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.

Carbonation can be traced back through the centuries. There is evidence that the ancient Sumerians had foam in their beer, which would indicate the existence of carbonation. It would be a few more centuries before airtight commercial bottles allowed drinkers to have stronger carbonation one pop at a time and then a few years more before advances in molecular sciences allowed brewers to force carbonation into the beer itself.

To just think of carbonation as merely bubbles in a glass is to dismiss the science, passion and countless hours brewers and researchers have put into making sure the effervescence is all it should be.

More Than Bubbles

Carbonation occurs after carbon dioxide (CO₂) is dissolved inside a liquid. In beer natural carbonation first occurs during the fermentation process when yeast absorbs the sugar in the wort creating both alcohol and carbon dioxide. Some brewers will also add additional sugars to unpasteurized bottles of beer, allowing yeast to feast a second time, thus allowing additional CO₂ into the beer.

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.

For the last 20 years, cask ale has seemed like the Next Great Beer Trend in the United States, but it has always had too many mitigating factors conspiring against its success. After all, if it has required the advocacy of the 100,000-member Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and the industry-sponsored Cask Marque education and accreditation program to sustain quality and relevance in England, think about how difficult its chances are over here. The fact that any cask ale is available in America at all is remarkable in itself. But passion is not enough.

Many businesses have tried mightily to make cask ale viable in this country, but failed. Some overestimated consumer demand; others never understood the extensive support network of brewers, importers, distributors and trained bar staff needed to make it work.

Gradually, relentlessly, others have endured and the good news is they’re succeeding. Greater New York City has dozens of bars now regularly serving cask ales (Manhattan’s Rattle N Hum typically serves four; many more during frequent festivals), ditto Philadelphia. Down I-95 in D.C., ChurchKey established a new precedent by opening with five cask beer options on their extensive beer menu. Handpumps are sprouting all over the country: you can find them in pubs and festivals in Atlanta, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Houston, Pittsburgh, Portland (ME and OR), St. Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, and beyond.

On the other hand, we still have bars and festivals where cask-conditioned beer is viewed as a decorative gimmick. The question is, are American craft beer consumers astute enough to know the difference? Perhaps not, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be. That’s my goal here; to teach you how to distinguish the real deal from the pretender, the sublime from the mediocre.

Gimmick or Gestalt

Let’s begin with some basic assumptions. The mere presence of handpumps (also known as “beer engines”) or firkin kegs is no guarantee that authentic cask beer is being served. Sad to say, but this always involves a leap of faith that goes beyond your trust in the dedication and honesty of the bar owner―you also have to trust the brewer and the entire infrastructure of our three-tiered system.

That’s because cask-conditioned beer is not a style but the result of a specific process of brewing, fermentation and dispense. At every point in the supply chain, critical steps must be taken to deliver to you that authentic, beautifully served, sumptuous glass of beer you were hoping for.

That process, once widely followed around the world, persisted in the British Isles while other nations adopted different methods, so it remains strongly associated with British ale styles. Indeed, even contemporary American consumer expectations about the appearance and flavor of British styles are still largely driven by this tradition, whether we are aware of this or not.

Regardless of style, authentic cask beer will have certain shared characteristics. At the very least, it should contain live yeast, because it completes its secondary fermentation in the cask. Then it must be kept and served at a cool cellar temperature (52-57° F), naturally carbonated to lower levels than standard draft beers, and dispensed without the use of any extraneous carbon dioxide pressure. The result should be decidedly less gassy, lacking the often prickly, acidic bite found in other beers. The mouthfeel is softer and gentler, while the slightly warmer serving temperature allows for a greater range of flavors and aromas to emerge.

Going Live

Few consumers are aware that the presence of live yeast is the defining characteristic of cask beer. If it’s not there, it is something else entirely. It doesn’t matter if it’s been stored at cellar temperature and served via handpump or from a gravity tap―it is not cask-conditioned, merely in a cask. The distinction is critical. Brewery-conditioned, filtered beer that’s been racked into a cask might still be very tasty, but it’s just a warmer version of a brewery’s standard beer dispensed from an unpressurized container. Authentic cask-conditioned beer completes its secondary fermentation in the cask. Period.

Two other distinguishing features of cask beer run counter to expectation. Despite the mythical image of British ales, cask beer should never be served flat. And no, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been to pubs in London that serve it that way―it’s simply not correct. A beer without any carbonation is dull, lifeless, at best insipid, and certainly not what the brewer intended. A good head and the resulting “lace” adhering to the sides of the glass are signs that both the brewer and the pub’s cellarman have done their jobs well. Indeed, many brewers still add a small dose of a sugary solution known as “primings” to the cask to produce a more vigorous secondary fermentation and livelier condition in the beer.

The other feature that runs counter to expectation is clarity, and by that I mean the beer should be brilliantly clear, without any floating particles or haze. The fact that cask beer is unfiltered leads to the misconception that it’s OK if it is served turbid and cloudy, but this is definitely not the case.

In the U.K., a cloudy pint is never accepted at a pub―it is sent back and replaced with another without question. In this country, especially in the craft beer market, clarity isn’t considered a requirement. These days, even the most casual beer drinker has likely been exposed to German hefeweizens or Belgian-style white ales, so a cloudy pint is often considered a sign of quality. But beer styles that traditionally have a hazy appearance are almost never served in cask-conditioned form. For those that are―British styles like mild/brown ale, pale ale/bitter, porter and stout―cloudiness is typically a sign that something is amiss.

If you’re presented with a muddy pint of cask-conditioned beer and told by the server that “it’s supposed to be that way,” don’t believe it. In fact, it’s a sure sign that something has been neglected in the process or the bar staff doesn’t know any better. A slight haze―OK, cut them a break. But otherwise, send it back. If they are unwilling to pour you a clearer pint or offer you another beer, you have little choice but to drink what you’ve been given and chalk it up to experience. Just make a note to yourself that you won’t order a cask beer at that establishment again.

You see, most brewers typically add “finings” to cask-conditioned beer. Finings (a substance whose purpose is to attract organic compounds like spent yeast, hop particles, and other proteins and cause them to fall out of solution and form stable sediment at the bottom of the cask) have been used for centuries as a means of clarifying beer. They were employed long before modern methods of filtering were invented.

Finings are not required, as most beer will ultimately “drop bright” when given enough time to settle in its serving vessel. But as a practical matter, a pub can’t wait indefinitely for beer to clear. Finings make the process more predictable and controllable.

So, if a cask of beer is given ample time to settle and reach its optimal temperature in the bar cellar, and assuming that certain basic techniques have been applied in the pub’s cellar or cooler, the beer in your glass should be absolutely bright and clear. The only exception is if haziness is considered proper for the style of beer being served.

In the U.S., cloudy cask beer is most often a sign that the beer is still “working,” that is, it hasn’t been given the time to complete its secondary fermentation and drop bright. It’s also a sign that the cask might have been jarred or shaken prior to dispense. On the other hand, it can also be a sign of infection, either in the cask itself or due to dirty beer lines and handpumps. In this instance, the aroma and flavor will be obvious indicators, and any good bar or pub should take it out of service immediately and replace your beer without question.

The British Invasion wasn’t just limited to music. Soon it seemed that almost everything British became a hot commodity—James Bond, The Avengers, Carnaby Street, Twiggy, mini skirts, Kings Road Chelsea, Monty Python, and even Benny Hill. The United States may have been born in a rebellion against Great Britain, but now almost anything from the mother country was chic.

Beer was an entirely different matter. There was Bass Ale, of course. The classic English pale ale was popular here even before imported beer became the rage. But, in general, British beer continued to bear the mythological “warm and flat” image brought back by American servicemen from the Second World War. Music, movies, and television shows were one thing, but beer was something entirely different. In America we apparently still liked our beers yellow, cold, and fizzy. End of story, right?

The emergence of craft brewing in the United States kindled a new-found appreciation of the complex flavors and aromas of many classic beer styles. Britain’s styles gained new admirers, especially once our new brewers revived them with uniquely American ingredients and verve.

Meanwhile, British brewing did not stand still, either. As the largest breweries continued to push increasingly bland products or exit the business completely, smaller regional and family brewers rededicated themselves to traditional cask beers. By the turn of the 21st century, they had been joined by a surging number of microbreweries to outpace the few remaining multinational giants in the production of cask ales. Today, Britain is overflowing with new beers of high complexity and quality. A growing number of them have been showing up on our shores.

You Say You Want A Revolution

Beer lovers in America now have access to a selection of British brands that was simply unfathomable in 1964. But despite this development, the prevailing view of British beer in this country remains remarkably out-of-date. It’s as if we stopped listening to rock music after the Beatles broke up. People still ask about old “classics” like Watney’s Red Barrel or Double Diamond, brands that haven’t been produced in eons. In musical parlance, it’s like talking about Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark 5, or Freddie and The Dreamers, as if Bowie, Costello, or the Clash had never existed. All is not just Bass Ale and Newcastle Brown. The fact is, we’re actually in the midst of an unparalleled British beer invasion, with choices that couldn’t be imagined just a few years ago.

Walk into a decent beer store these days and the selection of British brands can bowl you over. Next to some familiar names like Fuller’s, Young’s, and Samuel Smith are lesser-knowns (at least in the USA) like Adnams, Black Sheep, Broughton, Caledonian, Coniston, Felinfoel, Greene King, Hook Norton, Hop Back, Moorhouse’s, O’Hanlon’s, Orkney, Frederic Robinson’s, St. Peter’s, Charles Wells, and Wychwood. And not all of these are standard pale ales. There are golden summer ales bursting with hop character; low and high gravity milds; powerful old and winter ales; porters and stouts; wheat and rye ales; Scottish wee heavies and English barley wines. There are even ales brewed with heather, spruce, and gooseberry. Clearly these are not your father’s British ales.

But, truth be told, our purchasing patterns have yet to catch up with all these new choices. When we opt for a British beer, we’re just as likely to go for the more established names. Beyond Bass and Newcastle, the top sellers come from familiar old friends Samuel Smith’s, Fuller’s and Young’s. Interest in imported beers is booming, yet many magnificent British ales are gathering dust on the shelves, and we’re not talking one-hit wonders here. Why is this?

Unlike most beers, real ales complete their fermentation in the vessel from which they are dispensed. The vessel most commonly used is the cask, whose distinctive barrel shape—wider in the middle than at the ends—actually aids in the beer’s subsequent clarity. That’s why real ale is often called cask-conditioned ale (or, for brevity’s sake, cask ale).

The actual container, however, is not important. Real ale may come from a bottle, keg, or serving tank, but in every instance, one thing is consistent—the beer is in contact with live yeast until the moment it is dispensed. Because it is unfiltered, the beer retains many complex flavors and the continuing metabolic activity of the yeast keeps it at the peak of freshness.

Finally, real ale is served at a cellar temperature (52 to 57 degrees F), naturally carbonated to less than half the level found in regular beers, and dispensed without the use of any extraneous carbon dioxide pressure. As a result, it is decidedly less gassy and lacks the often prickly, acidic bite found in other beers. The mouthfeel is softer, while the slightly warmer serving temperature allows for a greater range of flavors and aromas. Whether served via an elegant hand pump or straight from the tap, real ale is a treat.

It’s important to note that real ale is not a specific beer style but a process. And, although the process is almost always associated with British ale styles, any beer can be handled and dispensed in this fashion. In fact, many lager styles can be conditioned and served from the cask. Chicago’s annual Real Ale Festival has featured a variety of Belgian and German styles.

According to Michael Jackson, consistency is not one of real ale’s well-known qualities. “Ordering a pint of cask-conditioned ale is like opening a bottle of fine wine,” he said. “You know the character of the vineyard, but each bottle will have its own delights or disappointments.”

Since gas pressure is not used to dispense the beer, the cask must be vented and exposed to ambient air, so subtle changes begin to occur as the beer oxidizes. For the beer connoisseur, these changes from cask to cask, or even from the same cask at different times, are part of the allure. On the other hand, the average beer consumer expects unyielding consistency in brands. Variability is thus both blessing and curse. And when you combine it with comparatively warmer temperatures and lower carbonation than most US beer drinkers expect, it’s easy to see why real ale will never be a huge seller in America.