You may not believe it, but these are exciting times for the

But standard lager, like all other beer sectors, is having to face and deal with the challenge of other product categories such as wine, vodka and premium packaged spirits.

That's seen the main players all striving to give their brands extra value through improving product quality and consumer expectations.

The stakes were raised even higher with Heineken's unilateral decision to withdraw from the sector altogether.

While Heineken's heyday in the mainstream sector may have been behind it, it shouldn't be forgotten that as recently as last November, AC Nielsen figures put the old Cold-Filtered brand at number seven in the GB on-trade beer table. It had sales worth £468m and made Heineken's decision one of the biggest gambles in beer marketing history.

It's also left the other major brands with a huge slab of business to compete for in what remains the biggest on-trade beer sector, with just short of 36% market share.

Keith Quinn, on-trade cate-gory marketing director at Scot-tish Courage, says: "It's still the largest sector of the market by a long way."

And Colin Pedrick, managing director for on-trade sales at Interbrew UK, describes standard lager as "the engine room of the industry".

He adds: "There's an absolute fortune being spent by everyone on supporting the standard lager market, whether it's for last year's World Cup or another sporting event, or in supermarkets or pubs."

Those marketing millions make new entry into the market practically impossible, especially as many regional brewers have taken a step back from having their own or exclusively imported brands to list one or two of the big three.

The beer market cliché of recent times has been that the big brands are getting bigger, but the reason it's become a cliché is because it's true.

The value of standard lager in the on-trade was up 6% in the year to last November. Each of the big three grew sales at a faster rate over the same period ­ Foster's by 12%, Carling by 10% and Carlsberg by 8%.

Carlsberg's resurgence in recent times has owed a lot to the new focus following a trimming of brands, including the departure of Castlemaine XXXX to Interbrew in the UK and the decline of Skol, which still just about hangs on in the Carlsberg-Tetley portfolio.

Like its main rivals, the big issue for Carlsberg has been product quality in the last year or two, attempting to persuade consumers that the somewhat urinary descriptions applied to standard lager from time to time are completely unjustified.

The introduction of the Vortex dispense system has been backed by a new font design and plenty of well-targeted sponsorship bucks.

Iain Paton, Carlsberg-Tetley's director of brands, says Vortex had been "the rock of the relaunch".

He adds: "It's led to a lot of regional brewers reassessing Carlsberg and we've won business with Greene King, Fuller's and Wolverhampton & Dudley, with some 18,000 new accounts in all.

"If you're going to stock two standard lagers, the rationale often is to stock Carling or Foster's as they are the brand leaders, with Carlsberg positioned as the lager that's a bit special and one that attracts slightly different users."

Vortex cuts down dispense times by a third and provides a better head on the beer. "We weren't getting negative feedback from consumers about how long it took to pour a pint," Paton says, "but it was seen as a benefit for the trade. A 30% saving in time does help bar staff."

Foster's is also using technology to try to improve head delivery as well as a consistently cool temperature of product with its head injection tap (HIT).

Quinn at Scottish Courage says: "The benefit to the trade is that they're going to sell more Foster's and make more money. There's reduced wastage if the tap is used properly, with less fobbing over the top of the glass."

Many brands are relying on nucleated glasses to deliver a better pint. Quinn says: "Nucleated glasses help, but they're not enough. They produce a better head, but they're not as good as the HIT tap. You don't get the lacing down the glass in the same way."

He goes on: "Perhaps because the brands are so well known in this sector, it sometimes seems like things can be going on and almost be ignored, unlike with a new brand. In reality, a brand innovation such as this is probably more significant than something like Caffrey's starting from scratch.

"Foster's has a £25m marketing spend and you have to create a hell of a scale for a new brand to be able to sustain that sort of investment year after year."

Castlemaine may not exactly be coming from a standing start, but it does have significant ground to make up, having shown relegation form in its recent times, with the increasingly Carlsberg-focused C-T.

It provides new steward Interbrew UK with a standard brand to sell in a rounded portfolio to customers, but it will aim for a slightly different proposition in its bid to accompany Carling or Foster's on to bar tops.

Interbrew's Pedrick says: "We see Castlemaine as a value-proposition alternative to Foster's or Carling within an outlet.

"It can sit comfortably with them and give consumers a choice. There's an opportunity in most outlets to offer two brands in a way that there isn't with some of the other smaller product sectors.

"You sometimes see a significant number of premium ales on a bar, but if you look at the state of that market, you'd have to question it."

Pedrick says distribution and rate-of-sale were key issues for the brand.

He adds: "We've got it into 80% of the accounts where we previously had Heineken and we're in a lot of big multiples.

"We'll have somewhere in the region of 400,000 barrels by the end of the year compared to something like 100,000 before we took it over."

But don't expect any technological innovation on Castlemaine, at least for the foreseeable future.

"When we took it on, we had to change all the fonts in 15,000 outlets within a month or two and it was a miracle for our technicians to do all that. Now we're aiming to have a brand new font by the end of the year, which will say more about the positioning of the brand."

The Castlemaine target for the year will still see it a long way off the pace of the market leader, Carling, which has some 2.7 million barrels, despite having no significant presence in Scot-land ­ yet!

Carling's own innovation programme may prove to be the one that everyone has to match, if for no other reason than the brand's scale in the market-place.

Carling Extra Cold is entering its second year with 7,000 accounts.

Des Johnson, the brand director for Carling at Coors Brewers, says: "From all the research we've done, one of the main things consumers send back to us, is that mainstream lager is about refreshment and a key part of that is coldness.

"The main sources of consumer dissatisfaction are a warm pint, a flat pint or a dirty glass.

"It's probably got a better head on it now as well, because we're supplying new branded glassware, which is nucleated. It means consumers are getting a better quality lager experience all round."

Johnson claims Extra Cold is gaining repurchase rates of up to 90%. He says: "I think it's added a halo effect on to the category in general. Consumers can see that there's a lot happening in the market when perhaps they've been a bit bored with what's on offer for them."

The concern for licensees might be that drinkers will merely switch from Carling to Extra Cold, gaining nothing but losing bar space.

Johnson says: "From some of the EPoS work we've been able to do with some of our commercial partners, we're seeing that it takes some sales from Carling, but it's also taking a little bit out of every competing drinks category, so it is driving incremental sales of lager."

So standard lager remains the number one beer of choice among the UK's pub customers, but the major brands have plenty going on to make sure that remains so.

"We expect to see single digit growth [each year] at least for the next five