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.

"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.