The Boag's Effect

Sitting at the bar at Frankie's, a fellow beer lover casually mentions the drinks people have been ordering all night. I've just come from a concert at the State Theatre, and he's been drinking since after work, so he's had a lot more time to make such observations. "A group of guys ordered those two drinks at the bottom," he says, pointing to the tap list at back of the cash register. The only permanent fixture is Boag's, with the remainder of the list crudely fashioned from strips of masking tape and permanent marker. The two beers he's referring to are by Doctor's Orders and HopDog. "They didn't even know what they were, but they seemed to like them! At least they weren't drinking Boag's." A light bulb goes off in my head.

Frankie's Pizza is the third offering from the people who brought you Shady Pines Saloon and the Baxter Inn. After barely a month in operation, it's already a raging success, just like its sister bars. This with only a word-of-mouth marketing campaign and a little article in TimeOut. Just like its sister bars. It's well-deserved, too, with the bar offering a wide selection of good beer both on tap and in bottles, pizza by the slice, free pinball, hard rock blaring out of the speakers, and an atmosphere that evokes the great American dive bar, without the surly bartenders. The two minor gripes about Frankie's coming from people within the beer community are the plastic mugs and the availability of Boag's, but both of these are mostly understandable; the former is partly due to licencing restrictions, and the latter is presumably a consequence of a contract to pay for the tap system. The positives of Sydney's latest beer bar not only outweigh but overwhelm the negatives.

"Maybe it's because of the Boag's that they're drinking those beers," I tell my drinking partner. He nods slowly with a look in his eyes that could be epiphanic or a result of drinking for hours on end. It could be the alcohol affecting me too, but I'm beginning to think we've stumbled onto some weird phenomenon here. "Maybe," I continue, "it's because Boag's doesn't have the same appeal of, say, New or Carlton. The casual crowd comes in, maybe after work, and they only see Boag's on tap. It's Boag's. It's the lowest of the low.* It's water. So they try one of the other beers on the list, and all the other beers actually have flavour. Maybe Boag's is turning these people onto good beer."

It makes a odd, drunken sort of sense that the necessity of a tap contract has worked out better than planned for Frankie's and for the growth of the beer community as a whole. Is Boag's an unlikely hero in the campaign to convert big brand drinkers to the tastier side?


*I'm not suggesting this is true as it can get much, much lower; it's just a drunken hypothesis on the big brand beer drinker's thought process