Heady combination

Could football fever, as evident in Mumbai's bars, help beer sales cross the one-litre-per-capita mark?

Beer and football are no strange bedfellows. As a teen poster has it, if you want a kick out of either, you must go head first (the froth is described thus, for the uninitiated, in the case of beer).

For live evidence, however, you need to crawl your way round Mumbai's bars and cafes, almost all of which are equipped with outsized plasma TV screens for all the frenzied action.

Frenzied action, to the pubs, means a surge in beer sales, as ol' faithful Cafe Leopold and Cafe Mondegar report from Colaba causeway. For a headier figure, however, there's Starboard, the sports bar at the Taj, which has seen lager sales brim over "" up 50 per cent since the World Cup began.

The scene is no different in the suburbs. At Hotel Tian, Juhu, beer sales are up by nearly 30 per cent since the beautiful game took over its TV screens.

Several other bars are trying hard to get into the spirit of things. One bar has switched its "happy hour" timings to coincide with the matches, offering a "free kick" (a mug of beer) with every two bought.

Some of the hoopla is brand sponsored. There's Airtel Football Fever, for example, at Jazz by the Bay on Marine Drive, while ESPN freebies are up for grabs at Karma, a lounge bar at Opera House.

It's lager all the way "" even at the spiffiest of bars. Hotel Intercontinental and Hotel Marine-Plaza on Marine Drive even have link-ups with Tiger Beer. "Beer goes very well with soccer," says Karan Khiani, assistant F&B manager, Intercontinental, Mumbai, which has turned its vodka bar, Czar, into a beer bar for the Cup.

UB Group, which markets the leading brand Kingfisher, is glad that football fans favour beer so overwhelmingly. "The offtake of beer has definitely increased because of the World Cup," says a UB spokesperson, "though we cannot quantify it till July."

It also happens to be summer, and the March-June period of the calendar typically accounts for the bulk of beer sales in the country: an estimated 110 million cases per year (nine litres to a case), just nudging the one litre-per-capita mark. Could the World Cup vault beer sales past that figure this year?