In the last year or so, a select crew of beer fans and brewers has begun proselytizing about what they regard as British beer’s cutting edge—craft keg. But the word keg sends shivers down the backs of members of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who believe in traditional beer or cask-conditioned beer, which they call real ale.

Draft beer traditionally had been put into a cask with enough yeast to create a secondary fermentation and is dispensed with a hand pump. It is unpasteurized and unfiltered.

But by the early 1970s, much of the beer served in Britain was from kegs. The beer was filtered and pasteurized and carbon dioxide was used to dispense it. The advantage over the casks was that there was no sediment in the beer, but the disadvantage was that there was more gas in keg beer, which some believe diluted the natural flavour.

This is when CAMRA was created and helped partially reverse the momentum of kegs and preserve natural beers in Britain.

Nowadays, exponents of craft keg, using updated technologies, urge drinkers to forget the past and judge their new beers on taste and not on how they are dispensed. And it may be working.

Spotting a Trend

Craft beer is enjoying a healthy state of affairs in the United Kingdom. There are nearly 800 breweries, mainly micro in size, and many are showing growth. There is a multitude of beer styles available and New World hops have never been more popular.

Social media has also helped as brewers, beer journalists and beer geeks have taken to the blogosphere to discuss beer.

And 2011 saw more craft beer bars open. Then there is the influence of the North American beer scene.

Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale and Brooklyn Lager are commonly seen in bars on draft (in other words keg!), while brewers such as Odell Brewing Co., Flying Dog and Brooklyn Brewery visit from across the Atlantic and organize tastings.

And the emergence of United Kingdom craft lager brewers—see AAB, Vol 31, Number 4—has persuaded brewers that beer can be dispensed in other ways than by hand pump and still taste good.

“I find all sorts of people trying craft keg,” said Glyn Roberts, former manager of The Rake, arguably London’s first craft beer bar when it opened in 2005, “Not just young people, but older drinkers too. I have a feeling that it will keep its momentum partly because many people like drinking cold fizzy beer and partly because more craft breweries are using keg as a form of dispense.

“I believe that there are a couple of reasons for the latter. Firstly the beer keeps longer and is more robust… Secondly I think that there’s an element of emulating the U.S. where there is very little cask dispense.”

In Greenwich, Meantime Brewery’s founder and brewmaster Alastair Hook could be forgiven a slight self-congratulatory smile at craft keg’s emergence. When he began Meantime in 1999, every new brewery majored in cask beer. But Munich-trained Hook specialized in European beer styles such as helles, pilsner and Vienna.

British styles such as IPA, porter, stout and pale ale were eventually brewed, all of which are dispensed from kegs or bottle. “It’s been a tough battle,” he said, “but there have been a lot of changes in the last five years and I take a lot of pride in thinking that we have helped in many ways to inspire other brewers.”

But Hook is quick to state that Meantime is not opposed to real ale. One of the company’s best customers is the Market Porter, a South London pub noted for serving up to a dozen real ales. For Hook good beer is a simple matter of technology plus the absence of air from the beer container. “Air is bad for beer and the only people who don’t understand that are those who believe that cask is the only way,” he said.

“If cask conditioning is done properly, you have a re-conditioning in the cask, which should work really well. But if the cask is left hanging about for too long, it is not good for it. We have cask beers in our bars. We should only be talking about good beer.”

Making the Switch

One brewer inspired by Hook is Jeff Rosenmeier. He moved to Britain from the United States in the 1990s to work in software engineering but was also an avid homebrewer. He swapped bytes for beer in 2005 when he started Lovibonds in Henley (formerly home to Brakspear’s). Even though cask beer was initially brewed, he soon switched to bottles and kegs.

“All the local micros did cask beer so I thought I would have to do it as well,” he said. “I was a true nano brewery at the time, doing 100-liter batches and I bought a dozen firkins. I started selling these to my local free house and discovered that at day four in the pub the beer that I worked so hard to produce tasted flat, lifeless and was starting to sour.

Lovibonds Brewery's Jeff Rosenmeier, founder and brewmaster, has been brewing on the historic Henley-on-the-Thames since 2005.

He said he was aware of what Hook was doing and it made sense to him and gave him confidence to try something different.

Tasting through his portfolio of beers, you get a sense of his eclectic approach.

Henley Gold is a wheat beer that seemingly owes more to Flanders than Bavaria. There are bananas and cloves on the nose, along with a brittle herby/spicy background. The mouth-feel is creamy and caressing and the palate is suggestive of ripe bananas, accompanied by a medicinal aniseed-like note; the finish is dry and slightly woody.

Henley Dark has a lustrous, silky texture, reminiscent of chocolate ice cream, along with some smokiness, delicate roast notes and mocha coffee. At the back of the throat there is a hint of orange. Served cold and crisp from the keg, it has a refreshingly frisky nature. It’s a party beer, a cheerful, bright-eyed beer and I couldn’t help reflect that dark beers in the cask often seem more somber. These were good beers and if I hadn’t been told, I wouldn’t have known they were dispensed from kegs.

“It is funny to watch all of the brainpower and bytes wasted on the debate about what is ‘real’ or not,” said Rosenmeier, “and I’m as guilty as anyone. But, the fact of the matter is that 99 percent of the British beer-drinking public don’t care whether a beer is dispensed with extraneous CO2 or whether or not a cask breather (where a layer of CO2 keeps oxygen from contact with the beer) has been employed. All they care about is if the beer tastes good and they feel they are getting value for their money.

“We don’t do any filtration or pasteurisation or any other voodoo; therefore the beer that we package always contains yeast. To me it is still a live product. Where we fall down with CAMRA is with dispense, as all of our beers are pushed to the bar with CO2. The only by-product of us using CO2 is that our beer can last months in a cold cellar. Our bottled beers are also not filtered, however we keep the yeast counts low so that we don’t get the chunky style beer like most real ales.”

Every Dog has its Day

One brewery that has certainly set up craft keg as a superior alternative to real ale is Scotland’s iconoclastic BrewDog. These self-proclaimed punks have been masters of public relations with stunts such as brewing the strongest beer in the world, encouraging fans to invest in the business and engaging in online spats with CAMRA.

However, they also have managed to produce a stunning set of beers (plus some duds as well). They initially produced their beers in bottles and casks but with the opening of their branded bars in Aberdeen and Edinburgh (with London and other cities imminent), they have become vocal champions of the craft keg.

“We always believed kegs were the future,” said James Watt, BrewDog’s co-founder. “Cask is traditional to the U.K. and does well at showcasing some pretty boring beers in a way to make them seem a little bit more interesting. However the U.K. cask scene is also traditional, stuffy and old-fashioned with CAMRA’s overbearing influence making the whole thing very strange.

“We wanted to get away from all that and get new drinkers into the craft beer category and we see kegs as the way to do this. If we look at the U.S. craft beer scene, it is kegs that are leading the way. The same thing will happen in the U.K.”

But it’s also instructive to talk to more conventional, brewers. They often see craft keg as another product in their beer arsenal. They make real ale and sell a lot of it, but craft keg’s longer shelf life gives them a chance to get into outlets where real ale might not appear.

“Keg beer opens up a whole new trade customer base,” said Bob Hogg, Commercial Manager of Scottish brewery Inveralmond. “This is particularly true in a relatively small market like Scotland. Keg beer also gives us an opportunity to reach consumers who may not necessarily choose real ale first. As for the name craft keg, I don’t really mind what it is called as long as it is good beer—good beer can be served in keg format as well as cask. We are finding pub owners quite prepared to try something new as they realize that having a point of difference can help drive footfall to their pub, whether it be cask, craft keg or a combination of both.”

Inveralmond initially began with a Czech-style svetly lezak called Sunburst, which originally had been served as a “cask-conditioned” lager. Then it was kegged and served colder with more CO2. Following this, the brewery then felt it could do the same with Lia Fail, a dark chestnut ale with mocha coffee, chocolate, vanilla and espresso notes on the palate. The beer is chill conditioned for two weeks at minus 1 degree C prior to filtration with the addition of some CO2.

There are some problems with keg beer and one is getting it to the market. More investment is needed for keg beer than for casks, for example some pubs require font and chilling equipment for the kegs.

New Craft Keg Brewery

Close to the Rake in London is an exciting new wave brewery whose approach typifies the eclectic nature of the craft keg. The Kernel Brewery is beneath a railway arch in the Bermondsey district of south London, an area that was flattened during the 1940/41 London Blitz.

Head brewer at The Kernel Brewery, Evin O'Riordain, holding court in the brewhouse.

Started by Evin O’Riordain in 2009, its beers are mainly bottled with the rest in casks and kegs for brewery open house on Saturdays.

According to O’Riordain, “We have been approached by lots of pubs for kegs, so it would seem that the demand is there. Our beer suits bottles and it may suit kegs as well, but for us keg conditioning is more difficult than bottle conditioning. It requires more equipment, and the kegs require more looking after and are harder for pubs to serve well. We reckon that certain beers, for example our IPAs, work brilliantly in keg, and not so well in cask.”

At the brewery, I try a glass of the 7.8 percent Export Stout, dispensed from a keg. It is full of espresso, roast coffee beans, milk chocolate on the nose; the mouth-feel has a rich chocolaty texture with a firm bitterness and a dry cracker-like finish that has delicate fruity notes in the background. It is magnificent.

Kernel is new but other more established breweries, known for their cask beer, are looking to include craft kegs in their portfolio. These include Titanic (whose keg stout replaced a well-known Irish brand at the bar counter in one pub I visited); Fuller’s (its keg London Porter is gorgeous); Butcombe; and cutting-edge Welsh brewery Otley.

“We are trialing three of our beers in keg,” said brewery founder Nick Otley, “The Oxymoron Black IPA, 07 Weissen and Motley Brew IPA. We’re confident that the finished keg product will also be a good match with certain food, but we are only doing it on a small scale at the moment and will not be investing too much in it. Keg will never replace cask. Cask is unique to the U.K. and should remain so. I certainly don’t want my only choice in a pub to be cold and fizzy, but there is definitely room for it as an alternative.”

As brewery lore has it, Otley Brewing Company's Nick Otley was once a fortune cookie writer.

Otley’s words are also echoed by the Stuart Howe, head brewer at Sharp’s, recently purchased by Molson-Coors.

“It is not an area I think I will be entering in the near future,” he tells me, “From a brewer’s perspective, keg is good because you can use higher levels of CO2 to provide balance for fuller beers with bigger alcoholic strengths. On the downside, unless you are filling kegs with unprocessed beers, centrifugation, filtration and/or pasteurization of beer for kegging does change beer flavour from that you can experience in the brewery. Cask ale is as close as you can get to drinking it from a tank in the brewery.”

If there was one thing that demonstrated craft keg’s arrival it was the debut appearance of the Craft Beer in Keg awards category at the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) National Beer Competition in 2011. This was groundbreaking given that the vast majority of SIBA members produce cask beer.

I judged this category and found it thoroughly intriguing. It was divided into lager styles, wheat beers, stouts and porters and a variety of ales. There were good beers, plus a few indifferent chaps.

Thornbridge’s Kipling, a self-proclaimed South Pacific Pale Ale, had a big biff of passion fruit on the nose, but little else. I love it when served on cask. While Hambleton’s Nightmare, a gorgeous stout that has won plenty of awards in cask, was all butter toffee and mocha on the nose and thin roast water on the palate.

On the other hand, Thornbridge’s Jaipur IPA on keg was a glorious explosion of tropical fruit and grapefruit on the nose, a rollercoaster of sensation that continued its ride on the palate.

Is the rise of craft kegs really a revolution? I am not sure, but it does mean that the British beer drinker is getting more choice.

The likes of BrewDog like to paint it as a battle between keg and cask, a chance to punk it up in front of their brewing elders. However, I would suspect that for most craft keg brewers, it’s about improving beer choice.

And perhaps brewers don’t need CAMRA’s guiding hand as they used to, while the organisation’s Chief Executive Mike Benner takes a phlegmatic view, while firmly stating a policy of no change: ‘CAMRA is committed to choice. We want pub-goers to have access to a range of quality and interesting real ales. Our role is to promote real ale as our national drink, but that doesn’t prevent brewers producing other beer products for their customers.’

Whatever the motivations and the reactions, craft keg has shaken up the British brewing industry and it will be interesting to see how far it goes.

Brewers have only been using hops for about 1,000 years, and in Britain, since the 16th century. London water was not particularly suited to hoppy beers anyhow, but darker, sweetish ales instead. Within a few decades though, hopped beers made converts of English brewers. Nearby Kent became England’s premier hop growing region within short order. How, then, are hops germane to the lineage of bitters? The name denotes a reliance on hops, but that is more an issue of comparison, as bitter and pale ale evolved as an alternative to the under-hopped status quo. Even so, it would be nearly 300 years before bitter would become the hands-down favorite among the Brits, a result of modern grassroots pugnacity spun from a longing for traditional ale.

Pale beers were not even possible until coke was invented in 1669. Until then, wood and straw were primarily used to dry green malt, but they were excessively smoky. Coke, coal without its noxious compounds, was cleaner and easily tempered. Quite expensive, coke-fired pale malt was reserved for the affluent tipple, and used mostly for well-hopped stock beers, left to age for a year or more. These stock beers were sent to servants and military in India, the most-savvy exporter being George Hodgson of London. By the early 19th century competing brewers of Burton upon Trent in The Midlands were getting busy making similar pale ales. Burton water was rich in calcium sulfate, and its effect on hoppy pale ales was astonishing. It gave a clean, fully hopped character, a light and clear complexion, and served as yeast nutrient, ensuring swift, full attenuation. This broadened the sensory gulf between brown and pale ale, and made those of Burton superior to those of greater London. Competition flourished, commercial railways were built and the brewing efficiency of pale malt was shown to be cost-effective, adding more to its growing popularity. Brits though, still overwhelmingly preferred the mass-produced, financially connected and publican-dominated dark brew, porter. Slowly however, pale beers gained ground on porter, a trend that would continue for another 150 years.

When the doors of the conference hall opened, I expected to see a thin trickle of CAMRA members. But they came rushing in, several hundred of them. They had come by train and ferry. Such is their legendary enthusiasm for beer, there’s no doubt that some would have rowed or even swum to get to Douglas.

This year, the conference will be based in Sheffield in Yorkshire, more easily accessible by train or car. And there will be much to celebrate, for CAMRA, founded in 1971, is 40 years old. It started with four members, had grown rapidly to 29,000 when I joined in 1976 and today boasts a membership of 125,000. It’s a power in the land. Its officials are routinely called in by both British and European parliaments to discuss such matters as levels of excise duty and the imbalance of buying and selling power between supermarkets and pubs. For example, CAMRA’s chief executive Mike Benner addressed members of the European parliament in Brussels in December.

But equally important, it’s CAMRA’s beer festivals—at least 12 a month, culminating in the Great British in London every August—allied to the rise of craft brewers that have put the seal on the campaign’s success and vitality over the past 40 years. It’s a uniquely British institution. The image of the Brits—introverted, victims of the stiff upper lip—could not be more misplaced. Go to any major soccer or cricket match, and you’ll witness a different side to the island race: passionate and committed.

And it was that passion and commitment to traditional British beer that fuelled the rise and influence of the campaign. It will come as a shock to most CAMRA members to learn that their organisation is rooted in Britain’s imperial past. But it was the Victorians’ determination to remain loyal to ale and, in particular, its cask-conditioned version that led to the rise of this remarkable consumer revolt a century later.

In The Beginning

In the 19th century, a small island had painted half the globe red. While mainland European countries remained largely rural and agricultural, Britain was a powerhouse of industry and innovation. It exported its products throughout the world, beer among them. The holds of sailing ships were weighed down with great oak casks of British ale that eventually slaked thirsts in India, Australia, the Caribbean and North America.

William Bass started a tiny brewery on a patch of land in Burton-on-Trent in the late 18th century and a century later his sons had turned the company into the biggest brewery in the world, making more than one million barrels a year. Thanks to new technology, British brewers had developed a style of beer—pale ale—that bewitched the world. Great brewers such as Gabriel Sedlmayr in Munich and Anton Dreher in Vienna came to Britain, and Burton in particular, to see how pale ale was produced. They returned home, determined to make their dark lagers paler in colour. The first truly golden lager from Pilsen was made possible by a malt kiln imported from England.

British brewers, pumped up with imperial pride, saw no need to switch to lagering—cold fermentation and maturation—even when they rapidly lost most of their overseas trade to the new type of European beer. Brewers in Britain still had a large internal market to satisfy and they could now move beer around with comparative ease thanks to the rise of the new railroad system.

The question is obvious: if British brewing was so successful, why was it necessary to launch a consumer movement in the 1970s to protect its major beer style? The answer lies in Canada. In the 1960s, a Canadian called Eddie Taylor owned the rights to a lager beer called Carling Black Label. He was successful in his own country but Canada has a small population and he thought greater success could come in Britain, one of the biggest beer-drinking countries in the world,  where the natives more or less spoke the same language as he did.

In a whirlwind few years, Taylor changed British brewing beyond all recognition. To produce Carling he needed breweries and pubs—at the time 80 percent of beer in Britain was consumed on draft in pubs. Within a few years, he had bought and merged a number of breweries in the north of England to form Northern United Breweries. He added the famous London brewer Charrington to the pot, followed by Tennents in Glasgow. His greatest coup was to talk mighty Bass into joining a group he renamed Bass Charrington. By the end of the 1960s, Taylor controlled 20 percent of the brewing industry, owned 10,000 pubs and enjoyed an annual turnover of £900 million.

And he’d frightened the life out of other big brewers, who huddled together for comfort. A series of mergers and takeovers produced what were dubbed the Big Six: national brewing groups that included such famous and historic names as Courage, Tetley, Truman, Watneys and Whitbread. The emergence of the Big Six coincided with the development of a national network of new super highways—Britain’s motorways. The national brewers could move beer around at speed but they wanted a new type of beer that was not perishable like cask ale and had a longer shelf life. For all his bravura, Eddie Taylor had not achieved overnight success with Carling lager. The Brits were doggedly determined to remain true to ale. The response of the Big Six was to fashion a new type of ale called keg beer that was filtered, pasteurized and artificially carbonated.

This traditional English beer, once the most popular style in the country, fell from favor in the last century. However, it is staging a comeback in its native land, and has even made its way onto U.S. shores. You’ll have to do your research if you want to try it this side of the Atlantic, but mild—sometimes dubbed the original session beer—has qualities that make it a great choice for American audiences.

Mild is a malty, low-hopped, low-alcohol, and light-bodied beer. The style is highly diverse: milds vary in color from light amber to dark brown and black.  They range from warming roasty examples to more refreshing summer lunchtime choices.

The name “mild” comes from the fact that the style is low in hop bitterness: in that, it is mild compared to the other English pub staple, the style called bitter. Mild dates back to the late 18th century, and grew to meet the demands of a new class of industrial laborers. It became particularly popular in the Midlands, a heavily industrialized area of England. There it was drunk by miners and factory workers looking to quench their thirst after a hard day’s labor—people who were also looking for a value beer.

Then, in the 1950s, the popularity of mild began to slip. Britain’s industrial base declined and, with it, the demand for this sweet, sustaining, low alcohol beer. Mild’s reputation was not helped by the publicans (however few) who dumped drip tray waste and cellar waste, known in the industry as “slops,” back into the beer.

Things became even worse for mild in the 1970s when large breweries introduced keg beer, which was filtered, pasteurized and dispensed with the use of added carbon dioxide. Publicans liked keg beer, which had a longer shelf life and required less care, but the new method displaced the older cask-conditioned method of tending and serving beer to which mild and other traditional beer styles were well suited. Beers dispensed in this manner from the cask declined dramatically. Shortly afterwards, light lagers started to take hold.

Fewer and fewer breweries by the 1970s were producing mild and those that were tended to drop “mild” from the names of those beers. Soon, mild became something that old men drank and “beer” became pretty synonymous with fizzy golden liquid.

Mild stayed out of favor until the 1990s. By then the practice of putting the slops back into the beer had been stopped. “There was a lot of opposition at the time but now it’s virtually unheard of,” said Graham Yates, licensee of The Brunswick pub in Derby in the Midlands, who worked for big brewer Everards at the time of the changes.

“[Adding the slops] was done because the licensees were all being pushed on profit, to make sure any beer that was in the barrels or in the bottom of drip trays was returned to the mix,” he added. “It was easiest to put it in the mild because it’s a dark beer.”

Mild Rebounds

Although mild ale can be served in any format, including bottles and conventional kegs, in its heyday it would have been found most often in pubs as a cask-conditioned beer. So it is fitting that supporters of this form of beer, also known as “real ale,” have been instrumental in mild’s return.

In 1971, CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale was launched to bring cask-conditioned beers back from the brink of extinction. Now 100,000 members strong, the organization is backed by plenty of Brits tired of drinking poor quality beer. CAMRA promotes good-quality real ale (defined as “beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide”) and the pub as a focus of community life.

CAMRA has focused extensively on mild and every year runs its Mild in May Campaign, through which it encourages its 200-plus branches (which are spread through the U.K.) to encourage at least one pub in their area to stock at least one mild during the month.

Over the years, more and more pubs have begun participating in Mild in May. But some pubs in England have success with mild all year long. One is The Brunswick, where they’ve always done well, said Yates, constituting 8 percent of sales.

Yates sells two milds at all times, and four during the Mild in May promotion. Recently on tap was Black Sabbath, which at 6 percent ABV is a very strong mild, and Midnight Express, which is a more standard 3.6 percent.

“There’s a general trend back towards traditional beer, brewed in the old way and as part of that, mild’s becoming more popular,” said Yates. “Mild used to be just drunk by old men over 60, or in certain areas, like Birmingham, where a lot of mild is drunk. But I’ve noticed more and more, even young girls come in and drink it now, although not too much of the strong one. It’s because they like the flavor.”

Kelham Island Tavern in Sheffield, in the north of England, always has a mild on tap, such as Thwaite’s Nutty Black (3.5%) or the slightly stronger Cock Mild.

The milds vary from 3 up to 5.5 percent, but people tend to think mild is a weak beer,” said licensee Trevor Wraith. “That’s not true—they’re mild as opposed to bitter; they’re lacking in hops.”

Mild started getting more popular at Kelham Island about four years ago. “We always would try from time to time, but we didn’t always have one on permanently. More people have become interested in it. It did have a bad reputation in this country,” said Wraith.

Iain Loe, research manager and national spokesperson for CAMRA, thinks mild will continue to be popular, but will remain a small proportion of the real ale market.

And much of the mild, he anticipated, will come from the small and medium-sized breweries. “The people in the smaller and medium-sized breweries are coming into the industry fresh and are not burdened down by the fact that they have to make certain numbers for their shareholders and have to appeal to lots and lots of beer drinkers,” said Loe.

“The big brewers tend to brew beers that no one objects to the taste of. The smaller ones make beers that some people love and some people loathe, but that’s great, because the people might hate one beer you produce but love another one. The smaller brewers can afford to be more innovative and experimental. They also network more and get ideas from within the country and aren’t afraid to get ideas and even get ingredients from abroad.”

Out of the Dark

Those brews initially designated “pale ale” were actually not that pale at all, but relatively pale, as they were decidedly lighter in color than common ales of the day, porter and stout. As there is some historical account of their color, we can assume that they were most likely copper or amber in hue.

The shift from coal and wood as malt-curing fuel resulted in a medium that was a vast improvement over the dark, smoky, inconsistent product of previous ages. Coke, a purer derivative of coal, and later drum-type drying mechanisms allowed maltsters to produce dried malt that was not only lighter and more consistent, but also devoid of off-flavors and toxins.

This refinement was expensive and, thus, more judiciously dispensed initially, or even reserved for the well to do. The technology eventually became less expensive, and pale ales, more affordable for the masses. The invention of the thermometer and hydrometer further broadened the availability of pale brews, as it was demonstrated that pale malt was indeed a more efficient wort-producer.

Pale ales were most common in London during the 18th and 19th century cusp, but still competed fiercely with porter and stout. One London pale ale brewer, George Hodgson, modified his recipe to accommodate English interests in India by making it stronger and adding more hops. Hence, the birth of India pale ale.

During the early 19th century, the crafty brewers at Burton-Upon-Trent in the Midlands developed pale ales of their own, as more of a local brew. Burton brewmaster Samuel Allsop succeeded in brewing one of exceptional quality, with help from an expert maltster, and offered an IPA superior to that of Hodgson. It became the preferred export.

To this point, most pale, hoppy ales were known as India pale ale or simply India ale. The burgeoning pale ale market in the Midlands was about to get even better, with additional refinement, and a more subdued formulation tailored to the local markets. This had as much to do with serendipity as it did skill, as you will see.

The water around Burton, with a high concentration of calcium sulfate, or gypsum and magnesium, is perfectly suited for the production of pale ale, especially with respect to its effect on hops. This hard water not only gives an impression of dryness in the finished beer, but also rounds out the hop bitterness, a very desirable characteristic in a brew that stakes its reputation on a robust hop profile. Instead of jabbing bitterness, there is softer, yet still formidable, hop complexity.

Beer Appreciation & Style Guides

If there is a single book that has masterfully illuminated the beauty of all things beer in the minds of laymen and experts alike, it is Michael Jackson’s New World Guide to Beer—the undisputed best-selling beer guide of all time. The colorful, oversized volume takes you on a dizzying tour of global beer culture and heritage, leaving you not only with a superb education, but a renewed excitement for your love affair with beer. Information on all of Jackson’s books is available at his website, www.beerhunter.com.

Not the romantic type? Maybe you prefer a more systematic approach to your favorite indulgence. Roger Protz’s latest release, 300 Beers to Try Before You Die!, will help you ply your way through beer heaven. The beautifully-illustrated portfolio of brews gives expert tasting notes for each beer, as well as a little history, a little brewing info and space for the taster’s own notes. Michael Jackson’s Great Beer Guide: 500 Classic Brews delivers a similar experience. Simply put, it is the culmination of Jackson’s life-long globe trot in search of the world’s best beers.

Want to mount your own beer expeditions? For the beer trekker and pub crawler, handy guides have been published for virtually every beer-producing corner of the globe. In the U.S., Lew Bryson has launched a series of books (including Pennsylvania Breweries, New York Breweries and Virginia, Maryland & Delaware Breweries) that have set the standard for trekking handbooks. Paul Ruschmann and Maryanne Nasiatka have recently published Michigan Breweries in the same series. Across the pond, CAMRA (Campaign For Real Ale) annually publishes its Good Beer Guide—Britain’s granddaddy of pub guides edited by Roger Protz. The 2006 edition, as well as CAMRA’s long list of other books, is available at www.camra.co.uk. Taking a trip to Europe? Naturally, the German beer mecca, Munich, has its own guide. The Beer Drinker’s Guide to Munichis now its 5th edition and popular as ever.

Beer History

There are almost certainly more books on the history of the amber fluid than on any other facet of beerdom. Historians Gregg Smith and Carrie Getty give us one of the more whimsical and entertaining histories in The Beer Drinker’s Bible—Lore, Trivia & History: Chapter & Verse. For a more in-depth study of beer’s role in civilizations from Egypt to colonial America, have a look at Origin and History of Beer and Brewing—initially published in 1911 but reprinted in 2005 by BeerBooks.com. For a fantastic journey through German brewing history, get a copy of Horst Dornbusch’s Prost! The Story of German Beer. www.beertown.org.

For U.S. brewing history, Stanley Baron’s 1962 book Brewed In America: The History of Beer and Ale in the United States remains unmatched in breadth, depth and insight. You’ll have to hunt a little online to find a copy, but it’ll be well worth the effort. Conveniently, the book Beer Blast: The Inside Story of the Brewing Industry’s Bizarre Battles For Your Money picks up the story just about where Baron leaves off. Industry insider Philip Van Munching gives an incredible account of the big boys’ competitive battles of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Be sure, also, to look for Maureen Ogle’s opus, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, released last fall.

In terms of the modern landscape, we are unique. There are probably 400 micros in the UK. We’re the only one who brewery-conditions all of our products. We’re very much more like an American microbrewery, in that we brew and produce styles within the definitions set out by the Association of Brewers. We use processes and materials that are appropriate for the styles in question. As you know, we’ve won three medals at the World Beer Cup, for our Vienna-style lager; our Fest Beer, which is an Oktoberfest style; and for our Chocolate Beer, which won a gold in 2006.

I think the British brewing landscape is a difficult model because much of it was based on vertical integration, and pub ownership by breweries, which goes back to the Victorian age. The industry was told that there would be no new licenses for pubs, so every brewery worth its salt bought pubs as its root to market. It was akin to the scramble for Africa. Until the Beer Orders in 1989, breweries owned pubs, so they had this very heady mix of retail and manufacturing, which meant that whatever was most lucrative would drive the business. Breweries were focusing more on their retail side than on their beer production side. Hence the Campaign for Real Ale [CAMRA], which set up in the early seventies to campaign for the increased availability of cask-conditioned beers.

CAMRA’s emphasis has obviously been on real ale. And that’s one place I see you breaking dramatically with tradition. I mean, was anyone else in the microbrewing world over there making Viennas and Fest Beers?

No. I’m a believer in great beer. My first real beer experiences were real ale in the south of London. I thought real ale was a fantastic, tasty product compared with all the pasteurized, kegged brewery products that were all accountant-driven—rather cheap, nasty lagers or bland ales. That’s the product of the vertical system I was telling you about.

So, I think real ales were my first inspiration, but flavor and taste is the biggest inspiration. My first experience in the States was when I visited Hopland Brewing Co. in its first year, in Mendocino county. What struck me was that, in a hundred degrees of heat, you could drink these cold beers that had amazing flavor. That’s when I first started to realize that CAMRA’s campaign, although very noble in some respects, was clearly not the whole story.

So my quest for flavor started there, and ended up in Bavaria after my brewing degree at Heriot Watt in Scotland.

So, when you were in San Francisco…

I was studying brewing at Heriot Watt, and spending my summers working in the States and watching the beginnings of the microbrewing revolution, which is a business and commercial revolution, as opposed to CAMRA, which is a consumer lobbying group,

So you went into university knowing you wanted to brew?

Yes, absolutely. Well, truth be told, when I got my A-levels [specialized education certificates taken by secondary school students], I was already traveling up and down the country to the Black Country and to Manchester on day trips just to drink beer with some friends. By then, I realized I had a passion for great beer. I’d started an Economic and Social History degree at York University. I was doing a research project on Guinness, the first private limited company. I thought it was enthralling, and I hopped on the train to Edinburgh to speak to the people at the brewing school. I decided I was going to jack in my Economics and Social History degree, which to me seemed to be a bit abstract, and do something real, making people happy with something that I’ve made. You know that feeling.

I went to Edinburgh to do more A-levels—would you believe, because I didn’t have the right ones—and started my brewing degree in 1985. By then, I had more A-levels than anyone I knew… During that period I was working the States. In fact, it was 1983, my first trip to the States to work for the San Francisco Boys and Girls Club—I’m actually a lifetime member after the work I put in over four consecutive summers!

I’d seen the early days of the microbrewing revolution there. At Heriot Watt, I learnt nothing but the big industry side, all the new cutting-edge technology: it was all “stack it high-sell it cheap.” There was not much passion; it was all about chemical engineering and industrial technology. So I thought, clearly the Brits don’t care too much about the product that’s been part of making this a great nation, but the Germans seem to, so I learnt German. I went to post-grad for professional analysis at the University of Munich, Weihenstephan. As you know, that’s where I met Eric Warner [of Flying Dog Brewing Co. in Denver], and Eric Toft, another friend, who now runs the Schoenrahmer Brewery in southern Bavaria.

So, an Englishman, an American and a German walk into a bar…?

A Wyoming cowboy, really, that’s why Eric’s still in Bavaria. Bavaria’s no different from Wyoming, really, full of rednecks and horses and great beer. Well, Wyoming has Tommyknockers.

By then, I’d had a completely international education. I’d learned German, I’d worked in Switzerland and Germany, and my first job was working for a German brewery in Italy. When I got back to England finally, to set up a German-style brewhouse in Ashford in Kent in 1991, the whole real ale thing was still strong in the UK, but nobody drank good lager or good Belgian style beers or good fruit beers or wheat beers.

So you were carving out an unusual niche.

I think my history, my education was so different from anything that was conventional in the UK that I had a completely different view. And you can see the American influence.

How did you go about winning over drinkers in the UK?

The UK by then had nestled into either real ale that was badly kept by pubs that didn’t understand real ale, or rather tasteless keg lager or keg ale. With specialist lager—“lager” means to store, anything that’s been stored for five or six weeks and is made with marvelous materials—you create tastes and flavors that normal lager doesn’t have. It was very easy to impress people. It’s no secret, you’re just maturing your beer properly, unlike the rest of the industry that didn’t seem to bother.

So this German-style brewery was before you founded Meantime?

Yes, that was way before that, that was 1998. I produced a dunkles, a Vienna and a Pilsen-style, and we’d do specialties like Dortmunder. There was no one doing anything like it in the UK. But it was part of a retail group, and the directors couldn’t see the value: they were targeting young people who didn’t really appreciate the quality of the beers or the expense of making them. So I left, and set up the Freedom Brewing Co. in Fulham in 1994, producing one non-pasteurized, bottled Pilsen-style beer that was properly matured. I still hadn’t brewed a real ale in Britain.

Was that the brewery that was prevented from exhibiting at the GBBF?

No. Well. (laughs) Yes. They never had this product at the GBBF because I fall between two stools. I don’t produce real ale, but I’m not Continental.

You’re neither.

I’m neither. And the fact that I’m a Londoner who cares passionately about beer makes that whole thing even stranger.

You’re from Greenwich, hence the location (and name) for Meantime.

Exactly. We went through Freedom, then I worked for Oliver Peyton, quite a famous London restaurateur. We opened a couple of microbreweries where I started to produce a range of styles. He was a restaurateur concentrating on flavor and taste in his food, in cocktails and wines, so that sat quite nicely for four years. We did some great beers. If you take the log of the Great American Beer Festival, I’ve probably produced 30 to 40 different styles along those lines. I think the most warmly received beer was my black currant porter. We did a strawberry cream, things that nobody was doing in the UK. For me it was simple. But I’m talking to somebody who’s lived through the whole microbrewing scene in the States, so to you it must sound so simple.

No, because it all happens in a business and cultural context as well, and that’s very challenging…

Exactly. But it’s not as radical and different as people seem to think. I’ve sat very comfortably with my bi-annual visit to judge at the Great American Beer Festival, which started in ’96 I think, and Meantime, which was started in 2000, which was I suppose the fruits of all my labors. Meantime was the brewery that was going to produce bottled and kegged beer, brewery conditioned: in other words, beer that I know when it leaves the door is going to be perfect when the customer drinks it. Nobody’s going to wreck it, so long as it doesn’t get boiled in transport.

Meantime was my brainchild, my dream: my own brewery; my own town; next to my own football ground; my football club, Charlton Athletic, playing in the premiership. My friends all chipped in to help. They knew if they didn’t find some money, they’d have to listen to me whining for the rest of my life. We probably put about a million pounds into Meantime. It was a huge leap of faith. The other 400 micros in the UK all produce cask-conditioned ale, and they all sell to the limited number of free houses that are able to dispense real ale.

And not all of them do it well.

A lot of them don’t. This is a real problem that real ale has. And there’s not enough money in cask ale to sustain businesses: there’s so much training, and quality issues. And the culture in this country: this is 30 years beyond the keg revolution and people have forgotten how to take care of cask ale.

Unfortunately, Campaign for Real Ale has made the mistake of campaigning for real ale, but also campaigning for low prices of real ale. Commercially, it’s not sustainable.

You have to be willing to pay for it.

Yes you do, that’s the secret.

When you’re not brewing, what do you like to do?

I’ve been a golfer since I was ten years old, so I play a lot of golf. I fish a lot. When I come over to the Great American Beer Festival [in Denver], I end up heading to Wyoming, or it was British Columbia last year. I’m going with a very famous chap in the beer industry, Chris Swersey, he’s a fishing guide. We’re going off to Idaho at the end of next year’s Great American Beer Festival for some fly-fishing. Like that famous book, Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan.

And I’m a great fan of cricket and soccer, things that are a bit strange to the American psyche. I’m a Charlton Athletic Football Club season ticket holder. Apart from that, I don’t have time for much besides the brewery

We see your beer here in North Carolina, so you’ve got great reach.

It was pretty much the brainchild of myself and Eric Warner. This was prior to Flying Dog’s purchase of the Frederick Brewery. We started the project rolling, then Eric was immersed in the Frederick project. I bumped into Bob Legget, and Sean Knoll and Lanny Hoff, the principals of Artisanal Imports, the offshoot of Manneken Brussel. I met them and they’re just beer people. You don’t meet wholesalers like those three in the UK, who understand beer they way they do. Anything associated with the American microbrewing scene, it always blew me away how much you guys know about something you knew nothing about 30 years ago,

Its been a steep learning curve.

You’ve embraced it marvelously. It shames the Europeans, the way the Americans are really acting as custodians of history. It’s typical of the Americans.

That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard someone say about this country in quite a while!

Don’t start talking politics. (laughs)

Well, it’s nice when we have fans for what we do with beer.

It’s been my model for quite a while. And Meantime, of course, has the provenance of being a London brewer, with Young’s closing—which of course is a tragedy. As a London beer drinker, I am gobsmacked by the whole course of events. It’s terribly sad. So Fullers are London’s biggest brewer and we are now London’s second biggest brewery.

There’s responsibility. We make an India pale ale and a London porter—India pale ale being, of course, the London beer that made Burton famous. Originally it was a London beer, imitated by the brewers of Burton in a much more successful manner, but of course they had gypsum in their water.

And then we have our London porter, the beer that made London great. It was a beer that fueled hardworking millions, helped them up and helped them down. In the early Industrial Revolution, porter was the drink of choice, the ideal beer to be brewed with the waters of London.

So we’ve got that provenance. But of course, in England, Meantime made themselves famous for specialist lager beers, wheat beers and fruit beers. We picked up a contract early on to supply all the beer for a brand called “Taste the Difference” for Sainsbury’s [a national grocery chain]. We’ve been brewing their beers for them ever since we started. A Kölsch-style lager, a Vienna, a hefe weizen, a Münchner dunkles, a raspberry in the Belgian style, a fest beer, and an organic north German pilsner style.

They were the early beers that got us our reputation. All the beers are non-pasteurized, properly lagered. I think we also did a late-hop blonde ale, which is a pale ale really, and then came the beer in America. I looked to the American market, and thought, well, I’ll get more appreciation there for doing something special.

The combination of the beer and the wonderful bottles is very classy.

You can be passionate about beer all you want, but of course its only half the story. In the UK, I’ve watched generations of brewers producing very ordinary beer but nicely packaged, so I thought surely it would be sensible to make sure the packaging is beautiful as well as the beer.

There’s great heritage in the London Porter and the IPA. The websites London-porter.com and India-pale-ale.com chart the history of these styles. We went to the British Library for a month to find out everything we could. Those websites are projects on why those beers are as they are. It adds to the experience people have when they enjoy the beer. You can’t expect people to part with their hard-earned cash if you don’t give them more.

You have to get the details right.

Eric Warner was a great help. He knew the American market through Tabernash and Flying Dog. We pretty much co-designed the packaging. Then the nicest thing was to hand it over to Artisanal, to people who love and care about beer.

Think a moment and give me your favorite beer drinking memory.

I’ll give you two. The most sentimental beer drinking memory is taking a day trip on the train from London with my old music teacher and a friend of mine at school—we were still only 16, how my music teacher got away with it, I don’t know. The friend is the head brewer and owner of the Twisted Hop in New Zealand, so he’s become a brewer as well. We toured the Black Country in a day and we drank beers from breweries like Simpkiss, Bathams, Holdens, Banks (of course), Sarah Hughes. We visited those brewery taps, and that was sensational.

And another great beer drinking memory—because of course sometimes you don’t really remember the great ones—was the Aventinus strong beer festival in Kelheim. The tickets to the Aventinus fest in March are like gold dust. And all the people of Kelheim would visit the brewery on this one evening. They’d all arrive at the brewery at eight o-clock in the evening, the brass band would start up, and by nine o’clock in the evening, every single individual—man, woman and child, regardless of age—would be up on the tables drinking liters of Aventinus and singing. And it carried on for another three hours until midnight, then they all got off the tables and walked home.

If you haven’t, and can’t even imagine the scenario, then you likely won’t be interested in owning a copy of Cellarmanship. On the other hand, based on the growing number of e-mails I receive asking for just this sort of advice, I’m guessing that there are enough of you out there who are. And as one who has confronted this very issue on many occasions, I can’t recommend this book too highly. Real ale has been a hot item in America for over 10 years, but for it to really take root here, a generation of cellarmen (note: both this and the book’s title are genderless terms) must be trained. Cellarmanship should be the required textbook for that next generation.

This is a fully revised and updated edition of a CAMRA work that premiered in 1981 as little more than a glorified pamphlet. The second edition, published in 1992, was scarcely larger—just over 40 bound pages. But what this series always lacked in length was more than made up for with clear illustrations and concise information. That precedent was continued even as Ivor Clissold expanded Patrick O’Neill’s original work by a hundred pages in 1997 and has been followed once again in its current form.

Taking over from his late colleague, O’Neill once again shares his experience and passion for real ale in a work that you will refer to over and over. Cellarmanship requires plenty of on-the-job experience, but if you start by following the advice in this book, you’ll be off to a great start. From setting a stillage, spiling and tapping, to sanitation, cooling, and dispense issues, all is explained and de-mystified. New auto-tilt and vertical extraction systems are profiled. Need to order equipment? A handy appendix provides the contact information for the major suppliers. Perhaps the most handy feature is a “quick practical fault finder” that directs you to the causes and solutions for the most common problems encountered with cask ale.

No book is perfect, of course. Once again, O’Neill has devoted a section to the discredited practice of recycling beer back to the cask. Although the author goes to great lengths to discourage this (“This is bad practice at any time and cannot be recommended.”), he goes on to explain exactly how this is done and what tools to use. I know it’s important to understand what unscrupulous methods are employed, but I think there’s a limit to what needs to be presented in such a concise book. It’s sort of like providing instructions for building a bomb but including the caveat: “bombs are illegal weapons in private hands and we don’t recommend that you build one.”

A properly-served pint of cask conditioned ale can be one of the greatest pleasures in the beer world. Cool, softly carbonated, tantalizingly fragrant and complex, it is the celebration of a unique and uncompromising collaboration between brewer, cellarman and server. All too often, however, it remains an elusive, almost quixotic, goal. If more cellarmen owned and used this book, that goal would be much more attainable.

Brown is a breezy and entertaining writer who adds new details to familiar subjects. For example, many writers have discussed how the great microbiologist, Louis Pasteur, while working for Carlsberg, was the first person to see a yeast cell with a microscope. But Brown explains why Pasteur was working for Carlsberg-because Pasteur, a patriotic Frenchman, hated Germans and was happy to help a Danish company gain a competitive advantage over German brewers.

Brown has cogent criticisms of the Campaign for Real Ale and its allies. If real ale remains stuck at 10 percent of the British beer market, he argues, it’s because CAMRA and other ale aficionados haven’t given outsiders a reason to join their club. He visits the Great British Beer Festival and finds it an event hostile to new drinkers who might be put off by special members-only lines that enable CAMRA members to skip the lengthy queue to get in, or by a program that simply lists breweries alphabetically, without offering any explanation of what the breweries are or what they make. “The lasting impression” of the GBBF, Brown writes, “is that this is a club and you are not a member. Nor would you want to be.”

Instead of complaining, Brown writes, real ale lovers have to make their product inviting to newcomers-including advertising in an intelligent, non-snobbish way.

Man Walks into a Pub is a promising debut by an important new British beer writer.

The book gives a short history and also discusses the differences between “real ale” in a bottle and lifeless, filtered and pasteurized beers offered by the megabrewers today. This is done in an easy-to-understand way, as are the rest of the explanations in the book.

The author discusses CAMRA’s new plan to have their stamp of authenticity on bottle-conditioned beers, and the widespread acceptance by Britain’s real ale brewers of the idea. He also gives advice on purchasing, storing, and drinking such brews.

There is a straight-forward section on the brewing process, and the methods of bottle-conditioning utilized by the brewers of real ale. There is also a discussion of how the big breweries bottle their beer, and why it is inferior to real ale in a bottle.

The book states that it lists every bottled real ale produced in the U.K. Each brewery is listed alphabetically, with the beers from each brewery described. This includes the alcohol content, size of the bottle, recommended serving temperature, ingredients (the specific malts and hops used), as well as the author’s own tasting notes. There are also comments on the history of some of the brews.

There is also a section on grocery stores that maintain good bottled beer selections, as well as specialty beer shops that carry bottle-conditioned beers. This includes addresses, telephone numbers, and internet sites.

There are additionally a number of foreign bottle-conditioned beers mentioned in a separate section, as well as a dictionary of terms used in the book relating to bottled beer and real ale.

Overall, this is a well-researched and well-presented book on the subject of bottle-conditioned beers in the U.K.; I would recommend it to readers interested in the subject.