For nearly 80 years, Almaza reigned supreme over the Lebanese beer market. Founded in 1933, the company solicited the technical supervision of Heineken's Amstel early on and quickly became associated with some of the biggest advertising class acts in the region. It was a recipe for culinary and commercial success. In 2013, CNN Travel dubbed Almaza the "king of Lebanese beers." They ranked it No. 1 in the region.
So when the group ran their latest TV commercial, they carried the mantle of Lebanese patriotism as they nearly always have in their decades of advertising. With some faux 35 mm tape, interlaced with images of your typical family get-together in the scenic Mount Lebanon and folkloric national music in the background, Almaza wants to remind the Lebanese that the brew has been with them through it all. Fitting for Lebanon's most famous brand, no? Not quite.
Their young and feisty competition isn't letting this kind of messaging fly, anymore. They are a group of budding local craft beer producers, and they have something to say about all this: enough with Almaza's nostalgia, enough with the corporate emotional blackmail, and most of all... enough with pretending that Almaza is a local product when it was acquired by major Dutch beer company, Heineken, years ago .
Here is Beirut Beer 's biting response to Almaza's TV commercial. Beirut Beer's ad was released on Aug. 2, nearly two weeks after Almaza's 38-second commercial. Beirut Beer never names its formidable competitor, but the references to the 38 second video are plain to see.
It's a poetic takedown of Almaza's long legacy of co-opting Lebanese patriotism, as the potbellied narrator saunters through film sets and makes other not-so-subtle references to the alleged artifice of it all. It ends with Beirut Beer's slogan: "It's time." Time to support not only local producers, we're assuming, but also the small and creative ones. We tend to agree, especially when those small producers do a great job at shaking up tired clichés.