new man’-ism – only subtly sexist and knowing his way round an omelette pan – give way to the hairy-chested, unrepentant machismo of the 1970s. Instead of the Scandinavia of walnut coffee tables and Ibsen, lager adopted Viking imagery — Hagar the Horrible for Skol, Norseman from Vaux. In the long-term this opportunism probably did CAMRA more harm than good, making it seem snobbish and puritanical, and perhaps alienating those who enjoyed lager and ale . The Campaign for Real Ale, of course, had a field day. For some time it had been re-orienting its guns from keg bitter, the great scourge of the 1970s, towards lager, and in an article for What’s Brewing in December 1988 Tony Millns gloated over lager’s new image problem: A similar pen portrait from The Times for 22 July 1981, of an 18-year-old east London skinhead called John O’Leary, mentions his habit of drinking lager from the can in the very first line. When England football fans returned home after an outbreak of violence at a match in Copenhagen in September 1982 journalists felt the need to mention that they arrived at Heathrow ‘drinking lager from cans’. Lager’s symbolism had become potent, the mere word a shortcut for a certain type of troubled, troublesome youth. The problem for British brewers was that lager sophisticates were drinking imports. Ind Coope had a British lager in its roster, Graham’s, but it was Carlsberg that had the credibility. In 1959, though, Graham’s was relaunched and rebranded, as explained by Martyn Cornell in this 2012 blog post:

All three sides will enter the international spectacle in France among a handful of teams that will be considered potential contenders for the title, so we are expecting a thorough test throughout the campaign.” Prince Charles (attractive wife, lots of money), Don Johnson (star of Miami Vice, cars, pretty girls, expensive clothes, money), Rod Stewart and Peter Stringfellow (for the same reasons).