Foster's, CUB and the great Australian beer that isn't

Walk into a pub in Manchester or Munich and there's a fair chance you'll see a Foster's tap before you see one in Melbourne. That's not an accident, and it's not really a mystery either — it's the end point of one of the stranger split personalities in Australian branding. The beer that built its entire global identity on being "Australian for beer" spent much of the last two decades barely sold in Australia at all, brewed here mostly for export, while the company that actually makes most of the beer Australians drink, Carlton & United Breweries, quietly passed into foreign hands. I've spent a fair bit of time on this one, partly because every time I mention it at a dinner party someone insists Foster's is "basically our national beer," and I have to break the news gently.

The short version: Foster's the brand and CUB the brewer are related but not identical, the marketing made them seem inseparable, and the eventual takeover of CUB by a multinational brewing giant is one of the better case studies in how a genuinely local product can become a licensed export logo while the actual business underneath changes owners entirely.

Two Foster brothers, a Melbourne icebox, and a lager nobody local drank first

Foster's Lager traces back to 1888, when two American brothers, William and Ralph Foster, arrived in Melbourne with refrigeration equipment and the idea of brewing a cold, light lager suited to the local climate — a departure from the warmer, heavier ales that dominated colonial brewing at the time. The Foster Brewing Company they set up was quickly absorbed into the wave of Melbourne brewery mergers that eventually produced Carlton & United Breweries in 1907, when Carlton Brewery combined with several rivals including the Foster's operation itself.

From that point Foster's was one brand among several under the CUB umbrella, sitting alongside Victoria Bitter, Carlton Draught and others that would go on to define Australian beer drinking through the twentieth century. It wasn't the flagship at home. VB and Carlton Draught did the heavy lifting in the domestic market for decades. Foster's found its calling somewhere else entirely — as the brand CUB decided to send offshore.

Building "Australian for beer" out of nothing much

The campaign that made Foster's a household name in the UK and elsewhere is one of the great fish-out-of-water success stories in advertising. Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s and 2000s, Foster's marketing leaned hard into a cartoon version of Australia — sunburnt, laconic, slightly absurd, built around the tagline "Foster's: Australian for beer." It ran heavily in Britain, where the beer became one of the biggest-selling lagers in the pub trade, propped up by an image of Australia that had more to do with advertising executives' idea of the country than anything a Fitzroy local would recognise.

It worked, and it worked spectacularly, precisely because almost nobody drinking it had ever set foot in Melbourne. The joke among people who actually grew up on Victoria Bitter was that Foster's was what tourists ordered because they'd heard of it. I reckon that's slightly unfair to the beer itself, which was a perfectly competent lager, but it's not unfair as a description of how the brand functioned. Foster's wasn't selling a taste profile so much as selling a costume — a version of Australianness for export, not unlike the way Blundstone's boots became a global fashion staple long after most Australians had stopped thinking of them as workwear (see our piece on Blundstone's path from Tasmanian bootmaker to global elastic-side icon).

The empire-building years: Elders, wine, and a very long hangover

Foster's the corporate entity got considerably bigger and considerably more complicated in the 1980s and 1990s under the stewardship of Elders IXL, the pastoral-and-beer conglomerate run by John Elliott, which took control of CUB and rebranded the wider group as Foster's Brewing Group. Elliott's Foster's went on an acquisition spree, eventually merging with the UK's Courage brewing interests and later pivoting hard into wine, buying up Australian wine assets including Mildara Blass and eventually Southcorp, home of Penfolds, in a deal completed in 2005. The logic at the time was diversification — beer and wine under one roof, a beverages powerhouse. In hindsight, and there's a lot of hindsight available here, it diluted the company's focus and loaded it with wine assets that performed poorly through a rough patch for the Australian wine export market in the mid-to-late 2000s. Foster's eventually wrote down billions in wine-related value and, in 2011, split itself in two, demerging its wine business as Treasury Wine Estates and leaving a much narrower Foster's Group holding the beer assets, principally CUB.

SABMiller comes knocking, and the beer goes to London

That slimmed-down Foster's Group didn't stay independent for long. Within months of the demerger, South African-founded, London-listed brewing giant SABMiller launched a takeover bid, and by late 2011 it had secured control of Foster's Group, taking Carlton & United Breweries — VB, Carlton Draught, Foster's Lager and the rest — into one of the world's largest brewing multinationals.

It wasn't the end of foreign ownership musical chairs, either. SABMiller itself was acquired by Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2016, in a merger so large it reshaped global brewing, and regulatory conditions around that deal saw CUB pass again, this time to Asahi Group Holdings of Japan, which completed its purchase of Carlton & United Breweries in 2020. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission scrutinised that transaction, as it does with concentration in the local beer market, before it went ahead.

So the brewery that makes VB, Carlton Draught and Foster's for the Australian market is now a subsidiary of a Japanese beverages group, headquartered in Melbourne but answering to Tokyo. Meanwhile the Foster's brand name itself — after the 2011 SABMiller deal and subsequent corporate rearrangements — ended up with international licensing rights split off in ways that meant the Foster's sold in a British pub and the beer sold under the same name in parts of Australia haven't always even come from the same production chain or company structure. It's a genuinely tangled bit of corporate history, and I'd argue it's tangled specifically because the marketing insisted on simplicity — one beer, one flag, one accent — while the ownership behind it kept fracturing.

Why the brand outlived the plot

Here's the part I find most interesting as someone who spends his working life picking apart why brands survive corporate chaos that would sink almost anything else. Foster's the marketing property proved far stickier than Foster's the Australian-owned company. The tagline, the cartoon accent, the green-and-gold packaging cues — all of that kept generating recognition and sales in overseas markets more or less independent of who actually held the equity in Melbourne. Consumers in Leeds or Lisbon weren't tracking the Elders IXL wine diversification strategy. They just knew the can. That's a lesson that applies well beyond beer. Myer's name survived a string of ownership changes and a fair amount of boardroom turbulence at Bourke Street because the department store brand meant something to shoppers that outlasted any particular owner's tenure (there's more on that saga in our piece on Myer's journey from a Bendigo drapery to the trouble at Bourke Street). Coles managed something similar, evolving from a Collingwood variety store into a supermarket giant through waves of ownership most shoppers never noticed or cared about, a story told in our history of Coles. Brand equity, it turns out, is remarkably indifferent to who's actually cutting the cheques.

What's actually in the glass now

If you're drinking a Foster's in Australia today, you're most likely drinking something brewed by CUB under its current Asahi ownership, formulated for a domestic palate that, frankly, mostly forgot about the brand decades ago in favour of VB and Carlton Draught. If you're drinking one in a British pub, the marketing DNA is still doing its job, even if the exact corporate plumbing behind that pint has changed hands about as often as international ownership deals allow. I don't think there's anything scandalous in any of this — brewing has always been a globally consolidating industry, and Australia's beer market is hardly unique in ending up under multinational control. What I do think is that the gap between the story Foster's told the world and the story of who actually owned and brewed it is one of the more instructive case studies in Australian marketing history. The accent was never fake, exactly. It was just doing a lot more work than the ownership structure behind it could keep up with.

For more on the brands that built Australia's commercial identity, and the deals that quietly changed who's actually behind them, have a look through Defamer's Iconic Brand Histories hub.

— Doug Kirby, Brands & Business Heritage