Foster's lager is an Australian brand, not an Australian beer – the amber nectar is in fact made in Manchester

Foster's may be 'the Australian for lager' but it is brewed in Britain

Let's be clear: Foster's lager, as we know it in Britain's pubs and supermarkets, is an Australian brand; it is not an Australian beer. "Australian for lager" it may claim to be, but 1.2bn pints of the amber nectar a year are brewed in Manchester, not Melbourne. And almost all of them are drunk in Britain, making Foster's this country's second best-selling standard lager, behind Carling.

The ersatz Aussie beer, initially brewed under licence, first captured the imagination of British drinkers thanks to tongue-in-cheek television adverts in the early 1980s.

These featured Paul Hogan – that international embodiment of the Australian stereotype – at a wine tasting, telling viewers he had brought "enough of the amber nectar to go around".

Watching in horror as his fellow drinkers sipped and spat, the Crocodile Dundee actor proclaimed: "Looks like I did the right thing too – 'cos that stuff looks about as popular as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip."

So far, so clear. But Foster's was not always a British beer pretending to be Australian; it began life as an Australian beer mimicking "lighter European-style" lagers.

Production was started in Melbourne by two American brothers, William and Ralph Foster, in 1887, before they quickly sold up and returned to the US. By 1907 the business had been swallowed up in the series of mergers that created the Australian brewing combine Carlton & United Breweries.

It was not until 1990 that the brewing business – which by then also had extensive wineries in Australia and New Zealand – again took the Foster's name, though by that time the lager brand had essentially become a British phenomenon. Little more than 100m pints of Foster's lager are drunk in Australia each year. Australian drinkers prefer Carlton Draught and Victoria Bitter.

In 2006 Edinburgh-based brewer Scottish & Newcastle, which had been brewing Foster's under licence for more than a decade, bought out the rights to the Australian beer in the UK, giving them full control of the brand here.

The lager had become a central brand for Britain's largest brewer, despite a personal dislike of the accompanying image of Australia felt by S&N's then chief executive, Australian Tony Froggatt. "They make me cringe," he said of the television adverts. "But that's the Australian image people in Britain like, I guess."

By this stage, Foster's the company was selling a lot of alcohol in Britain, though not a drop of it was lager. Paul Hogan may have helped sell cans of Foster's the lager by suggesting it was preferable to wine but for Foster's Group wine had come to dominate sales, with particular success coming from the UK market.

Last month Foster's demerged its wine operations but for many years its wine brands, such as Lindeman's, Rosemount and Wolf Blass, had been among the most popular on Britain's supermarket shelves.

Success in wine exports also mirrored Australia's domestic drinking preferences. Contrary to the image projected by British lager marketeers, Australians drink less beer and more wine than either the British or Americans.

Confused? There is one final twist. Three years ago the UK operations of S&N were acquired by a business controlled by someone called Charlene. Perhaps disappointingly, this Charlene was no more Australian than Foster's lager. Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken is the London-based Dutch heiress who nine years ago inherited a controlling interest in Heineken.