You’ll need to pick someone to star in it.

You’ll want someone successful, obviously.

Someone likeable, naturally.

Someone with an unblemished public record, surely?

In short, you’d want a fine upstanding, successful, famous and likeable star.

Someone like… Mickey Rourke?

No, we didn’t think of him either – but thankfully, Bavaria did.

And Bavaria really do deserve credit here for having the balls to run with an advert many wouldn’t entertain. I’d love to have heard the ad agency pitch. They also deserve credit for convincing Bavaria to go with it.

It’s a surprisingly good advert, for a surprisingly good beer.

Be warned, it does contain some strong language.

Understandably, couriers are still having problems delivering to lots of areas and we are still expecting delays in orders reaching customers but they are on their way. If you haven’t had your order by early next week, please do contact us.

Our Manchester shop will be closing early today though, at about 4pm, to allow staff to get home safely before it gets too dark. Thanks for your understanding.

Our Manchester shop in the snow

We’ve been snowed in since yesterday in Manchester where we’ve had at least 8″. We haven’t been able to ship online orders and we’ve had to shut our Manchester shop too.

Conditions have worsened overnight and the roads are treacherous.

There’s nothing worse for a shop than not being able to sell, so we thought we’d have a bit of fun and hopefully encourage you to do a bit of shopping.

We want you to get outside with a rule or tape measure and take a picture of yourself showing us just how deep your snow is. Then we’ll give you a discount on the cost of an order you place this week based on the depth of the snow in your area.

We’ll give you the number of inches you can measure as a percentage of your order – up to a total of 10%!

For instance, send us a snap showing 3 inches of snow, and we’ll send you a voucher for 3% off your order, send us one of 8 inches, and we’ll send you a voucher worth 8% off! To keep it simple, there’s no minimum spend required. All we ask is you use the voucher this week.

We’ll put the photos up on our blog and our facebook page and we’ll throw in a few random prizes too for the most imaginative and fun photos!

Then we hope to have lots of orders to pack when the snow starts to clear and we can get back into the warehouse – hopefully tomorrow.

To get things going, here’s a photograph of me measuring the snow here in Manchester. It was 7 inches deep!

John measuring the snow in Manchester

So, what are you waiting for? Get your hat and gloves on, get a rule or tape measure, and get snapping! Send your photos to info@alcoholfree.co.uk with the subject line How Deep Is Your Snow.

If you haven’t got a digital camera, or don’t know how to email photos, don’t worry, you won’t be left out. Just send us an email telling us how we can improve The Alcohol-Free Shop and we’ll send you a voucher worth 5% off your next order placed this week.

Stay safe, keep warm and have fun!

“Why do restaurants and chefs think they know better than their customers when it comes to alcohol-free wine and beer?”

It provoked a few responses.

One person replied “perhaps because they do, food and drink being their area of professional expertise?”

This is the same sort of thinking the leads to chefs refusing to cook a steak to the customer’s liking because the chef knows best.

Well, maybe the chef does know best, from a technical perspective, but from a taste perspective the only thing that matters is the taste-buds of the paying customer.

The same applies to drink.

If a customer wants an alcohol-free beer or wine, that’s what they want.

They don’t want water.

They don’t want cola.

And they don’t want yet another orange juice.

They want a good de-alcoholised Merlot, a fruity de-alcoholised Chardonnay or a great alcohol-free wheat beer.

Other people replied agreeing that they found it hard to find alcohol-free drinks when they went out, and they wanted the choice too.

One woman said she often phoned up before hand to find out if the restaurant sold any alcohol-free wine or beer.

Her husband doesn’t drink, and he isn’t alone. There are lots people like him around the country.

Pregnant women. Dieters. People on medication. People in recovery. Drivers. Workers on call. People of certain faiths.

There are lots of reasons people don’t drink.

As I said in my reply to her “yes & many people base their decisions on availability of alcohol-free for one or more in the group. no alcohol-free = lost sales”

We’ve had restaurants tell us they don’t sell alcohol-free wines because they don’t think they are good enough.

The chances are they haven’t tasted an alcohol-free wine since Eisberg, 20 years ago. We don’t sell Eisberg.

But even if they have tasted a good alcohol-free wine and still don’t like it, that isn’t the point.

We are testament to the fact people who drink alcohol-free wines like them.

We’ve been selling them for nearly 4 years. We sell a lot of them.

It’s like a restaurant refusing to sell anything but meat.

No one expects all restaurants to sell only vegetarian food. But they do expect a vegetarian option.

If you were a vegetarian in a group of meat eaters and the restaurant had nothing to offer you except beans on toast, you’d be understandably annoyed.

Especially if your fellow diners were tucking into the finest steak or lobster.

But when it comes to drinks, all we are offered are the beans on toast – the water, the orange juice, the cola.

We aren’t 10 years old. We don’t want soft-drinks.

We are adults. We want an adult drink with our adult food.

Is that really asking too much?

XA Rum and Diet Cola - only 20 calories per 250ml can!

We’re really very excited to be stocking XA – an incredible new brand of non-alcoholic cocktail from the USA.

XA comes in two great flavours of Rum & Diet Cola and Bourbon and Cola

They are created using only natural ingredients, elixirs and flavours to replicate the taste of these popular classic cocktails.

XA Rum and Diet Cola flavour has all the tropical taste and aroma of the spirit of the Caribbean with only 20 calories per can. It’s a great-tasting alternative for those who want to enjoy the warming essence of the West Indies and watch their figure.

XA Bourbon and Cola flavour has the distinctive taste and aroma of the liquor of the southern states with 110 calories per can. Served on the rocks, it’s an authentic-tasting choice for those who like to unwind with the soothing flavours of the oak-aged spirit of Kentucky.

XA is sold in single-flavour packs of four, 12 and 24, or as a mixed case of 24 cans.

The mixed case gives you the chance to try both varieties and share the pleasure with friends. It cotains 12 cans of XA Rum and Diet Cola Flavour and 12 cans of Bourbon and Cola Flavour.

XA. All you would expect of a classic cocktail, except alcohol.

View XA here.

I do the technical side of our business myself. I’ve got a history of programming and web production so it’s part of my “job” to do it and I’m glad I do – most of the time! When it goes well, it’s great to be able to quickly make changes to our site. It gives us a cutting edge over other web sites who have to get another company in to do the work for them which is slower and costs more.

Of course, I have to take the rough with the smooth and the last 24 hours or so have been pretty rough.

We’ve been working on our new site for a long time and last night decided to make it live. This is a pretty big, all-or-nothing sort of thing. Although in the absolute worst case, we could roll back to the old site, it would mean a lot of hard work to do so. Basically once the new site is live, it’s live and if anything goes wrong it has to be fixed, quickly.

Well, it went live last night and I went to bed at 2am this morning thinking everything was fine. I woke up to find no orders. Something was wrong.

The problem was customers couldn’t add products to their basket. Which, obviously, meant no sales.

I spent all morning trying to find the problem. Eventually I had to re-upload all the code from our development server and, for no obvious reason, it worked… Phew…

Then, about an hour or so ago, I found it had gone again! I really couldn’t work out why. Nothing, I thought, had changed. It just seemed to stop.

So, two more frustrating hours and eventually the problem was traced to an upgrade of Wordpress – this blog – which I had done just before I went to bed last night, and just before the problem started again this evening…

Something was causing a conflict and it meant customers couldn’t shop. It was really simple to fix. Once I found out what it was! Such is life…

Anyway, the site is now live and we hope you like it. We’re really proud of it. We think it looks great and is easier to use than the old site.

There may well be the odd bug (hopefully not as serious as the one that caused us to lose a day’s sales today!) and if you do find anything not quite right, please do contact us and let us know.

And if you have any feedback on the new site – good OR bad – please get in touch and tell us what you think.

Thanks!

It certainly made a change to go to a party and be able to enjoy a glass of de-alcoholised wine and a cold beer. The host had stocked up on some of our drinks and many guests took advantage of them. It also made a change to not have drunken people say “Why are you not drinking? What’s wrong with you?” which is common if you are seen with a soft drink in your hand.

With a glass of de-alcoholised wine or beer in your hand, no one is any the wiser and they just get on with having a good time.

Ever better was seeing a couple of people pouring out some of the Weinkonig Merlot I had brought along, taking a sip, and then walking away happy – completely unaware they were drinking de-alcoholised wine.

To get to the title of this blog “Put in my place” I was told off by a friend of the host, who is also a customer of ours, because I hadn’t updated the blog much recently. I did apologise to her, and do also to you. We have had a lot to do recently with the shop and warehouse move, getting the new shop ready, etc.

I’ve also personally been busy on our new web site which is due to go live very soon. It’s based on the same site we have now, with an improved design and the odd enhancement to make your shopping experience better (for instance, you will be able to add items to your basket from the category listing without having to click on to the individual item).

When the site goes live, please don’t panic! Yes, it looks quite different from the current site on first glance, but it does basically work the same as the current site and you shouldn’t have any problems shopping as normal. If you do though, please let us know. We have worked hard to get the site ready and bug-free, but it’s always possible something may still be wrong when it goes live and we’d appreciate it very much if you would tell us of any problems you find so we can fix them.