It's The Battle

Canned Beer Raises Blood Pressures in P-NG

Of The Bottles

To all new brewers in Suva, and places east and west thereof: Take warning from recent events in Papua and New Guinea. There is enough menace in the tin can to upset the best-laid balance-sheets.

EVERYONE knows that Joe Bourke, and Yeomans, and friends, established the South Pacific brewery in Port Moresby several years ago. Most know that some solid merchants of Lae, with the help of that practical scientist Meier, launched the Guinea Brewery in Lae early this year.

In both instances, the P-NG beer drinkers voted in favour of the new local brews; and the change in gallonage consumed, from imported to local, caused some unhappiness among the Export Sales managers of certain Australian breweries.

But hold back your sympathies.

The Sales Managers are getting their revenge.

Within the last few months, canned beer from Melbourne has hit the P-NG Territory like an avalanche. Everywhere I go, in clubs and pubs and all the other places where they argue that beer is a necessary foodstuff in the tropical islands, the cans now are conspicu ous on the bars and the tables, sharing favouritism with the draught beers of Lae and Moresby.

It's War!

The canned beer price is directly competitive with the bottled beer, local or imported. But I rarely see a bottle. The war is between the local draught, and the imported canned. , .

Gentlemen with trained palates argue heatedly about the respective qualities. Drinkers of draught seem steady in their loyalties. But others show a fanatical love for “canned”.

So there has been a marked change in the consumption figures.

But that isn’t half the story. There is tragedy in the empty bottles — or lack of them.

Over the years, millions of bottles of beer have been shipped to Papua and New Guinea, emptied in due course, and then dumped. In the Australia-New Guinea trade, of course, the return of “empties” is not economic.

Old travellers have seen mountains of empties behind the Territory hotels and clubs. Before the war, I walked on neat footpaths in Wau made of bottles with their necks stuck straight down in the mud.

Then came the “lolly-water” factories, which simply gathered up

ownerless bottles and used them in a legitimate trade.

Next came the new breweries; and the new breweries bottled their own beer.

It costs at least 13d to land here an empty bottle from Australia. The local brewers were happy—they simply used the thousands of empties. The writ of the Branded Bottles Association does not run here.

Australian brewers naturally did not like to lose trade to P-NG brewers who used the Australian brewers’ own bottles; but there was nothing they could do.

The Mighty Can

Or —was there something they could do? By either luck or design, they have done it. In one mighty blow, they have introduced the can,

recovered a proportion of their lost beer trade, and have created some thing near panic among a sectior of P-NG bottlers.

Even before the Guinea Brewers started, the empty-bottle situatior was getting tight. Soft drink bottlers as well as brewers, were anxious; with the result that they began tc pay intelligent natives to gathei bottles for them.

The simultaneous arrival ol Guinea beer, from Lae, and canned beer from Australia, started s struggle for bottles, which now is going on.

Empty bottles, which once made glittering, useless, little mountains in the edges of the jungle, near the pubs, now can be sold for 4d each— maybe more.

Cans, of course, are more easily packed and carried than bottles; and are much lighter. One notices them in patrol officers’ packs, in lorry-drivers’ baskets, or rolling about in small boats. Every can bought reduces the available empty bottles.

They're Desperate

But anti-litter officials also are becoming desperate! What to do with the empty cans? They are piling up everywhere. As I strolled: across the crowded lawn at the Habaul race meeting (perched coyly on the flank of Mount Vulcan!) I twice nearly turned a seven oven those little round tins, rolling about everywhere.- One ingenious Agriculture official is using them as a germinating ground for precious seeds. Some natives find them suitable as cook ing and drinking utensils. It is re ported that, with the bottoms cut. out, they are regarded by the Chimbus as fine arm-bands. Put; end to end, they are being used as drainage pipes. Someone in Rabauij suggested they be gathered together! and put under a press and sold to the Japs as scrap metal.

The ever-resourceful Joe Bourkee who owns a soft-drink factory atj Sunshine, has been taking samples; of sands from around the Huon Gulf, for analysis, in the hope he. find silica deposits, and begim bottle-making. No one gives him as chance. But they treated him thath way when he first suggested the; South Pacific brewery.

Meanwhile, the canned beer habitri grows; and the battle for bottles isi rising to new levels of bitterness and)

tragedy!

R.W.R.

.A, three-man New Zealand] National Film Unit team returned) to Auckland from the Cook Islands, in September after completing as him in the Southern Group. The. director, Mr. R. Bowie, said thatf the film, intended for New Zealandb and overseas circulation, would b©i of general interest.