Importing memories: Why Canadians love import lagers
Efes importer Yener Ciprut enjoys a bottle of beer with his wife. Photo by Erin Millar.
When the restaurant at Commercial Drive and 5th Avenue changed from the strangely named Me & Julio to the new, and perhaps even stranger, Sorry Babushka, a prominent blue banner appeared along the railing of the patio advertising Efes Pilsner.
“Is that Efes, the same stuff we drank when we backpacked in the Middle East?” I asked my husband Ben – a beer geek like myself who prefers a bold craft IPA to even the best pilsner – as we cycled past one afternoon.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said, a look of puzzlement on his face.
“But, why?” I asked.
Efes’ appearance in my neighbourhood was still bothering me a couple of weeks later when I bumped into a friend drinking a bottle at the Railway Club, which boasts an impressive lineup of local craft beers on draught.
“It’s awesome!” he retorted after I snobbishly questioned his choice. “Plus, it’s the cheapest beer here.”
How a beer from Turkey, of all places, could be the cheapest available at a bar in Canada mystified me. Efes is just another bubbly lager, a more exotic version of Heineken and Stella Artois, or even our own mass market beers such as Kokanee and Canadian − right? Surely it makes more economic sense, not to mention environmental sense, to brew such beers locally rather than shipping them across a continent and an ocean.
And yet, the popularity of beers like Corona, Harp and Beck’s suggests that Canadians love their import lagers. A brief glance at the BC Liquor website confirmed that British Columbians regularly purchase beers as varied as Kingfisher from India, Sapporo from Japan, Singha from Thailand, Tsingtao from China, Tiger from Singapore, Tusker from Kenya, Peroni from Italy and Baltika 3 from Russia. But why? And how can they be so cheap?
I put the question to the most qualified person I could think of to ask: Lundy Dale, senior ale advisor at the liquor store Firefly Fine Wines and Ales and president of the B.C. chapter of CAMRA, a beer advocacy group.
“People just think they’re fancy,” Dale says. “Someone who is used to drinking Bud or Coors thinks these imports will be better beer because they sound prestigious.”
Dale explains that because lagers are by far the world’s most popular style of beer, it’s the obvious way to enter a new market for breweries wanting to expand. Breweries often take a financial hit in order to keep the price low and build their brand, which explains why they are often surprisingly affordable. Once their brand is established, the brewery can launch other styles at a premium.
Efes is a textbook example. When the pilsner was first introduced here five years ago by the Turkish-Canadian importer Yener Ciprut, it was relatively unknown. But in the past couple of years, as a result of Ciprut’s tireless efforts, sales have steadily grown. The beer has even won awards at the Canada Cup of Beer and Calgary Beer Fest. Two years ago, when the brand was well recognized, Efes Dark was released in Canada at a higher price. It sold well, and Ciprut was able to quit his day job and focus exclusively on importing products from Turkey.
Ciprut decided to import Efes after his first wife, who hated beer, tried one at a festival in Turkey. A few days after the festival, he noticed two empty bottles of the beer in their garbage can. He questioned her, and she admitted to drinking them.
“I had the idea that if someone who hates beer that much likes Efes, there must be some magic,” he tells me over a bottle of Efes Pilsner at Sorry Babushka.
To a craft beer lover like me, having effectively burnt off my taste buds with in-your-face west coast hops, import lagers all taste the same: light and crisp with little bitterness or aftertaste, kind of like fizzy water. Dale, an ale lover herself, explains that their popularity is not really about the taste. It’s more about an experience or memory.
“People come into the store and say, ‘I don’t know if I’m still going to like this beer, but when I was sweaty on the street in Thailand, Singha tasted amazing’,” she says. “Take a look at the advertisements for Corona. They don’t talk about what the beer tastes like, they talk about a feeling. They are not pushing taste, they are pushing an emotion. They want you to think of being on the beach in Mexico.”
Yet Ciprut maintains that the taste of Efes beer is behind its popularity in Canada. Although nicely carbonated, the pilsner is not soda-pop-fizzy like other import lagers, lending it a softer mouthfeel. Its more aggressive use of hops gives the beer a more interesting aroma and flavour than the typical mass market lager, and it finishes crisply with a clean aftertaste.
“Red wine drinkers like it because they want the flavour but not the aftertaste,” Ciprut says. “We leave you with the good side of beer without the bad side.”
Despite my beer snobbery, I’ll allow that Efes is actually pretty good. But it’s Dale who best understood why I enjoyed it so much. As I took that first sip of Efes Pilsner, in the company of the quick-to-laugh Ciprut and his lovely wife Ebru Pinar Ciprut, memories of the Middle East rushed to mind – like sipping a tall can of Efes in a hotel room in Syria after a long day of exploring Crusader-era castles. The call to prayer echoing through the narrow streets of Damascus. Babaganoush, almonds, olives. And, most of all, our warm and welcoming hosts.