At the intersection of Pilsner, Punk and Pig's ears

It's the Pig's Ear beer festival in Hackney next week. I'm looking forward to it even more than usual this year, because if all goes according to plan, it’ll see a rare outing for cask beers from Walthamstow’s Signature Brew – and an even rarer UK one for cask beers from America's famed Dogfish Head. And they’ll be the same beers...

At least, that was one of the stories I heard when I was over at Signature last month for an event billed as “The intertwined history of punk rock and craft beer”. 

I have to confess that, when I first saw that headline, I didn’t get it. I was around in 1977, and I’m pretty damn sure there weren’t any punks necking single-hop pale ales and kettle sours – and there definitely wasn’t any Punk IPA!

Sams M (left) and C (right)

But the invitation also included the opportunity to meet craft beer legend Sam Calagione, the co-founder of Dogfish Head, and taste both his famous IPAs and the first of two beers he’s collaborated on with Signature co-founder Sam McGregor.

That first collaboration is an updated version of a beer Dogfish brewed several years ago called Piercing Pils. This playful take on the Central European classic – Dogfish styles it a Czech Pils, but it has definite Germanic notes – features both pear juice and pear tea alongside the noble hops. The pear juice adds both fermentable sugars, a fruity flavour and an intriguing, faintly Belgian estery note, while the tea melds with and builds the spicy character of the hops. 

It’s a very nice and very well-made beer – but why add flavours to a classic like Pils? “Since the craft beer revolution, brewers have been putting all sorts of crazy stuff into ales, but usually not lagers,” laughed Sam C. “With lager, there’s nothing to hide behind, so not too often do people fuck with lager – but we do!”

That ‘nowhere to hide faults’ aspect is why some modern ale brewers make lager, to show they really can brew, but as Sam M pointed out, that’s not relevant here. “The kit here [at the Walthamstow brewery] is already set up for lager,” he explained. “A lot of the work we did here was to bring our Studio Lager in-house.”

Beer and band punks on stage together

That work also included both a reverse-osmosis filter to get the right water quality for the beer being brewed – they even use it to replicate Colorado water for their American IPA – and a centrifuge for the finished beer so they don’t have to pasteurise or filter it. 

But with all this industry going on, where’s the punk angle? To discuss it, the two Sams were joined on the Signature brewhouse stage by Matt Reynolds of modern hardcore punk duo Haggard Cat, and Jon Langford of 1970s punk band The Mekons – roadies had been busy all afternoon setting up the stage for the two bands to play later that evening.

For all four of them, it’s a shared concept – a rejection of the mainstream and a determination to do your own thing. As Langford explained, while 1970s London punk was very shock-orientated, the north-east punk scene that The Mekons came out of was very different. “We thought it was all about you make your own entertainment, for us in The Mekons it was all do-it-yourself,” he said. 

Sam C said that American craft brewing, fired up by President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 legalisation of homebrewing, was driven by a similar rejection of the mainstream. “The homebrewing movement was a punk movement,” he declared. Dogfish Head may have been founded in 1995 – Calagione calls it “a second-generation craft brewery” – but it still started out as him and two friends brewing in a kitchen.

Burnished amber in a glass

He added that even now, after he sold his brewery to Sam Adams – yes, yet another Sam! – for which he inevitably got a lot of ‘sell-out’ criticism, it’s all still far from mainstream. “When we merged with Sam Adams, our ‘monstrous combination’ represented two percent of the US beer market,” he said. “In the US, 9000 craft breweries share just 14% of the market.”

So, a Punk Pear Pils then? Well, maybe – it’ll certainly have the guardians of the Einheitsgebot (the Law of Sameness) shaking their heads. And according to Signature Brew’s other co-founder Tom Bott, it’s not the only thing that Sam C and the Dogfish crew were in town for – the week after we spoke, they were due back at the brewery to start work on a collaboration Porter, to be brewed with Vietnamese pepper and maple syrup!

And that's where it got extra-interesting. Tom said they also plan to cask some of both the Porter and the Piercing Pils. Signature started doing cask beers about a year ago – initially just versions of its Roadie and Backstage IPAs – but only for sale through two handpumps in the  brewery taproom. Now, Tom said they’re also “thinking to let some casks out further afield,” with Pig’s Ear a likely early recipient. 

Not just a Punk Pear Pils, then, but a Cask Punk Pear Pils. Now that’s my kind of DIY entertainment… See you at Pig's Ear! 

Pubs are keen, brewers are cautious – but what of the drinkers?

With pub reopening set for this coming Saturday, I hope to enjoy a pint of cask beer before too much longer. But while I’m sure we all know someone desperate to hit the pubs as soon as they open, many of us and our friends will be more cautious – worried about safety, perhaps, or wondering what it’ll be like if we can only get served at a pre-booked table, or perhaps concerned whether unscrupulous owners will use distancing as an excuse to declare pubs ‘unviable’ and close them down.

So I was surprised during last week’s Brewers Lectures UK – actually a pair of online panel discussions – to realise just how split the two main chunks of the beer business are on reopening. In particular, while I knew the brewing side was cautious, I had not appreciated just how desperate many on the retail side are to open up again.

“On the retail side, everyone wants to get going – there’s such a big divide between the two industries,” said panel member Charlie McVeigh, perhaps best known for founding the Draft House chain and now the man behind Project Pint which campaigns to get ‘our pubs, clubs, bars and restaurants back, exactly like they were.’

And for all the uncertainty and fear around social distancing, contact tracing and so on, when I checked what publicans and others were posting on Facebook and Twitter it looked like quite a few others think the same way.

It’s understandable, I guess – even with staff furloughed for now, and with government grants, publicans have bills to pay. And while quite a few have switched to offering take-aways, it will not be replacing much of their previous turnover.

Then again, it’s not clear just how far this enthusiasm spreads beyond the retailers. For example, Project Pint’s online petition has been up for four weeks but still hasn’t reached its target of 2500 names.

And the brewers’ caution is understandable – they must now dump expired stock and buy new ingredients, for instance, even though many haven’t yet been able to pay their suppliers for the last lot of ingredients.

A trouble shared is a trouble halved

Those on the Lectures panel agreed that, in some ways, it’s been easier because everyone’s been affected. “The first thing we did was pause and talk to all our suppliers – there has been a huge amount of understanding,” said Wild Card’s head brewer Jaega Wise, while her counterpart at Northern Monk, Brian Dickson, added: “Everyone’s been in the same boat, they’ve been saying ‘We’ll make it work.’”

The challenge though is the transition back from that state of ‘all in it together’ to ‘business as normal’. As Adnams’ Fergus Fitzgerald put it, “Every supplier we talked to was amazing. But we are almost in the riskiest period now, because we have to start making stuff, buy ingredients, sell to pubs who don’t know how many people will walk in the door… Then it’s what we’ve already said we’ll buy for the next 12 months, such as hops, clearing out our hop stores, and so on.”

One thing seems certain from this combination of keenness and caution: I’ll be able to get that cask pint, but I’m not going to have the choice I’m used to – the cask ale supply chain is a bit too ‘fragile’ for that.

“We don’t know how many venues will be able to open, and there’s still the possibility of a second wave, so casks may have to wait,” said Brian, while Fergus explained that although Adnams is back in production, it’s aiming “to keep the range low. For our own pubs, they’ll probably open with two cask ales, not the regular five or six. It’s the usual rule – you try to sell it through in three days, so it’s start small and build up.”

Ah well, one or two good cask pints will be a lot better than none!

What is bottle-conditioning – and why do we do it?

“Bottle-conditioned beers are not some sort of poor relation to cask, they exist in their own right,” declared John Keeling, former head brewer at Fuller’s, now retired. “A bottle-conditioned beer can never ever be the same as a cask beer, the reason is it will probably be a lot older.” He explained that while most cask beer has a shelf life measured in weeks, “most bottle-conditioned beers haven’t even left the warehouse at 6 weeks old!

“So it will have changed flavour, and secondly it will have more fizz in it. Bottle-conditioned beers are the supreme example of packaging beers. You do get some ingress of oxygen but the yeast mops it up – we opened a bottle of 1979 Vintage, for example, and the yeast was still viable.”

Introducing the panel

He was speaking at an event hosted by Marston's a few weeks ago, when a group of brewers and beer writers got together to discuss the past, present and future of bottle conditioning. We’d actually started by talking about the widespread assumption – fuelled in part by CAMRA’s ‘Real Ale in a Bottle’ (RAIB) validation scheme – that bottle-conditioned (BC) beers and real ales are the same thing.

Cask as a precursor

Was John Keeling right, though? Certainly there are clear links between real ale and bottle-conditioning. For a start, if you produce cask beer then it’s easier to do a BC version – you just bottle the cask version, said Harviestoun’s Stuart Cail. The advantage is that if you bottle it right – he uses big hand-bottled flip-tops – you can make it ‘premium’ and add a bit of theatre in a market where as he put it, “cask is not esteemed.”

Aged & conditioned Ola Dubh

Where it gets more interesting is when you use bottle-conditioning as just one step in a more complex process, he added. By way of example he offered a BC version of Harviestoun’s already highly regarded Ola Dubh (Black Oil) which had been aged in Highland Park whisky casks then krausened – dosed with fresh wort – to return it to life. The result was stunningly good, rich and heavy with a whisky tint, treacle-sweet yet burnt-dry, fruity and complex.

Along with John Keeling’s reminder that “in BC you get negative and positive reactions. They go in waves” as different microorganisms get to work on different components in the beer, it made me think: They’re both right, aren’t they? Yes, you can readily bottle beer brewed for cask, but that doesn’t automatically mean it ends up as ‘cask in a bottle’, because what happens to it next can be very different.

It certainly can be a route to ‘bottled cask’, as Marston’s brewer Pat McGinty explained. Marston’s wanted bottled Pedigree to taste more like the cask version, so its brewers had to do a lot of trials to work out the best way to achieve that. “We got way more of a fruited flavour when we put yeast in,” Pat said. “After a couple of weeks it had more carbonation, and was more recognisable as the cask beer.”

Something a lot of brewers (including Fuller’s) do is to filter and then reseed with fresh yeast for the bottle – preferably a different ‘sticky’ one that will settle to the bottom. Marston’s didn’t need to do that though, thanks to its yeast and the celebrated Burton Union fermentation system. “The Burton system traps the yeast and we can crop it nice and fresh,” Pat said. “It’s great for brewing but also perfect for bottle conditioning – most yeasts flocculate at the top but Marston’s yeast hasn’t made up its mind!”

He added, “Two weeks after we produce the beer, we bottle and cellar it. We put a 12-month shelf life on it, you can consume it beyond that but really its flavour will develop beyond [the intention of] the brand.”

Going through the four seasons

There we have it again – give it time and it’ll go further, even more so if you give it a bit of variation in storage, added John Keeling: “They would not have had temp control in the past. To me going through the four seasons makes sense, why not let it go the way it wants to go – and the way the outside temperature wants it to go?”

John told a tale about the development of Fuller’s Vintage Ale to illustrate the changes that time can bring. “When we developed 1845 [in 1995] we put one year shelf-life on it, but when we tasted it at one year old it was even better, so we had the idea of doing a vintage like you would with wine. Because the first Vintage Ale was 8.5%, we decided to put three years on it, we couldn’t put longer because the labelling regulations said you couldn’t. Now you can, and we put 10 years on!”

To illustrate, he offered tastings of the 2017 and 2010 Vintages. The former was rich and warming, fruit and lightly peppery, while the latter had picked up light oxidation notes – iodine, a little dry dustiness, a faint woody note – reminiscent of an old Madeira wine, in fact.

Not everyone filters and re-seeds the beer with fresh yeast, mind you. St Austell head brewer Roger Ryman told how they used to do that, dating back to his strong witbier Clouded White winning the Tesco Beer Challenge. “It was unfiltered in the competition – we had to ask if market was ready for that, and we decided to filter then reseed,” he admitted.

When the St Austell brewers subsequently tasted aged beers, they discovered that while others were showing signs of age, Clouded White was not. So then they did a BC Admirals Ale and two years later they added Proper Job to the BC list.

“It took three-or four years to find traction in the market, we were worried about its reception in the supermarket,” Roger continued. “Every brewer gets those unhappy Monday morning emails, ‘I bought your beer and found bits in it,’ but for every one of those there’s thousands of other happy drinkers.”

The challenge, he added, is once your beer is selling well and you’re on double-shifts at the brewery, how do you find time to filter and re-seed it? So Roger experimented with unfiltered beer instead, and luckily the yeast in Proper Job settled really tightly, yielding an excellent result. So after a visit to Marston’s to see what they were doing, he designed a set-up that blends yeast and beer in controlled amounts as it goes to the bottle-filler.

“We put quite a bit of automation around it, I thought it was unique,” he laughed. “Then I visited Westmalle, I’m looking at the bottling line – and there’s their yeast tank the same as I'd designed! So we brewers find the same solutions to the same problems.”

Ageing in cask – and in cans

But to come back to the original question, is bottle-conditioned beer definitively different from real ale? Well, yes – if you take today’s real ales as your examples. But historically, probably not because in the past any vessel could potentially be used to age beer. In the old days, stock ales were aged in wooden casks, often in the brewery yard. While it’s rare to age cask beers these days, it is sometimes done, and I’d argue the difference is as much to do with expectations as anything else – we expect cask ale to be fresh, not aged.

Moor's award-winning OFW is now can-conditioned

And cask-ageing is making a comeback – if, like some commentators, you regard cans as tiny kegs or casks… One of the pioneers here is Justin Hawke of Moor Beer, whose canned beers were the first to be accredited by CAMRA as real ale – that is, they contain live yeast, and the beer continues to develop (condition or referment) in the can.

“We had to work with the manufacturer on can-conditioning,” he said. “It was a bit crazy! We measure the sugar and yeast content in our lab, then we literally package the same beer into can and keg.” Justin added that refermentation makes the beer more stable, such that “unfined casks will keep for ages.”

He continued, “We go through a full refermentation, we crash-cool the beer pretty much to freezing to settle it out, then we warm it up in special temperature-controlled areas to get that refermentation to happen. It’s at least three weeks, some beers are longer – it’s a massive cost because we’re sitting on beer for an extended period, but it gives that evolution of flavour. My friends who brew tank beer will get the perfectly-fresh hop aroma that we will not get – our yeast interacts with the hops and changes the flavour. It gives a much more rounded mouth, you lose a little flavour but gain depth and shelf life and stability.”

The numbers game

The aftermath....

One thing is for sure – whatever the motivation, the popularity of bottle-conditioned beer shows no sign of abating. Jeff Evans, formerly editor of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide, and more recently of the Good Bottled Beer Guide, pointed out that “at the founding of CAMRA, only five bottle-conditioned beers were known to be in regular production,” a decline which he argued had been driven in part by better bottling technology which made it possible to give people the clearer beer they wanted.

It can hardly be a coincidence that the number started growing again as CAMRA first introduced a BC category into its competitions, and then began listing BC beers in the Good Beer Guide. By the time the listing was spun off as the Good Bottled Beer Guide the number was well over 100, and by the most recent edition it was a shade under 2000.

Producing a new edition would be a daunting prospect. It would need to consider over 3000 from the UK, said Jeff, plus more from abroad, where some brewers have long preferred the softer texture of unfiltered live beer.

Would it be worthwhile – do people still seek it BC beer out, I wonder? Or it is a case of it’s expected or assumed that some will be BC? Let us know in the comments below… Happy New Year!

Nationwide beer festival kicks off with London Brewing Co

The last time I visited London Brewing Co, it was a small brewkit in the corner of the kitchen at the Bull pub in Highgate. Now, it’s a 10 hectolitre microbrewery in its own space*, and it’s been appearing in 40 Nicholson’s pubs up and down the country as the opening act in that pubco’s Autumn 2018 Beer Showcase, which opened last month.

St Pancras IPA

“We’ve been brewing non-stop for this,” says LBC boss Senan Sexton. The brewery has produced 12 cask ales for the festival, some are their regulars and others are variants of previous brews, done specially for Nicholson’s.

Normally LBC’s production is 40% to 50% cask ale, rather than 100%, he says, adding that “Cask isn’t the most profitable, but it’s the most important. It’s low-margin for brewers but we’re not too worried as we can scale up and down.”

I met Senan, head brewer Richard, and second brewer George, at the Coal Hole on London’s Strand, where the pub’s staff had arranged a treat for us and a number of their regulars: a beer and food pairing, matching five beers with different dishes. The Coal Hole is a classic Nicholson’s pub, all dark wood and polished brass – very much an updated version of the image that many people will have of the classic English pub.

In fact I wonder if that “modern-traditional” style is why Nicholson’s pubs are so popular with their locals, yet often overlooked by others. Nicholson’s is part of pubco M&B, so sometimes it gets disparaged along with the likes of Punch and Enterprise. In truth though, its pubs are generally rather nice – and more importantly, they keep a very decent pint of real ale (or at least the ones I know do!).

The first beer we try is St Pancras IPA, brewed and named for the 150th anniversary this year of the railway station where barrels of beer arrived from Burton-on-Trent and were stored for onward distribution. It’s a lovely beer – toasty-sweet and malty-dry in what we now tend to think of as the classic English IPA style. It goes very nicely with the fried nibbles presented by the pub, with the caramel malt complementing the caramelisation in the batter.

Senan serves up the brownies

The other beers are just as good, from Admiral of the Red, a red ale that’s spicy and lightly tangy, through 100 Oysters, a dry Stout which is indeed brewed with 100 oysters and is complex and dark, to Gigglemug. The latter is a change of pace – after relatively rich cask ales, Richard wants to show he can do lighter keg beers too – this is a fruity and lightly floral American Pale Ale.

We finish with a bite of chocolate brownie to accompany Senan’s piece de resistance, Samson’s Riddle. A big and chewy 9.5% Imperial Stout that included black treacle in the brew, it’s been aged in Bourbon barrels before a couple of years of bottle conditioning. It’s good now, and should only improve – if you can find a bottle, that is.

Although technically LBC’s slot in the Nicholson’s Beer Showcase is over, I hear there are still ales available in some of the pubs around the country. It’d be a shame to miss them, but then again there’s plenty more good beer coming up – Siren is next, with a range that includes a number of specials.

*Still in a pub, but now it’s The Bohemia, in North Finchley.

Cask goes Continental at GBBF

The trade session at GBBF, the day after the guild get-together, was preceded by a morning judging golden ales for Champion Beer of Britain. The tasting is all done "blind", but we find out later what we judged, so I can tell you that Salopian's Oracle was totally justified as the gold medal winner for the category! In the main halls downstairs afterwards, the beers were in good condition, better than in some previous years. Some were a little 'green' but this was the very first session, and from what I hear they improved just as you'd expect as the week went on.

The big 'gap' was the American cask-conditioned beers, which had been delayed arriving. Fortunately the organisers were able to fill the hole left on the bar using something that was new this year – cask-conditioned Dutch and Belgian beers! I hear that arranging these was a logistical challenge, as casks had to be sent over there for the brewers to fill, and then collected and brought back, but I'm glad they did it as some of the results were great. (By the by, I've seen old British-style bellied metal casks on show in Dutch breweries, so I assume they must have used them once upon a time.)

I only tried a few of these, but two in particular were very memorable – the dry-hopped Beluga 10% Imperial Stout from De Kromme Haring, burnt yet smooth and hugely flavoursome, and Brouwerij 't Verzet's Oud Bruin, a massively sour and tart Flanders Old Brown.

Of the British ales tasted, Lymm's Dam Strong Ale was lovely – malty, estery and earthy-bitter, and tasting rather lighter than its claimed 7.2%! As I said, the others I tried were maybe a bit too green, with the exception of some from the Thornbridge bar, most notably their creamy-dry and hoppy Green Mountain Session IPA (keykeg-conditioned, rather than cask) and the rich and weirdly tasty Salted Caramel Lucaria Porter (right).

Oh, and I also at last got to meet Ben Palmer, who writes about his experiences of being an Englishman training as a brewer in Germany on his blog Hop & Schwein. We'd chatted online – shared interests! – but not actually met before. 

Next: Franconia comes to London

Can cask ale avoid retreating into a corner?

I spent a pleasant hour or two last week with the folks from London's Moncada Brewery, formerly of Notting Hill and now of Dollis Hill (near Brent Cross in North London). They were holding a Meet-the-Brewer session at the George IV pub in Chiswick.

It's part of a guest-residency project Fuller's is running in a dozen or so of its flagship pubs with various other members of the London Brewers Alliance. Each month, Fuller's commissions two cask ales from another brewery – as far as I can make out, some are new brews, some are cask versions of existing non-cask beers, and others are regular cask beers. During its month, the brewer is also invited to visit those pubs with some extra beers in bottle or can.

The Moncada team at the George IV

So tonight we had Notting Hill Pale on cask, alongside Verano which is the new name for Moncada's summer ale – Verano is Spanish for summer. Brewers Angelo and Karl had brought along tall cans of two more beers. One was Mandarina Blonde, which is a version of the regular blonde ale single-hopped with, yes, Mandarina Bavaria. The other was a special version of Verano with two main changes – it too features Mandarina Bavaria in its hop blend, and it was fermented with a mixture including New England yeast.

What I didn't expect was that the mandarin notes would be more obvious in the mixed-hop beer than the single-hopped one. It's probably something to do with how the other hops combine to lift the flavours, suggested head brewer Angelo.

Needless to say, the cask beer at the George IV was in great condition, but one of the Moncada team, assistant brewer Karl, mentioned that they're winding back on cask and will produce it only for pre-sale in the future. The problem – despite all those seminars and training projects and cask ale reports and so on – is that too many publicans still can't look after real ale properly, and when they get it wrong it's often the brewer who unfairly gets the blame.

"How they treat our casks…" mused Angelo. "We delivered cask to one place in the morning, that afternoon we got a phone call: 'It's cloudy, I can't sell this!' It needs 48 hours to settle – no, they can't do that."

It's a story anyone in the trade has probably heard several times before, in one form or another. It's why some brewers have abandoned cask altogether, while others have told me they now sell it only to outlets they know and trust. And then there are those who are doing more and more brewery-conditioning of their cask ales – it's not a perfect solution, but it's an understandable one.

What does this all mean for the future of real ale – will it become a niche thing? Should it become a niche thing? Is the future 'fake cask', still real but with little left for the cellar manager to do? Let me know what you think, please.

It’s not about cask vs keg, it’s about the beer

We need a more nuanced approach to "cask vs keg", an end to the keg rip-offs, and a wider recognition that in beer packaging, limiting your options is generally a bad idea... 

One of the things I learnt, talking to brewers at both the final London Drinker last week and Craft Beer Rising before that, is that some continue to talk down cask ale. Somewhat sadly, for a cask-focused festival, even one of the prize-winning brewers at London Drinker confessed to me that his brewery is doing less cask. What was perhaps more interesting was that his reasons were more nuanced. Rather than the wild generalisation we’ve heard before that "Cask is too cheap", his argument was that cask is too cheap for many of the beers he wants to make.

Because the thing is, cask is not too cheap, nor is it impossible to build a viable business model on it. For many of the brewers I’ve discussed it with, the reverse is true: cask can be the cheapest way into the market. Pubs already have the necessary hand-pumps and are well-used now to the idea of guest and seasonal beers, cask deliveries and collections can help maintain customer relationships, and you have those less tangible promotional benefits of tradition, ‘LocAle’ and ‘NaturAle’.

Sure, it needs investment in infrastructure – a cask-washer, for instance, and the casks themselves, while reusable, are not cheap – but so does keg, and that’s typically more expensive. And yes, Keykegs (and cans, for that matter) are recyclable, but aren’t we supposed to be reducing the use of one-way plastics and making more use of reusable containers?

The real pricing problem is more subtle, and it’s to do with how popularity and availability affects expectations of price. You can make cask ale pretty cheaply indeed, if what you’re making is relatively lightly-hopped brown bitter, using mostly English hops. What you can’t do is make a full flavoured and hop-forward craft beer at the same price, not least because the ingredients are so much more expensive. Prices I’ve heard for modern New World hop varieties can be three to four times those of English hops, for example, and something like a New England IPA uses way more hops than a Bitter does. 

Then again, the same is true of keg beer – the average Eurolager or German industrial Pils is also cheap to produce, compared to the properly-flavoursome craft equivalents. (Bigger production volumes help here too, of course.)

So, expecting to pay £3-ish for cask real ale is reasonable, as long as what you want is subtle, flavoursome bitter, an English mild or pale ale, maybe a decent Porter. And to be quite honest these are the beers that can be utterly sublime in cask when well-kept, but can equally well be one-dimensional when kegged.

On the other hand, expecting a Double IPA, a triple-hopped American Pale, or a Belgian Quadrupel of any decent quality for £3-ish in cask or keg is just taking the proverbial. And in many (though not all) cases, such high-powered beers will benefit from the lift that an appropriate degree of extra carbonation in keg can bring.

So no craft brewer should be talking cask down like it’s something that’s holding them back, or moaning that it’s "too cheap". If you can cost-justify the recipe at £3/pint, casking it can both show your skill and produce a better end-product. On the other hand, if the recipe won’t be viable at £3/pint, then by all means keg it at £5/pint.

But don’t pretend there is any inherent extra value for the consumer in kegging. Sure, there is value for the bar – they get a product that can stay on sale longer, which enables them to charge more while they wait for it to sell, instead of pricing it to sell promptly. That might be OK for slow-selling niche beers, but charging £1 more for the keg version of a cask beer is merely an ecologically damaging rip-off.

And no one should disparage ‘twiggy brown bitter’. Some drinkers prefer subtlety, properly done, to in-yer-face flavour. And many of us like both, depending on our mood, our budget, the occasion or venue, or whatever. 

The Bermondsey Beer Mile is flourishing again

A couple of years ago, I came to the conclusion that the Bermondsey Beer Mile had lost its appeal. It had jumped the shark, a victim of its own success. The Kernel had closed its drinking area, and the other brewery taps were often overwhelmed – some, like Partizan, had a bar but little seating space.

What a difference those two years have made. OK, even on a freezing day in February, respected and well known places such as Brew By Numbers and Anspach & Hobday still get busy, and Eebria – one of the newer bars – was so rammed I didn't even bother trying to get served. Apart from that, and despite the many groups of people strolling from venue to venue, it mostly felt comfortable.

Fourpure, now times two

The overall story is expansion – existing breweries moving and growing, new ones moving in, more beer retailers, and so on. At the eastern end, Fourpure has taken over into the industrial unit next door. This has added a lot of production and workspace for them, but has also allowed the taproom to expand, with more seating space and a new bar. They also now have a proper spacious indoor toilet block, which highlights just how shamefully dismal are the loos in pretty much every other local brewery and bar.

Heading west, Partizan’s move to a new and much bigger site, with both indoor and outdoor seating, was long overdue. Being an industrial building, the taproom might be a bit overly echoey and noisy for some, but it has much more space and a bigger bar (right) with guest taps too – when I visited, there were several Kernel beers on.

The move also freed up two railway arches on Almond Road, making room for not one but two new breweries. Well, one isn’t totally new – the highly experimental Affinity Brew Co moved down from Tottenham. And the other, Spartan Brewery, isn’t totally a brewery as it doesn’t yet have its brewkit in (they’re brewing up the road at Ubrew for now).

To make it even better, while the other breweries on the Mile – with the notable exception of Southwark – are keg-focused for their draught beers, both these new ones plan to package a significant proportion in cask. Sadly, neither had cask on when I visited, although Spartan co-founder Colin Brooks said he’d like cask to eventually become the majority of their production, and they’ll have casks at London Drinker Beer Festival next month.

Meanwhile, Affinity (left) is organising a weekend Bermondsey cask beer festival for April 7th-8th. Co-hosted by Partizan, this will feature 30 breweries from up and down the country, each brewery supplying two different casks, one for Saturday and the other for Sunday. Tickets are available online and cost a fiver for each day – that covers a glass, a programme and your first half, then it's a fiver a pint. And no, I don't know if there's a refund on Sunday if you still have your glass from Saturday!

What really killed Watney's Red Barrel?

Red Barrel reborn

People who remember the Keg Wars of the 1960s still talk of how keg bitters were pasteurised and fizzed-up, knocking much of the character out. Some of the stupider ones also talk of today’s keg craft beer as if it’s treated the same (they’re wrong – much of it would fit CAMRA’s definition of real ale), and a few will also trot out how keg bitter was supposedly brewed cheaply and “full of chemicals”.

Full of chemicals? For the pedant, pretty much everything is a chemical – salt is a chemical, even water – but that’s not what they mean. They mean additives and impurities, things that probably wouldn’t be permitted under food regulations. Again, they’re almost certainly wrong – unless you count “processing aids” such as PVPP*, which is permitted under the Reinheitsgebot for instance.

Yet they might also be sort-of right, in a weird way that they probably wouldn’t recognise, and for something that they would almost certainly not think of as a “chemical” – and that is sugar.

That review in Which?

I didn’t become a beer drinker until a while after the seminal 1972 review of keg beer in Which? magazine – its criticisms helped drive the growth of CAMRA and the rebirth of cask – so I didn’t experience 1960s keg bitter. I’ve read quite a bit though about the likes of Whitbread Trophy, Double Diamond, Worthington E, and of course the legendary Watney’s Red Barrel, including the interesting tale that some of these beers were also available in cask form in small volumes, and were considerably better like that.**

So when I heard that one of my local brewpubs, The Owl and The Pussycat in Northfields, had brewed a cask recreation of 1963 Watney’s Red Barrel to a recipe devised by beer historian Ron Pattinson, I knew I had to try it. Earlier this week, I did just that, and it wasn’t half bad! It was also by far the pub’s bestseller, selling almost an entire firkin on the first night it was available, which will have had a fair bit to do with nostalgia and curiosity.

As I sipped my Red Barrel, a fairly pale amber-brown beer of 4.4% ABV, I detected light malt, a moderate and slightly earthy bitterness, and touches of biscuit and fruit. Yet I also found myself thinking how unlike modern bitters it was, even the keg ones. There’s lots around the same strength, but even the golden ones tend to be fuller-bodied, a little sweeter, a little more flavour-forward.

It was when I spoke to the brewer that I got an inkling of what was going on. He mentioned that the Red Barrel recipe was very different from their other ales in two ways: it contained a significant amount of sugar, and was relatively highly attenuated, meaning more of the sugars were fermented out to leave a drier body.

Re-reading some of Ron’s writing on those 60s beers, it makes sense. The grists of the period – grist is the mixture of malt and other fermentables – were typically 10% to 15% sugar (although he notes that Red Barrel used less than that). The typical reason for adding sugar and other adjuncts (sources of fermentable sugars) is to lighten the body, in a milder easy-drinking, don’t-frighten-the-horses sort of way. It can also improve stability and heads retention – and yes, it can save money (though not always).

So maybe, just maybe, the real reason people found 60s keg bitter insipid wasn’t just the blandifying effects of pasteurisation and fizz – though I’m sure they were (and are) important – but the fact that it started out as a light-bodied and fairly dry brew. In cask, it could just about overcome its limitations, but killed and kegged, well the poor thing didn’t stand a chance.


*PVPP (polyvinyl polypyrrolidone, or Polyclar) is a powdered plastic used as a clarifier. Anti-Reinheitsgebot campaigners say that the rule is simply a marketing tool of the big German brewers – and that it lets them cheat by claiming the PVPP is filtered out after use, so it doesn’t count as an “ingredient”. The German beer purity law also failed to prevent a 2016 scandal when some beers were found to contain traces of glyphosate weedkiller at a level up to 300 times that permitted in drinking water. The beers had been made only with malt, hops, yeast and water of course, but the malt had been made from contaminated barley. 

**Around 20 years ago I sometimes drank a perfectly acceptable cask ale branded as Worthington E, but I'm pretty sure it was nothing like the 60s version!

Cask Wars: Revenge of the Kegï

The toxic legacy of the long-vanquished Kegï hangs over a beer-galaxy struggling to rebuild from the Cask Wars of the 60s and 70s. Now, a small band of Craft Warriors seeks to re-unify the divided houses of the Beerati, but the entrenched Stickinnamuds still hold out for the Empire and the Old Order…

It’s ironic, really: the country that saved real ale and cask conditioning for the world is now the one that risks losing it – and all because of an artificial divide that was defined 40 years ago, to serve the needs of a very different time.

That was one of the messages that came out of a seminar held in London a few weeks ago to mark the release of the 2017 edition of the Cask Report, which surveys both drinkers and vendors on the state of the beer business. A key element in this year’s report is the rebranding of cask as also being craft – something that’s a no-brainer in most other countries, where the presence of a handpump enhances a beer-bar’s craft credentials, rather than distracting from them.

To listen to Cask Report author Paul Nunny, of the quality checking group Caskmarque, cask is a bellwether – or perhaps a canary – for the whole pub industry. He cited statistics showing that consumers as a whole see handpulls as marking out ‘a proper pub’, and that cask drinkers are more likely to move pubs if the ale quality isn’t up to snuff.

“Cask drinkers matter because 42% of them go to the pub weekly or more, they are more loyal to their local, they spend more – £1030 a year, 30% more than average, and they are often the ones recommending the pub [to the rest of their party],” Nunny added.

In the seminar, several speakers expressed amazement that anyone might think cask ale wasn’t already part of the craft spectrum. Clearly they’re not CAMRA members – even those of us that are quite happy with a cask=craft definition are well aware of the “keg is always evil” diehards.

“The first key step is to stop being distracted by definitions – cask has to move forward under the banner of craft beer, which it is,” commented James Coyle, the managing director of Innis & Gunn which recently added cask to its keg and bottle line-up. “The trend in America is pulling back from highly-hopped beers towards more sessionable beers. They’re not concerned about the definition of cask, for example craft brewer Shipyard also brews Old Thumper.”

I guess part of the problem is that cask and craft are orthogonal terms. Even if you believe craft is more than just a meaningless marketing term – and many will argue it’s on a par with other empty words such as Premium or Traditional – it refers to a completely different set of properties. Cask ale can be made by hand or in an automated industrial-scale brewhouse, while craft can mean traditional and anti-industrial, or modern and challenging.

The trouble is, we’re stuck with both.