No to "Cola-Nization": Russians Take to Traditional Refreshment Kvas
Wednesday, 09 July 2008
ZVENIGOROD, Russia: Poet Alexander Pushkin wrote that Russians need the drink like they need the air. No, it's not vodka. It's called kvas. And despite its humble folk origins, the fermented-bread drink brewed by Russians for over a thousand years has become a booming multimillion dollar industry.
Western imports like Coca-Cola and Pepsi once stifled the commercial kvas market. But today, a kvas revival has taken hold as Russia's companies pitch it as a patriotic cola alternative, and Russians are repatriating their tastebuds with gusto.
The mildly alcoholic drink, which tastes a bit like a weak beer or wheaty cider, is riding a nationalist resurgence under leader Vladimir Putin, who has boasted of a new era of Russian pride and power.
Bottled kvas sales have tripled in the past three years, according to Moscow-based Business Analytica, and Russians will drink more than three liters per person this year. In Moscow, cola's share of the soft drink market dropped from 37 to 32 percent between 2005 and 2007, while kvas' market share, 16 percent in 2007, more than doubled over the same period.
But cola makers have a strategy: if you can't beat kvas, brew it. Coca-Cola introduced its own brand this May, the first time a non-Russian company entered the market as a key producer, and Pepsi recently entered a distribution deal with a Russian kvas company.
"Kvas is getting more and more popular," said Alexei Frolov, the marketing director for Ochakovo, Russia's most popular brand of mass-produced kvas. "Something has changed in people's minds."
It's not only Russians' patriotic palate that has sparked kvas' revival. New distribution and storage technologies - as well as a heavy dose of Madison Avenue-style marketing - have breathed life into the market, which has seen the entrance of three new major brands since 2004.
Once sold only during the summer out of wheeled yellow tanks the size of beer barrels, the is now bottled, canned and shipped across the country. Unlike its predecessor, the new kvas does not spoil quickly, and Russians can now buy it all year round.
While Russians are drinking more kvas, some are enjoying it less. The new mass-produced brands have left many longing for the bread brew of the old days.
To find authentic kvas, connoisseurs come to this town about an hour west of Moscow, where in a basement beneath the onion domes of the town's fifteenth-century Orthodox monastery, a huge refrigerator chills vats of the muddy brown brew.
For over 600 years, monks at the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery have been brewing kvas for themselves, and seven years ago began selling it. Unlike mass-produced varieties, the monastery's kvas has no preservatives and spoils within five days.
As the monks say, it's "live." They sneer at competitors with their artificial preservatives.
"It is not profitable for them to make live kvas," Father Ignaty said of Russia's commercial kvas producers. "So they're forced to poison people."
Commercial brewers, meanwhile, pitch their product as the healthy patriotic alternative to unhealthy Western soft drinks.
That's how kvas company Nikola - literally - made a name for itself. Nikola, which means "not cola" in Russian, launched an "anti cola-nization" campaign in Moscow last year that billed its kvas as the Russian alternative to "cola-nist" soft drinks.
The company ran ads featuring look-alikes of Michael Jackson and Kiss singer Gene Simmons scaring Russian children and bathers while holding up cola. Then the look-alikes reveal themselves to be "real Russians" and begin drinking kvas.
"No to cola-nization. Kvas. To the health of the nation," the voiceover says.
The pitch appears to have worked. Launched in 2005, Nikola soon became Russia's second-largest kvas seller and retooled the traditional image of the drink.
"In our family we have a full ban on Coca-Cola, for both the kids and the adults," Olga Beglyarova said, after purchasing a bottle of fresh kvas from the monastery.
Coke and other soft-drinks, she claimed, "spoil and harm your health."
Even Coca-Cola brews its kvas only with Russian ingredients, using a recipe that, according to spokesman Vladimir Kravtsov, tastes "as much as possible like the kvas sold during Soviet times."
Yet despite their best efforts, the mass-producers can't beat certain selling points of the Zvenigorod kvas. As Father Antony said, his brew is "blessed by God."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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