Gods and park benches. (Carlsberg Special Brew)

Member Name: Rumblefish

Product:	Carlsberg Special Brew
Date:	19/04/01 (1718 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Favoured by tramps and hooligans

Disadvantages: Favoured by tramps and hooligans

There are few more distinctive beers in terms of taste, appearance, and reputation (notoriety?) than Carlsberg Special Brew. The mere mention of its name will conjure up certain images in the minds of some, and possibly also certain memories (my apologies for reminding you – yes YOU!) Of course many people, even beer-drinkers, will never have touched the drink – or touched it once and vowed never to do so again. Yet Special Brew is more than just a beer. It’s a symbol, an accessory. To be seen drinking Special Brew is to make a very public statement. But is this statement simply: “I intend to get very pissed very quickly”, or something more?

The Carlsberg brewery was formed in 1847 a few miles outside of Copenhagen, Denmark in the tiny village of Valby. Its founder was J C Jacobsen, who had begun his career brewing bland fermented beer for his father. Jacobsen enjoyed imported mature Bavarian beer and wanted to create a Danish equivalent, so he brought back some Bavarian beer yeast and began production in his hilltop brewery. He named the beer after his five year-old son “Carl” and “berg”, the Danish word for hill.

Carlsberg went on to become one of the world’s most successful breweries (today they churn out three-quarters of a million bottles of beer every single hour), but it was not until over a century later, in 1950, that Special Brew was born. Its creation was actually prompted by an Englishman – Winston Churchill. Churchill was seen as a hero and liberator in Denmark, whose people had suffered under the Nazis in WWII, and when he visited Copenhagen in 1950 it was thought appropriate to brew a special lager as a tribute. Two crates of the beer were sent to Churchill’s London home. He called it “Commemoration Lager” in the letter of thanks he sent to Carlsberg, although in Denmark it was known as Easter Beer. But for the purposes of the British market it was
named Special Brew, and when Carlsberg began production in their subsidiary plant in Northampton, a legend was born…

Special Brew has a strength of 9 per cent alcohol, which is by no means the strongest available from your local off-license, but far from the weakest too. Taste-wise, it is a rich, heavy beer with a bittersweet finish. It is certainly most unlike any other Carlsberg beer, even Carlsberg Elephant, which weighs in at over 7 per cent alcohol.

My own earliest experience of Special Brew came when I was about fifteen. My friends and I having found an off-license unprincipled/unintelligent enough to sell us alcohol, it was simply a matter of each of us choosing a four-pack. Believing it to be the most reliable vehicle for complete inebriation, I opted for Special Brew (I recall I was also influenced by a television campaign for the drink that Carlsberg was running at the time, which involved a parrot which could only say “Special Brew”). Of course I got very drunk and did some parrot impressions and vomited a good deal, and it all amounted to a pretty successful evening for a fifteen year-old.

Though my Special Brew days are largely behind me (or am I just in denial?), the drink still has a presence in my life. In fact it will have a presence in the life of almost every city-dweller in this country. That it because Special Brew – and even Carlsberg have implicitly admitted this – is a drink of choice for many individuals who are (either temporarily or indefinitely) on the margins of society. I rarely walk up Holloway Road or Camden High Street, night or day, without spotting at least one person with a can of Special Brew gripped in his or her hand. It could be twenty-something football hooligans going to the match or sixty-something vagrants going nowhere, but if they’re carrying a can, there’s a fair chance it’s Special Brew. For those seeking some kind of quick and inexpensive escap
e route from sobriety, Special Brew is the answer. That is not to say that many perfectly civilised and normal people don’t drink Special Brew. However Carlsberg have actively taken steps to try to shed the drink of its “park bench” image.

For example the drink has recently become widely available in the bottle as well as the can (bottled beer is markedly more expensive than the canned variety). Over the years Carlsberg have also redesigned the can, so that the famous gold, which was once glossy and metallic, now has a paler - no doubt “classier” – matt finish. Most notably, and in my view most misguidedly, Carlsberg took out a full-page advert in the Sunday Times in 1999 that sought to radically alter public perception of the drink. The image used was similar in style to the classical Roman mosaics once found in Pompeii, and depicted some unnamed noble, servants afoot, having his can of Special Brew opened for him. Beneath the picture were the words “BEER OF THE GODS” (I’m not making any of this up), and beneath that, in smaller letters, “Probably the most special brew in this world or any other”.

Carlsberg’s sales figures and market research may suggest otherwise, but I personally have seen no more Gods, or even would-be Gods, drinking Special Brew than I did when I was fifteen. In fact it is hard to see exactly what Carlsberg hope to achieve by attempting to move the drink upmarket. With its strong aroma and weighty palate it is never going to be favoured by the sophisticate, whatever its image. In my view they would do better to concentrate on keeping hold of the section of the market in which they can compete (which I would venture is not mainly comprised of Sunday Times readers).

Although it is strong at 9 per cent alcohol, there are plenty of other strong beers in the world (Carlsberg’s own Master Brew is 10.5 per cent), so it is not as if it is an automat
ic choice for those in need of a particularly stiff drink. What Special Brew has over its main rivals, such as Kestrel Super Strength and Tennents Super, is the very tackiness of its image its brewers seem to want to expunge. People generally drink beers like this specifically because they don’t know any better or specifically because they do. There is rarely any in between. But that sublime gold finish, and the mere title Special Brew, imply a kind of flawless ticket to oblivion that attracts first-timers and thousand-timers alike. Rather than attempt to transfer the drink into the realms of Hampstead cocktail parties, Carlsberg should capitalize on the drink’s “park bench” image and use it to its advantage. Oscar Wilde once said: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being be talked about”, and Carlsberg don’t know how lucky they are. Surely in the ironic, self-referential, post-modern, PC-be-damned climate of today, Carlsberg could come up with something more interesting and persuasive than “BEER OF THE GODS”?

Having said that, regular Special Brew drinkers will maintain their loyalty no matter what. Its distinctive flavour is unrivalled, and as many a drinker has been heard to say, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy” (although too many Special Brews induces a mental state not dissimilar to a lobotomy anyway). With its noble heritage and unique reputation, Special Brew is indeed a special brew. The really intriguing question is, did Churchill actually like it?

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