Since I guess most of you beautiful people out there in interweb wonderland* are now back at work. I guess this site ought to be too. We’ll try for a weekly blob format and see how we travel.

So, with the Commonwealth Games breathing down our necks like a drunk standing too close on a packed Friday evening tram, it’s on with the shoooooooo…

(* Phraseology developed and copyrighted by Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, in his unique interview stylings)

PERSON THE BARRICADES

If there was ever one issue that I thought could get Austrayans to the point of marching in the street, it was BEER.

And friends and customers, I don’t want to be too apocalyptic here - only just apocalyptic enough - but we’re nudging close to that particular water-closet.

I am here to expose a sad travesty of a mockery of a sham of a flatulent fraudulence - little short of an OUTRAGE, with a screw-job cherry on top.

The import BEER they’re trying to sell us is not imported. Repeat - (walkie-talkie static) The Eagle Has Landed - the import BEER being sold here is not imported.

They’re charging import beer prices. It has foreign countries and cities and the word “original” all over the labels, and it is made right here in Australia City.

They snuck this one in on us, bar-room buddies. They have flim-flammed and hornswoggled us, made out like bandits, sold us a load of clams, and flipped us an avian-oriented gesture of monumental proportions.

And the prime offenders are: Heineken, Stella Artois, Carlsberg, and Tuborg.

All these beers, which most consumers will doubtless believe are the genuine article, since they haven’t been previously warned any different, are now “brewed under licence” in Australia, with the exception of Tuborg, which despite references to “Copenhagen”, “Denmark” and “Genuine Quality” all over the front of the bottle/labels is brewed in that famous Danish stronghold of Auckland, New Zealand.

From my point of view, “Brewed Under Licence” translates simply to “Not the same beer”/”Inferior Product to the original”. On the latter point, I’ve never tasted one beer “brewed under licence” that, to my mind, was an improvement or an equivalent to the original. All four of the examples under discussion conform to that expectation in my opinion, not to mention gob and throat.

As to “Not the same beer”, by all means taste them and judge for yourself, while paying premium/import beer price for a locally brewed product dressed up in a fancy and misleading label.

On that score, on the front of none of these beers’ labels is there one word about this being Australasian product. There’s lots of “Amsterdams”, “Originals”, “Belgiums” etc to go around. All the medals these beers won in 1882 and all that good stuff.

The bit about how it’s not really the beer that won any of these medals, and it doesn’t come from any of these cities or countries, and it’s not, by simple definition, the “original” or “genuine”, is to be found, in each and every shameful, blackguardly case, in some very fine print buried on the back label of each bottle.

In each case, when I bought the beers concerned, I’d thought they were the real McCoy. (or McCoysberg or McCoyneken, as the case may be.) I was certainly getting charged real McCoy prices. The only other tell-tale sign, which isn’t sufficiently tell-tale from the victim’s point-of-view I can assure you, is that in the case of Heineken and Carlsberg, they’ve altered the label so it’s printed onto the bottle as a transparency, rather than the familiar paper’n’glue model. The Tuborg label features a slightly different colour green to the original, big deal.

In each case, your No-Ship Sherlock detected the three-card-trick only when the beer tasted funny, and the bottle was rotated in puzzlement to reveal a breach of faith (and wallet) and shattering disappointment.

Cheese Whillikers, pilgrims, I’d really hoped we were all over this crap. For years, many Angus Young moons ago, the only Lowenbrau you could buy here was a murderously ordinary “brewed under licence” pretend version by Sydney brewers who couldn’t even brew Sydney beers all that well at the time, by and large. As a result, for many years, you couldn’t buy the real Lowenbrau here, which was a shame, as that’s a good solid German flavour-grappling beer.

(The Lowenbrau available in rather too few stores these days is the legitimate article, at least at last sighting.)

Where are Sir Graham Samuel and his A-CCCP consumer-protecting rodeo clown posse when we need them? (Actually, after loveable old Prof Fels stepped down, I have no idea what happened to this organisation. Maybe they’re locked away in a Witness Protection Program or something.)

If a product’s made in Australia, it should say that loud and clear. On the front and back labels. In whopping-size letters. Particularly when almost every other aspect of the packaging is encouraging consumers to believe the product they’re purchasing is imported, and they’re being charged accordingly. Another good idea would be to wallpaper the street and the inside of people’s televisions with billboards giving them fair warning about this practice.

This paltry theatrical shop-front site encourages all readers in Australia not to purchase these products. You don’t want to encourage the people responsible do you. Of course not.

If you were of a suspicious turn of mind you could even think that maybe the local brewers responsible were thinking/hoping that the idiots out there (i.e. you, me and the public makes three) wouldn’t notice any different so they could coin it in charging import beer prices for product made here but packaged to look exactly like an import. What a suspicious turn of mind some of you have. Tut, tut. And pshaw, whatever that means exactly.

And getting back to the Lowenbrau debacle of a previous century mentioned earlier, another downside we might very well have to deal with is that while this borderline till-fiddling practice is allowed to continue, we won’t be able to buy the genuine, and wholly admirable, imported product of the brewers concerned - i.e. Heineken, Carlsberg, Stella Artois, and Tuborg.

If that’s the case, it’s the greatest flat-out “Lose-Lose” scenario since we decided to (a) have the Commonwealth Games here, and (b) decided to screw up the football draw as a direct result.

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