On a recent trip to Dublin, Ireland I visited a goodly number of pubs; I was there for ten days after all. Go into any pub in Ireland and you will find the ubiquitous beer mat (or beer coasters as we call them in the United States) upon which you can rest your beer. Today’s beer mat
serves a very straightforward purpose – it separates the bottom of the glass from the top of the bar/table and thus prevents damage to the latter. Beer mats protect a table/bar by absorbing any condensation emanating from the glass. High quality beer mats are made of pulp board and it is this material that gives them their high level of absorbency. The Katz Group, the world’s largest manufacturer of beer mats, claim that their beer mats can absorb 300% of their own weight in moisture. When the beer mat made its first appearance in late-19th century Germany, however, its purpose was quite different than that of today. Back then it was placed on the top of the drinking vessel in order to prevent insects and other debris getting into the beer. Beer mats were very much the purview of the lower classes. The wealthy had porcelain tankards with lids to protect their beer. On occasion you may still see a beer mat on the top of a beer glass. However, the reason for doing so is different than in days gone by. This is done when the drinker leaves his/her beer unattended to go to the bathroom or to step outside for a smoke. This tells the bar staff that the drinker has not finished with his/her beer and will be back to drink it. This technique is often used by a person drinking alone and there are no friends with him/her to tell the bar staff that they have stepped away momentarily. Another function of the modern beer mat is advertising. They are an inexpensive way for breweries to advertise their brand. This is done by printing the name and logo of the brewery/beer on the beer mats.. While beer mats were in use in the United States in the early 1900s it was not until the 1970s that their use really took-off.
Beer mats come in all shapes and sizes, although the square or round are the most common. There are even people who collect them – such folks are known as tegestologists. The word has its roots in the Latin word teges which means mat. In 2010, Scottish tegestologist, Ian Calvert left his collection of 27,000 beer mats to his friend Dennis Harle after he lost his battle with Parkinson’s disease. The 27,000 beer mats collected by Calvert pales into comparison, however, to the 150,000 different ones from 192 countries collected by Leo Pisker of Austria. Not surprisingly there are even formalized beer mat collector groups. The British Beer Mat Collectors Society was founded in 1960. The first presidents of the society (and you really have to be British of a particular generation to appreciate this) were the comedy duo Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. There are all sorts of world records associated with beer mats. These include the largest structure made out of beer mats, the most beer mats flipped, and the largest beer mat.
The world’s largest manufacturer of beer mats is The Katz Group who are headquartered in Weisenbach, Germany. Approximately 5.5 billion beer mats are made annually worldwide. Katz manufactures 75% of them. Ireland holds an interesting distinction in the beer mat world. It leads the world in consumption of beer mats per capita; consuming 50 beer mats per capita on an annual basis. This is most likely due to tourists taking them as souvenirs, particularly those bearing the Guinness imprint. Worldwide, however, the beer mat industry has been suffering in recent years due to a downturn in demand. The growing trend in many countries of more people drinking more at home rather than in a bar (a trend not helped by the recent recession) resulted in declining demand for beer mats. In 2014, for example, it was reported that Britain was losing an average of 31 pubs per week as societal drinking habits changed.
Beer mats are given to pubs and restaurants at no charge to them. As noted above it is an inexpensive way for breweries to advertise their brand. As a result most of the beer mats that you will see in pubs are provided by the large mega-breweries. In Dublin I saw a lot of Guinness and Heineken beer mats. In the United States you see a lot of Budweiser and Miller beer mats. So when I came across a beer mat in a Dublin pub promoting local alcoholic drinks (including beer) I was surprised. On one side of the beer mat were the the messages “Support Your Local” and “Reverse Excise Create Jobs”. On the the other side there were four statistics documenting the economic importance of Ireland’s drinks industry – 92,000 jobs, €2 billion in wages, 8,298 hotels and pubs, and 44 distilleries and breweries. There was also a URL for a website – www.supportyourlocal.ie. The beer mats piqued my interest, particularly the support your local message. This is what I do every time I visit my local craft brewery, The Black Cloister in Toledo, Ohio and enjoyed a couple of their beers. Even when I purchase a craft beer made in another part of the country I am supporting someone’s else’s local – and I am good with that. So a beer mat promoting local seemed like something I could get behind.
But curious as I am I did a little research on the beer mat. What I discovered is that the Support Your Local beer mats are part of a campaign orchestrated by the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (DIGI). DIGI represents the Irish drinks industry and its primary mission is to raise awareness of the economic contribution of the industry to the Irish economy. Seems like a laudable mission. But then I noticed that the current Chairman of DIGI is Peter O’Brian from Diageo. For those of you who do not know Diageo is the multinational behemoth that own a multitude of well-known alcoholic beverage brands including Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, Smirnoff, Captain Morgan, and Guinness. Diageo is a British (not Irish) multinational company that is based in London (not Dublin). Indeed an article by Mark Paul in the Irish Times in 2014 suggests that reduction in the excise tax (one of the key goals of the Support Your Local initiative) would be more beneficial to larger breweries (e.g. Guinness) than smaller breweries. Indeed Paul suggests that it is the large multinational breweries who are the driving force behind DIGI. From Paul’s perspective the message on the beer mat is disingenuous and misleading. “How clever of them” he says “to sell their budget message under the guise of a boost for ‘locals'”. Of course I could now get into a whole new discussion of what constitutes ‘local’ but I am not, except to say that it is at somewhat fuzzy and nebulous concept. But I do agree with Paul that there is a disconnect between what I thought the beer mat was all about when I first saw it and who appears to be actually driving the message.
Paul also questioned the second part of the support your local equation; that reducing the excise tax would result in more jobs. He states that ‘contrary to what the Support Your Local campaign says, excise hikes since 2011 contributed little to the demise of pubs. It also forgets that excise was cut by in 2010, and before that, was static on beer for 15 years”. Rather than blaming excessive excise taxes Paul points to changing drinking patterns (more people drinking at home) and the fact that Ireland simply has too many pubs (one for every 610 citizens) given its population size.
The “Support Your Local” beer mats got me thinking in another direction, however. Would it be possible for craft The Craft Brewers Association in the United States to produce and distribute beer coasters promoting the American craft beer industry? Or perhaps this could be done at a more local scale with, for example, the Ohio Craft Brewers Association producing coasters promoting the state’s craft beer industry? The Irish Support Your Local beer mats provide a nice model – a slogan or tag line, some information about economic benefits of craft beer, and the URL for a website where more information can be found. I am not sure as to what the obstacles to such an initiative would be but this seems, to me at least, that utilizing the humble beer mat could be a simple way to promote craft beer across an individual state or even the entire country.
