Monday 15 July 2013

More shite about real ale and craft beer.

This is a letter (in fact, the only letter) published in "Canny Bevvy", Tyneside CAMRA's propaganda pamphlet, issue 224, Summer 2013.




12 comments:

Benjamin Nunn said...

I was with him until the bit about Sheps being 'flavoursome'.

Unknown said...

Erm, brewers are commercial businesses, not playthings of CAMRA...

Anonymous said...

This dude knows nothing about true craft brewing, and will be left behind just like all the other CAMRA pubs. Most craft brewers worth their salt are far better brewers than most Brown beer merchants. Serving on gravity allows the beer to oxidise, basically it starts to go off as soon as it is tapped. Serving from keg with gas keeps the beer better. How many times have you had beer on cask that is off, loads.

StringersBeer said...

Chuckles. In fairness, it's not all shite is it?

Curmudgeon said...

Surely the only bottle-conditioned beer produced by Sheps is 1698?

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
StringersBeer said...

Mudgie, Yep, according to CAMRA's GBBG.

Anonymous said...

This bloke is notorious amongst local brewers for not being willing to pay more than £50 for a nine.

Curmudgeon said...

He does have a point about modern cask beers often being close to "bright" and not undergoing much of a secondary fermentation.

Most of the rest of it is shite, though.

Tandleman said...

I suspect it was the only letter published because it was the only letter. I also note it was a landlord too. They talk shite as much as most.

Beers can have enough viable yeast and still have little sediment these days. Would anyone say that Hawkshead are poor for example?

As for Anonymous, that's the standard you get from anonymous contributors.

Anonymous said...

Hope you are well and finding time to enjoy the sun with a beer.
My name is Dan and I am organising the London Craft Beer Festival www.londoncraftbeerfestival.co.uk
We have some of the best breweries in the UK and Europe and I was hoping you could help spread the word about the festival.
We are having a trade day on the friday of the festival, and I would be happy to give you a free ticket in exchange for help on the social media and web front.
Please let me know if you can help and if you need any more information or material.
I look forward to hearing from you soon
All the best

Gary Gillman said...

Coming late to this discussion, but I found the letter of interest and worrisome. Some real ale I've had on trips to England (I live in Canada) while certainly drinkable, seemed little different to the same brewery's keg or bottled/canned equivalent. Where I disagree with the writer is, I'd style these new, semi-filtered (?) real ales cask beer, but not as good as clearly his experience said beer once was.

By the same token, some of the new "craft beers", which in England seems to mean beer hopped with New World varieties, wheat beers or sour beers, are served on cask.

So you can have traditional, well served "craft beer" or indifferent cask "brown beer" as the term is called (although most traditional cask beer is not brown, it is yellow to light amber, where does this term come from?).

One can disagree with the categories but his main point is important I think: real beer should undergo a definite secondary fermentation in the dispense container, not an "symbolic" one, since the taste results matter.

Gary