You could be forgiven for wondering if beer drinkers are going soft on us, given the New Zealand market's current trend towards low-carb beers, low-cal beers and light tasting, sweet-flavoured seasonal beers.

Emulating northern European wheat beers, with their aromatic flavours, is one thing, but creating beers that rely on sweet citrus flavours for their appeal is an entirely different can of…er, beer.

And it’s not only the beers that are becoming lighter. Beer cans are also slimming down.

The new slimline Stella Artois beer can went down a treat in other countries last year, which is why it was introduced to New Zealand in late 2007.

If it seems that beer companies are trying to woo women, Lion Nathan's marketing director for beer, Stephen Smith, says nothing could be further from the truth.

So why exactly are beers looking, sounding and tasting lighter than ever?

The whole beer category is becoming less masculine, Smith admits.

"We don’t necessarily think 'How can we bring more women into the fold?' I think generally that society is changing and we’re effectively just recognising societal trends," he says.

"Even the guys are not necessarily wanting to be depicted as macho, masculine men. I guess everyone’s getting a little bit softer and there’s a real blurring of male and female roles in life, whereas in previous generations it was far more clear-cut. All those things contribute to the development of more feminine beers that are less masculine in flavour," he explains.

Smith insists that drawing female consumers to Stella Artois was not the driving force behind launching the slimmer-looking can, but rather it was the convenience factor: Stella had never been available in a can in New Zealand.

Where female beer drinkers are concerned, direct targeting doesn’t work anyway, he adds.

"There have been many people who have tried to target women with beer and failed miserably. Instead of that, we’ll just tailor products that suit both men and women; this is reflective of changing societal patterns within New Zealand. There are also a whole bunch of regulations that mean we are becoming more and more PC as a nation."

In turn, Smith says this adds pressure on beer companies to behave and tow the line, which necessarily means moving away from the blokey image of old.

"In Australia the beer market is entirely different to ours. It’s very blokey. I don’t know if they still use their old XXXX ads, where the guy makes the choice between his wife travelling in the Ute or taking an extra case of XXXX in her place - she gets left behind at the bottle store. There’s just no way we’d ever have done that here – in the past or now."

For the past five years, female beer consumption in New Zealand has been relatively static at about 30 per cent and Smith insists he does not think this figure has grown.

Instead of trying actively to grow that figure, he says that changes in the beer market come in more subtle ways.

"The whole New Zealand beer market used to be based on a couple of brands only and now we’re seeing things spark people’s interest, whether they are male or female. Beers like Radler and Mac’s Sundance are now giving everybody a choice of something lighter, whereas in the past the entire beer industry was founded on two brands."