Why is fosters called the amber nectar

These featured Paul Hogan - that international embodiment of the Australian stereotype - at a wine tasting, telling viewers he had brought ''enough of the amber nectar to go around''. Watching in horror as his fellow drinkers sipped and spat, the Crocodile Dundee actor proclaimed: ''Looks like I did the right thing too - 'cos that stuff looks about as popular as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip.

So far, so clear. But Foster's was not always a British beer pretending to be Australian; it began life as an Australian beer mimicking ''lighter European-style'' lagers.

Production was started in Melbourne by two American brothers, William and Ralph Foster, in , before they quickly sold up and returned to the US. It was not until that the brewing business - which by then also had extensive wineries in Australia and New Zealand - again took the Foster's name, though by that time the lager brand had essentially become a British phenomenon.

Little more than million pints of Foster's lager are drunk in Australia each year. It is arguably the world's third most widely distributed beer after Heineken and Carlsberg , available in more than countries. A new premium variant, Foster's Gold, launched in the UK in summer Foster's Rocks arrived in , a so-called "speer" or spirit beer, offering a blend of Foster's and rum. It is also the 7 across Europe; the 8 imported beer in the US; and the 2 beer brand in the Middle East.

Ironically, one of its weakest territories is Australia. The UK has long been Foster's biggest global market. It was originally available in imported cans "tinnies" during the s, mainly for the benefit of the expatriate Australian audience and those Brits familiar with The Wonderful World of Barry Mackenzie, a cartoon strip by Australian-born Barry Humphries in the satirical magazine Private Eye.

With Barry Mackenzie, Humphries single-handedly created the popular image of the warm-hearted but culturally backward Australian abroad. Later he built upon this early success with the creation of another alter ego, Edna Everage, originally Barry Mackenzie's aunt, later elevated to Damehood "for services to Australian culture".

In the Barry Mackenzie cartoons and two subsequent movies, the titular hero regularly drowned his sorrows in a foaming pint of Foster's. With its popularity growing, Foster's began to be distributed on draught in ; UK distributor Courage acquired local brewing rights three years later.

Foster's first UK marketing campaign, launched in , adapted and sanitized the Ozzie fish-out-of-water concept for a wider audience, and introduced the UK and then the world to a rather less disreputable Australian stereotype than Barry Mackenzie. Little more than m pints of Foster's lager are drunk in Australia each year. Australian drinkers prefer Carlton Draught and Victoria Bitter.

By this stage, Foster's the company was selling a lot of alcohol in Britain, though not a drop of it was lager. Paul Hogan may have helped sell cans of Foster's the lager by suggesting it was preferable to wine but for Foster's Group wine had come to dominate sales, with particular success coming from the UK market.

Last month Foster's demerged its wine operations but for many years its wine brands, such as Lindeman's, Rosemount and Wolf Blass, had been among the most popular on Britain's supermarket shelves. Success in wine exports also mirrored Australia's domestic drinking preferences. Contrary to the image projected by British lager marketeers, Australians drink less beer and more wine than either the British or Americans.