I admit it: I was suckered.

When I was *cough* 16 or so, and just discovering the wonders/evils of alcohol (as you do, and DON’T tell me you didn’t because I KNOW you will be lying) and on holiday or out at indie clubs, I drank cider. Like so many other teenagers, I discovered that it was the most palatable thing to my undeveloped drinking palate, tasting a lot like fizzy apple juice, and boy, did the marketing teams know it. I shudder to remember a visit to friends in Somerset, when we sang in New Year 1990 on the market cross steps in Somerton, passing around bottles of Diamond White, having been ejected before the bells from the White Hart on the market square. These days, I look at teenagers swigging cider in public spaces and tsk under my breath. How soon we forget - though, of course, we were different, being educated, good at school and polite to our parents and strangers. Mostly.

The summer after I was 16, on a stop-off visit to Kendall on my way up to Scotland, solo, I was introduced by the son of an old family friend to the delights of Snakebite and black - cider, lager and blackcurrant juice - which the yoof of Kendal referred to, worryingly, as “Diesel” - and I soon realised that it had the effect of making the drinker feel as if they had been run over by a juggernaut. Not pleasant.

That pretty much put a lid on my cider drinking, to be honest. Besides, I soon after moved to Canada, where any drinking was either softish (pilsner, in cans, shotgunned in college dorm rooms at parties) or hard (Jack Daniels, which I can no longer even smell without feeling ill). Then periods spent in Scotland, the North of England, Spain, Bolivia, more Scotland, and eventually London have kept me refining my drinker’s palate, enjoying (in moderation, natch) hearty scottish ales, fiery tequila in icy solutions, generic local-to-wherever fizzy lager, wine, tea, water and all sorts.

I’m not much of a drinker, to be honest, though the opening paragraphs of this post may seem to tell a different story. I don’t get wildly drunk - I don’t enjoy it much - and like everyone else, I’ve noticed my hangovers increasing in profundity and complexity as I advance in years. I just can’t do it like I used to, and that means I tend not to.

Besides, I don’t like the variety of cooking lagers/premium types which array every bar in this country, have never had much of a taste for Guinness and wine makes me dizzy and doesn’t really quench the thirst. So for a good few years I’ve been rather boringly going to pubs with friends and mostly drinking lemonade, because there was nothing else which quite hit the mark, thirstquenching-and-taste-wise.

Until earlier this year.

See, for years in Ireland they’ve been drinking a cider called Bullmer’s. Over the last year over here, they’ve been marketing it heavily under the brand name of Magner’s, and served in a pint glass over ice, I discovered that it does actually hit the spot on warm days (and nights), with the added benefit of being so diluted by the ice by the time you get around to drinking it that you suffer very little later on. Which is nice.

Some things I know about Magner’s:

1. They serve it in a bottle which holds more than a pint. This has the effect of requiring drinkers to transport the bottle to their pub table, where they sit, unwittingly marketing the drink to everyone else in the vicinity. You don’t get that with a pint of generic wifebeater.
2. It’s a massive marketing success. Where cider had previously been seen as the exclusive territory of crusties and students, today you can witness people from all walks of life and representing many demographics - including, crucially for the brand, the young(ish) and cool(ish) and wealthy(ish) office-working classes, who are a long way from dogs on strings and tie-dye waistcoats, thankfully
3. The advertising agency retained by the company don’t know anything about photoshop

Last night, on the tube home from meeting friends in a pub in town (where, yes, I was drinking Magner’s) I spotted this advert above the head of the bloke opposite me:

I’ve seen this ad, billboard-sized, and puzzled over what’s wrong with it before. Let’s consider the problems with it purely from a photographic/design perspective - and, just in case you don’t know, my interest in photography and design is hobbyist at most:

• The glass is in focus. The bottle is not. I assume this is supposed to communicate depth of field. Yet the orchard is in full focus. This makes the bottle look weird.
• The ice cubes dropping into the glass are translucent, yet the light showing through is white, like that which you might find in a photographic studio, and bearing no reference to the orchard behind.
• It’s obvious that the glass, cubes and bottle have been photographed independently, then chopped up, blurred in the case of the bottle and stuck back together. This gives the whole ad a certain air of scrapbook.
• What’s that thing about a third of the way down towards the left hand side of the image, directly above the E of everything? Is it an apple? An icecube? A weird applecube hybrid? Why is it there? What is it doing? Is it hurtling towards the glass? Wait, does that mean the apples are icecubes? Huh?
• The apples on the trees in the orchard have been highlighted and coloured to look juicy and resemble the particular peachy orangey colour of the drink. That’s fine, except that there’s one just right of centre, above the C of ice, which appears to be a) brighter and b) the wrong perspective compared to the others. In fact, despite being further back, it seems to be the same size as the ones further forward.
• Why are the bottle and glass on an angle? Are they on a table? Does it have a wonky leg or something?

Just wondering.

None of this, of course, touches on the sly genuis of reinventing ropey cider by serving it over ice - a practice into which, yes, I have been firmly suckered along with most of the rest of the population.

One summer, seven or eight years ago, it was my round and I asked a barman in a pub for two pints of Kronenbourg, a gin and tonic and a Fosters Ice. When he returned to the bar with the first three beverages and a pint of fosters with icecubes floating in it, I laughed and explained that no, sorry, my friend wanted the bottled cooking lager in the fridge behind his knees. he apologised at the time, but thinking about it now, he was obviously onto something….