How’s your Dry January going? Heineken reckons its 0.0 beer has made it easier than ever to ‘cheers with no alcohol’.

To illustrate its point, its latest ad takes us on a journey through time. We go back to celebrations in the Viking era, the French renaissance and as far forward as 1980s Japan, to witness the shunning of non-alcoholic drinks consumers, whose various cups of tea, cartons of juice or cans of pop are all frowned upon (it’s ‘bad luck’, apparently). Happily, of course, these days non-boozers can clink their Heineken 0.0 bottles with impunity.

Of course, this ignores the fact that refusing to ‘cheers’ someone without booze is simply mean-spirited, bad luck or not. If you have to trick your friends into clinking glasses with you, you need better ones.

But with an ad this fun (it’s soundtracked, aptly, by Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’) who really cares?

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