A history of the beer which ‘worked wonders’

UNLIKE some beers, the history of Double Diamond is not entirely straight forward and its origins cannot be pinpointed to an exact date.

Bottle labels may have suggested Double Diamond had been brewed since 1876 but this was the year the trademark diamond symbol was registered.

The origin of the beer may well be 1876 but it could equally be 10, 20 or even more than 30 years earlier.

Double Diamond gently bubbled away for a number of years without any major success until the end of the Second World War.

The catalyst to is meteoric rise to stardom could be pinned to the opening of the Curzon Street bottling stores in 1948.

Earlier problems with quality were now ironed out as the beer was being brewed and bottled under the watch of Ind Coope experts rather than relying on slapdash third parties.

Within a decade, Double Diamond was Britain’s best-selling bottled beer and following the brewery’s merger with Tetley Ansell in 1961, advertising of the brand went into overdrive.

The strapline “a Double Diamond works wonders”, was, and still is, one of the best known advertising phrases of all time.

It was first produced by the advertising agency London Press Exchange in 1952 with its extension into television in 1967.

Between 1967 and 1974 more than 30 Double Diamond television commercials were produced.

By 1974 it was estimated that 50 million pints would be sold in that year alone.

By 1982, Britain was at war in the Falklands and on April 4, 1982, a news agency photographer snapped a picture of thousands of bottles of Double Diamond being loaded onto a Royal Navy ship at Portsmouth for the troops.

Despite its growth and widespread popularity, Double Diamond was loathed by the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra).

Camra branded the keg version of the beer – alongside most other commercial beers of the time – as “adulterated sludge” and issued it’s own demoralising slogan of “DD is K9P”.