Young women are developing a growing taste for premium bottled ale and turning their backs on mainstream lager, according to Sainsbury’s.

More young female customers were buying into the premium bottled ale (PBA) category than ever before, said the retailer’s BWS category manager Andy Phelps.

The number of women buying PBA has risen 4% year-on-year, according the retailer’s Nectar data [52 w/e 12 May 2012], while the number buying lager has dropped 6% over the same period.

Although it was difficult to establish whether women were buying for themselves or a partner, the uplift was “statistically relevant”, said Sainsbury’s beer buyer Nicky Millington, adding that there were other signs of women turning to ale.

She added that more young drinkers - including women in their 20s - were now attending the regional heats of the annual Great British Beer Hunt, which is judged by consumers and beer experts and rewards two brewers with a national listing in Sainsbury’s.

“We invited consumers to judge based on Nectar Card data and we’ve seen a surge of younger female consumers judging at the event,” said Millington, who joined the retailer in September as part of its increased focus on ales and bottled beer.

A big growth area had been ‘golden’ beers - such as Fuller’s Golden Pride - a category that had attracted 23% more customers over the past year, just over half of whom were women, according to Sainsbury’s.

Another area that had over-indexed with women was flavoured beers such as Hall & Woodhouse’s Blandford Flyer and Wells’s Waggle Dance, added the retailer.

Brewer Marston’s said that retailers could encourage more women to buy PBAs by running more mix-and-match promotions across traditional and flavoured beers.

Topics