You can expect riots in the street if St. James Gate ever changes the amount of Guinness in their cans.

@SinDex23: And by "Cans" I mean the already crippled American Cans which aren't a proper pint as it stands.

Hurting companies by not buying their product? Whoda thunk it?

I'd like to see massive support for the sugar pepsi coming out soon. Enough so that Coca Cola realizes it and Quality is brought back into the equation.

Hey,

The company is fosters but the beer is Cascade - which is a great Tasmanian brew.

And if you think Fosters is bad where you are, remember it has been reformulated. You can strip paint with the Aussie version.

K

Had too much Foster's?

Which is it, 357 ml or 375 ml?

@albear: 375 ml; the blog post is victim of a typo.

"Foster's never intended to rip off its customers or make them unhappy by giving them less beer for the same money, [a spokeswoman] said."

So, what...they gave their customers less beer for the same money by accident? Did vandals sneak in to the bottling factory in the middle of the night and retool the production line and redesign all the labeling in secret?

I was going to make some crack about Australian companies being lying liars just like American companies, but then I realized that American companies at least come up with more plausible sounding bullshit. Come on, Australia, step it up here.

@Patrick Henry: Here in Tucson we get the Mexico Coca Cola made with sugarcane. I'm a Pepsi drinker myself, but I like the Coke with real sugar.

@SinDex23: Or their 11.2 oz. bottles. For shame...

Foster's is almost certainly not Australian anymore. I don't know a single other Aussie who drinks that crap.

The article is referring to the Foster's owned Cascade brewery, who do actually produce decent beer. It was total crap that they did this, but every Aussie brewer is reducing size and/or reducing the alcohol content. Lame.

I'm gald to haer that Fotsers is goign back to hte 357ml cnas.

@ohnoes:

I thought it might be more Foster's trickery: "Don't worry! We're going back to 357 ml!" hoping that the rowdy drunks don't noticed the transposed digits.

I can't stand their regular lager int eh blue can, but their bitter in the green can is not too bad.

@ohnoes: Maybe Ben's been celebrating with some Foster's of his own?

@drb023: We get it here in LA too. Not so easy to find but so worth it. It tastes immeasuably better with sugar. I think the glass bottle helps too. I'll try Pepsi with real sugar though - I prefer Coke but with real sugar, maybe I'll prefer Pepsi to US Coke. I salute Pepsi for not continuing down the cheap (high-fructose corn syrup) road.

Could we force producers of Tuna, Ice Cream and other notorious shrink-ray users to go back to larger sizes just by boycotting them?

Wouldn't that be nice?

I'm still smarting from the recent downsizing of tuna, one can barely makes 2 sandwiches any more. Used to get 4 if you were careful.

If you're drinking any other crummy light lager, you're wasting your time.

@failurate: I won't try to defend the bottles, but at least they accept their stunted position in life. It's just a shame when I pour a can of the black into a Guinness Pint glass and it doesn't fill it all the way.

@SinDex23: The draught bottles aren't that size to save money, though, it's the widget. You can't really fault them for that if you still want the creamy simulated draught goodness. If you want more, I think the stouts are 12oz, yeah?

ah Foster's...for the people that really think they're eating Australian fare and beer when they go to Outback Steakhouse.

Foster's: Australian for "export."

@vision4bg: Nor do I. I have a friend who lives in Queensland and he described it as the Bud Light of Aussie beers.

i like fosters....i could care less where it comes from...

@Garbanzo:

Australian ?

Read the label,mate.

All beer should come in 500mL bottles/ cans in my opinion. I don't understand why US consumers appear to be the only beer drinkers in the world that can't seem to handle half liter bottles. Better yet bring out the 1L cans. I bought a great bit 1L can of Faxe in Hamburg last spring, and that was amazing.

@failurate: I keep waiting for beer manufacturers to change the size of 40's. What a sad day that will be...

@BuddyHinton: I had to read that twice to see what you did. Then my brain exploded.

I'm still upset that they did away with the seam in the Foster's can...was that when they started brewing it in Canada?

The standard packaged beer sizes in Australia is: cans (375ml), regular bottles (375ml) and 'long neck' bottles (750ml). But who drinks Fosters in Australia anyway? The most popular is VB also made by Foster's Group

@Patrick Henry: We went searching through the soda section at the grocery last week hoping they had already released it. I can't remember the last time I went looking for some product based on learning about it. I am not even a huge Pepsi fan but I want to give it a try. I hope Coke gets a clue soon.

@TheGuinnessTooth: I hear what's you're saying, but then the comedic value of showing up to a party with a bunch of tall boys would diminish.

Meh. Who am I kidding? At 33, those days are over...

@Marshfield: I am boycotting tuna. The only reason I bought a few of their stunted cans was because the store had a 50 cent a can sale. Removing 1oz out of a 6oz can is a significant shrink.

Good news, boys and girls...

The Wall Street Journal reported a withdrawal of the mighty forces of the Grocery Shrink Ray yesterday:

Heinz is offering consumers larger ketchup bottles that sell at smaller price gaps to private label in the U.S. Meanwhile, Frito-Lay in North America will begin adding 20% more product to take-home bags of its corn-based Tostitos, Fritos, Cheetos and Doritos without increasing the price.

[online.wsj.com]

Victory will be ours!

@albear: Damn fancy fureigners with their fancy "metric" system trying to confuse us God-fearing Amuricans and not using feet and pounds from the Bible like they God intended.

@Marshfield: I'm boycotting Breyers right now because of the shrink. As a bonus - I wrote Unilever a complaint, they sent me a coupon for a free .375 gallon and 2 dollar off coupons. So I bought 3 more. Last one is in the freezer, then I'm back to making my own.

I don't regularly buy tuna, so I haven't noticed yet. Bought like a dozen cans on sale last time, but I'm out now and it's on my list.

@Marshfield: 4? how about one big one? and now only one little one.

I'm a pig.

I haven't bought Breyer's Ice Cream for 4 years because they led the downsizing of half gallons of ice cream. From 2 quarts to 1.75 and now to the embarrassingly small 1.5 quarts, all the while charging premium prices.

It's too bad, too, since I loved their vanilla bean ice cream and wouldn't ever consider buying any other kind of ice cream. They lost me as a customer forever when I discovered other products for half the price that were just as good.

@vision4bg: "I don't know a single other Aussie who drinks that crap."

Have you not noticed that lots of "export" beers are not actually drunk in their home countries? I saw some "American" beers sold in Europe that I'd never HEARD of (and I like my beer), being advertised as "America's favorite beer!" So when they say "Foster's: Australian for beer" in the ads, I assume they mean, "Hey, I think you'll buy this if you think Aussies drink it!"

@Patrick Henry: I stopped drinking soda quite some time ago but I'm seriously considering buying some every now and again for that very reason.

@Patrick Henry: The thing is, as it stands, sugar cola is immensely more expensive to produce, and since they are introducing it as a "novelty" product - it will probably be twice the price of regular soda - and they've already reduced 12 packs to 8 packs.

@Coles_Law: Whether BuddyHinton knew it or not, he was actually pointing out a neat brain trick. Fluent speakers/readers of English (I'm not sure if this works in other launguages) look at the overall shape of a word when they read it, so for many words, you can rearrange the middle letters as long as you keep the first and last the same. For example, Buddy typed "glad" as "gald" and "hear" as "haer." When you look at them closely, they're obviously wrong, but read an entire sentence, and it becomes diffciult to notice the diffreence.

@Irish_Knight: You could, but you don't, and that's comforting to me.

@TheGuinnessTooth: Yes, only US beer drinkers can't handle half liter bottles.

This story is about beer in Australia in 330 and 375ml bottles.

@Marshfield: Yes, you could. What you do is you don't buy the product as they currently package it and if enough other people do that with you, they either stop selling the product or they package it differently.

@TheGuinnessTooth: I guess I don't drink fast enough but those 750mL/1L containers annoy me because the bottom 1/3 is warm and flat by the time I get down that far!

I'm Aussie (currently living in the US) and I wouldn't drink that crap. In fact, you'd have a hard time finding it in stores or pubs back home.

@TheGuinnessTooth: Who said we can't handle them? I dunno why we're marketed 12oz bottles, but I would surely enjoy 16oz (or 16.9 oz, which would be your 500 ml) bottles better.

Or even 19.2oz (568-ish ml) bottles, which would be an "Imperial" pint. Those 22oz bottles, though... I dunno, I'm kinda torn.

You may be able to get away with shrink-raying some consumer goods, but beer drinkers are especially picky. Just take a look at the uproar that "falsie" glasses have caused in bars nationwide.

Besides, if people pour out a beer and expect it to fill their glass to a certain level, you can bet that people will start to notice.

@RandomHookup: Damn straight. My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and thats the way I like it.