Rugby and racing - Beer and brand disloyalty

Last week's Malthouse blog covered burgers, brocolli, the Lucky brewery debacle, the three greatest Canadians of all time, "Spiderman" Emerson and Chimay White. It was called "A spirited defence of brand loyalty":

We would tend to portray the person who eats only corporate burgers and fries as unsophisticated, a little odd and probably quite large. However, the person who drinks nothing but – say – Heineken is seen as a loyal and informed drinker. I simply cannot express the absurdity of this notion any better than noted beer writer and my third favourite Canadian Stephen Beaumont...

In "Rugby, racing and beer", I take at looking at the baffling appeal of the Melbourne Cup, the cultural theft of Phar Lap, the attempted shooting of Phar Lap, the alledged similarities between American lager and horse by-products, West Coast humour at the expense of DB and Monteith's Summer Ale:

At 5pm today, millions of otherwise normal and usually horse-racing agnostic Australians and New Zealanders will stop what they are doing, turn on the television, put a silly hat on their head, throw buckets of cash at the TAB and cheer wildly for a large four-legged animal who, yesterday, they had never heard of.

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