By VICTORIA MOORE

Last updated at 17:54 15 November 2007

You know how depressing it is when the local you've happily been sinking pints at for years suddenly seems to be going downhill?

Well a few months ago, landlord Dave Edwards of the Rose & Crown in Worthing on the South Coast began to notice that was exactly what was happening to his own pub.

As his bar manager, a man who doesn't mince his words, puts it: "We're a nice place with nice, often more mature, customers. We have a Thai restaurant in the evenings, and they come for a quiet drink and something to eat.

"Then suddenly - I'm not a snob - but we started getting all these loudmouthed yobs in. Younger drinkers, 19 to 30-year-olds, and builders and labourers.

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"They weren't fighting - we'd never have let things get to that stage - but they were creating, and it was bad enough to make the other customers start leaving early."

Dave noticed that besides being trouble, all these "rogue elements" had something else in common. When they asked for "the usual", it always meant the same thing: a pint of Stella Artois.

"With Stella, we got a minimum amount of drinking and a maximum amount of aggravation," says Dave. "It didn't appear to be a social drink and seemed to have an adverse effect on people. Everyone who was drinking Stella was a pain."

His solution was blindingly simple. He cancelled his order for Stella Artois and replaced it with another lager, San Miguel.

Within a matter of weeks, the rowdy crowd had found somewhere else to drink and it was business as usual at the Rose & Crown. Everyone, it seemed, was happy.

Well perhaps not quite everyone.

For InBev, the company which owns the enormously successful and profitable beer, this incident was further worrying proof that Stella Artois, once best known for its unashamedly upmarket advertising slogan, "reassuringly expensive", has, as a member of the drinks trade phrases it, "done a Burberry" - the fashion house which became the designer label of choice for football thugs.

In short, it has gone from being a product with a certain degree of class to one associated with all the wrong sort of people.

Despite heavily discounted prices, sales of Stella Artois in Britain have slumped recently with take-home sales down five per cent. Perhaps this is not surprising when own-brand supermarket lagers are now cheaper even than mineral water at an astonishing 22p per can.

But Stella's owner is now trying to fight back with a new multi-million pound advertising campaign. It has dropped the "reassuringly expensive" slogan ("but only for the time being," insists a spokesman), and is attempting to reposition the lager with a Continental set of ads that doesn't mention "Stella" at all.

"It would be naive to say no [there isn't an image problem]," admits a spokesman for InBev.

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Image problem? Just a bit! The drink, which at 5.2 per cent alcohol is stronger than many other lagers and therefore makes people drunker and sometimes more aggressive more quickly, has acquired the unflattering soubriquet of "wife beater".

"I first heard someone refer to it as that two or three years ago," says Zak Avery, a beer trade commentator who owns a specialist off-licence in Headingley near Leeds.

"I think that to use a term like that laughingly as a nickname for a beer is crass. But it seems to happen.

"It comes from the people they refer to in America as "poor white trash",

or "trailer trash", and there's a particular item of clothing, a white sleeveless vest, that gets called the "wife beater vest".

"The sort of person who might live that lifestyle, and wear that top, was co-opted to describe the average Stella drinker - though I should stress it's not something I necessarily believe is fair."

None of this is compatible with the sophisticated and upmarket image that Stella has tried to push, using TV ads with such high production values they look like expensive art-house mini-movies. Or with their sponsorship of the tennis tournament at Queen's Club in London, which is a warm-up for Wimbledon.

Tap the words "Stella Artois" and "wife beater" into an internet search engine, though, and you'll see just how commonly used the nasty nickname is.

"Me and my partner used to drink Stella all the time - and every time we'd end up in terrible arguments," offers one (female) correspondent on an internet discussion board. "4 years ago we decided to drink a lighter beer and eversince [sic] we have not argued like back then."

Another adds: "My parents run a pub and they stopped selling Stella for the reasons above. It is even called wifebeater in the trade!"

And yet another: "I used 2 drink stella and all it does is make me and the mrs argue and i've hit her a few times which im ashamed of."

Meanwhile, one drinker said he was convinced the drink sent "mental messages round my brain".

Of course, it is ridiculous to suggest that any particular drink, rather than people's excessive consumption of it, might be to blame for violence.

But the cultural association is far from being just a bit of pub and internet chat.

In the courts, lawyers are sadly familiar with the Stella phenomenon. Barrister Alex McBride says: "The people I see coming into court who are up for charges of GBH are, by and large, young men who have drunk an awful lot of strong lager.

"I'm not saying that means they've drunk Stella, but, more often than not, it does tend to be Stella."

Others claim Stella seems to have become the drink of choice for those who go out and "glass each other". And as criminal defence lawyer Greg Foxsmith told BBC's Newsnight: "One rarely hears the same thing with other brands that I can mention."

The lager was even singled out by a judge in a Brighton court, who linked it with binge-drinking and alcohol-fuelled violence when sentencing a man who had attacked his ex-girlfriend's partner after downing Stella Artois.

"For people who sit where I do, there are key words in the papers for this case which occur all too frequently in cases involving young men and alcohol," said recorder John Hardy. "They are "Stella" and "binge-drinking"."

When the Mail contacted Mr Hardy this week, he declined to comment further:

"The observations that I made in court were relevant to the particular case with which I was dealing."

Given the rate at which Stella outsells its rivals, perhaps it is inevitable that its name will crop up more frequently in cases that involve alcohol and violence.

But with the Stella name now so tarnished, no wonder its parent company told the Mail it has decided to withdraw it from some (presumably less desirable) establishments - even if the official reason given for this is that "the pouring ritual is not being observed correctly".

For those familiar with its reputation, the idea of asking for a "pint of Stella please, mate" is rapidly becoming about as appealing as the idea of ordering the down-and-out's favourite, a pint of Special Brew.

So where did it all go wrong?

For the past decade, the Stella Artois brand has been one the most commercially successful beers in the country.

Initially marketed as a premium, ever-so-stylish French lager (even if it was actually Belgian) aimed at the upmarket drinker, it rapidly became "a success story beyond anything the beer trade had seen", says Graham Holter, editor of Off Licence News.

The advertising campaign was hugely successful in increasing awareness of the brand. And this was soon coupled with huge price promotions. Despite the "reassuringly expensive" tagline, Stella Artois is very often anything but.

Says one advertising executive who used to work on the brand: "Stella Artois soon became widely available in supermarkets and off licences, where it was - and still is - often discounted."

While the advertising sought to position the brand upmarket, the discounting had the opposite effect and attracted the sort of customer who was good for sales but certainly didn't fit the profile for a high quality product.

"It has become a victim of its own success," says brand expert James Osmond, a director at consultancy Clear. "This often happens when a brand gets so enormous that it tries to appeal to everyone. Either it becomes ubiquitous and begins to lose credibility. Or it's bought by the wrong type of customer."

It was the relatively high 5.2 per cent alcohol content that encouraged the binge-drinkers and led to lager becoming something you'd order "if you were really out on the lash", as one drinker, estate agent Martin Abel, puts it.

"It became something a bit naughty," he continues. "I'd order a pint of Stella rather than another beer because I'd know it would get me more revved up."

Chris Canning, a plumber from Bethnal Green, East London, concurs. "It gets you smashed, doesn't it? Me and the lads have it when we're on a big night."

And so Stella began to acquire a reputation as a drink for those whose stated mission was to get blind drunk.

Understandably, Stella's owner now wants to shed this downmarket image. Its new advertising campaign strives to position it as part of the "Famille Artois" - a family of three beers sold alongside each other under the Artois umbrella.

As for the pedigree, it claims the pale gold pilsner lager, made with Saaz hops, was first brewed as a Christmas beer in Leuven, a Belgian city with an elaborate Gothic town hall, and that "it was named Stella from the star of Christmas, and Artois after Sebastian Artois, founder of the brewery".

But there is some controversy over the precise history of the Stella brand.

Earlier this year, the advertising watchdog banned the brand from implying in its adverts that one family had been brewing the beer for more than 600 years.

A spokesman still insists it can trace its history back more than six centuries, as it was first brewed in 1366 and is still made "in the same way, perhaps with the odd technological advancement".

And where is it made today? "It's all made in Leuven," explained a spokesman. All of it? "Yes, except for the stuff we drink in this country, and that's made in Wales."

The owner, InBev, is doing its level best to distance itself from the wifebeater moniker. "Successful brands are often blamed for social problems," says the spokesman. "In reality, the minority who cause problems due to excessive drinking are an issue for society as a whole."

InBev also points out that the number of establishments selling Stella Artois has risen by 500 in the past year.

But given the experience of the Rose & Crown in Worthing, perhaps a few other landlords might now be considering calling time on it.