Boak and Bailey's post about alternate history got me thinking again about something I've pondered about for a while. They were wondering about what British beer would be like if CAMRA had never existed. It's an interesting question but as to the answer we can only speculate.
Something I'd like to know more about though is how did cask beer die out in other countries? At one point all draught beer must have been cask beer, and outside of Britain at some point in the 20th century it died a death and was replaced by keg. Ireland must be the closest to Britain in terms of beer history and as far as I'm aware went totally keg. Australia and New Zealand must have had a strong influence from British brewing, as indeed must Canada and the USA. So where did it all go wrong?
Did any brewers try and hold out? Did any drinkers put up a fight? Were any organisations formed? And what happened in Europe? There are still lots of small breweries in Germany, and I've seen pictures of wooden barrels being tapped at beer festivals there. Are these filled with bright beer or are they cask conditioned?
Answers on a postcard please.
Certainly in Köln and Bamberg the, often 25l barrels, are full of bright beer. They are usually manhandled onto the bar and the contents served immediately. In a busy brauhaus this can be a fascinating show of beery theatre.
ReplyDeleteI guess the question is: how is the beer treated before filling into these barrels?
I suppose the closest to cask-conditioned beer in Germany would be a ungespundet kellerbier, not that I am an expert by any means.
Some smaller countryside Franconian breweries do Kellerbier as you say, with beer that's been lagered for weeks being racked into gravity-pour barrels without filtration or extra CO2. Some load the beer with extra CO2 before racking (should I really call this "racking"?), some don't.
DeleteBut the weeks of lagering makes a fundamental difference to cask-conditioned beer, I suppose. The conditioning is all done by the time it's put in the barrel. Though some places also supposedly do barrel conditioning, but I don't *know* of any in particular.
One unique case is the Roppelt Keller in Stiebarlimbach south of Bamberg, where Franz Roppelt brews a Kellerbier, lagers it 4-6 weeks, then fills this into a 1000 litre disposable bag inside a tank in a big cooler (so not a true "Keller"). This is then pressurised by an air compressor for dispense. No added C02, no filtration. And sometimes too young. But he sells a lot of it, brewing 9000 litres a week.
Which reminds me, I haven't been in 5 days now, and with the afternoon free, I'm off there in an hour or so.
Barm aka @robsterowski is your man on this.
ReplyDeleteWarning: unfounded speculation follows.
DeleteI am not convinced that cask-conditioning was the way things were done in lager lands (although I think I once saw a reference to a practice which looked like it; but I doubt it was ever generally done).
I think it is quite likely that conditioning temperature has something to do with it. If you rack porter or ale into casks at 18 or 20 degrees C, there will not be enough CO2 in solution in the beer to keep it frothing, so you need to prime the cask. We still see the problems British ale brewers have when they need to provide bright beer – it doesn’t last very long and is generally on the flat side because of the loss of gas during transfer.
But if you are racking lager from big lagering barrels at just a few degrees C the beer retains enough gas to be enjoyable, if you are careful. So you can take beer from the lagering vessel up to the brewery tap or beer garden in the serving cask and have nice frothy beer without sediment.
This beer still has the same problem that bright ale does, of course, in that it starts going stale immediately. This is probably why the Germans started using extraneous CO2 as soon as the technology was available. You can see old illustrations of signs in bars stating proudly "We tap with CO2!"
I have no particular knowledge of Belgium or Australia, but I’d bet there was some cask-conditioned beer in both at one time. But those markets were structured very differently to the British model so there could be any number of reasons why it disappeared (if I'm right and it ever existed there at all).
That's interesting, I can see the divergence happened before keg was invented.
DeleteI'll have to have a ponder on the change from stock beers to running beers, widespread use of finings and priming sugar, pure yeast cultures for lagers and brewery refrigeration.
In the past, wasn't a lot of beer produced in the UK brewed to be stored over a long period rather than drunk fresh, and so wasn't really "cask beer" as such?
ReplyDeleteThe stored beer underwent a true secondary fermentation from the likes of Brettanomyces yeasts, and this could take place stored casks as well as storage vats.
DeleteThere are plenty of holes in the Irish beer story, which shouldn't really be as the big changes happened within living memory. I wish someone would do some proper research on it.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I think the main thing about Ireland is that draught beer seems to have been relatively rare, certainly in rural areas ie the vast majority of the country. My grandfather's local pub, in a small town, served bottled stout only and that would still have been available even after keg arrived: the "large bottle off the shelf" is still a standard method of serving Guinness in Ireland. My father was 18 when nitrokeg Guinness was introduced and recalls it being the hipster craft beer of its day: the new thing that would get you and your mates travelling to one pub rather than another. That, and "lounge bars" which had wimmins in them. People like my father and grandfather wouldn't have sought to protest the introduction of keg beer because they had never known cask.
I don't know what happened to the cask-drinking urban population -- I am not of their stock -- but I suspect that nitrokeg was good enough for them: more reliable, for one thing. I think we forget that this was the Space Age and things which were New and Modern were treated more positively. This attitude only really changed around 1990. I blame the Levi's ads.
The introduction of keg by Guinness and Smithwick's (acquired by Guinness in 1960) are documented, but I'd love to know more about the other breweries: how were the still-independent regional ale breweries packaging their beer? And what happened when the other big stout concerns switched to nitrokeg? Was it just accepted as "The New Thing"? Who held out last? Were there letters in The Cork Examiner?
There were brief flashes of cask in the late 20th century, largely inspired by British beer, but a combination of unscrupulous publicans, dominant national brands and (I suspect) wonky beer quality meant it never really caught on for very long.
Compared to the UK the even greater dominance by an even smaller number of big brewers must have affected Ireland/NZ/Australia. That's not the situation in Germany though.
ReplyDeleteAnd dare I say it the lack of a mass beer consumer movement must have been important.
Strangely, the widespread availability of bottle-conditioned ale lasted much longer in Ireland that in the UK (ie right through to the early 1960s) because so many pubs/local distributors still bottled their own beer, and they couldn't afford the equipment to filter and/or pasteurise/carbonate the beer: their bottling lines probably dated back decades. There are stories in the trade press (back copies can be seen in the National Library in Dublin) from that time of the protests by the National Licensed Victuallers' Association, or whatever it was called, complaining on behalf of its members of the drive around 1961 or so by the big brewers to introduce "bright" bottled beer, and complaining that their members couldn't afford to upgrade their bottling equipment to bottle "bright". There WERE, IIRC, complaints that bright beer wasn't as good as bottle-conditioned, but the main objection was purely economic, that the move to bright bottled beer was too costly for the independent bottlers, and they were going to lose some of their profit margin by no longer being able to bottle the beers themselves. Sadly, all the notes I took on this 10 or so years ago never got used in BTSOTP because the planned chapter on Ireland had to be dropped for space reasons. Those notes are still somewhere in the attic: one day, perhaps ...
ReplyDeleteAmazon Kindle single?
DeleteThat's interesting about bottle conditioned beer in Ireland. Presumably it explains why bottled Guinness held on for so long.
DeleteI doubt it. The only Irish people I've ever heard giving a toss about Guinness ceasing bottle conditioning (which happened around 2000 in Ireland) were home brewers. In the era before homebrew suppliers or foreign imports it's Where Yeast Came From. Bottled Guinness is still very much alive* in filtered, pasteurised form. I've never heard anyone say the taste changed in 2000.
DeleteBut again, this is just Guinness. Pint botles of Beamish only disappeared a few years ago: when did it stop being bottle conditioned? Did Macardle's change over at the turn of the Millennium like Guinness?
*figuratively
In Germany some keller beer is just straightforward keg, as is ungespundet (sometimes sold as the same thing - sometimes not.) Some kellerbier is sold from a wooden cask - more of this in a moment - and some is sold from cellar tanks, much as bright beer was sold here years ago. That is in a big plastic bag. Mike McG can tell you all about that.
ReplyDeleteBright beer isn't pasteurised and comes from the bright beer or conditioning tank. It may or may not be filtered, rough or otherwise.
Beer from wooden barrels comes as above from the conditioning or bright beer tank. It usually would get no carbonation adjustment, but then again maybe it would. It is served without extraneous CO2, is not pasteurised,it does not undergo a secondary fermentation, though I suppose with keller bier it just might on occasion by accident as it were.
German brewers, unlike British ones who are garrulous on the whole, are a taciturn lot. Then again, they have a lot to keep quiet about.
Hmmm...so no secondary fermentation except by accident. I suppose a rapid secondary fermentation is hard to get going in beer that's been lagered for a long time.
ReplyDeleteI doubt if they intend any cask conditioning anyway.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI think there is a temptation to look at the British beer scene around 1970 and extrapolate back that the cask-conditioned beer than was under threat then had been the norm in previous eras.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as Martyn Cornell says in Amber, Gold and Black,
"because mild was generally meant to be drunk soon after it arrived in the pub, and was not supposed to undergo any real secondary fermentation, it was often sent out from the brewery 'bright', that is without any yeast in the cask."
Historically, all draught beer would have been unfiltered and unpasteurised, but probably little of it would have been cask-conditioned in any meaningful sense.
In any case, by the post-war era, when people might have started to become annoyed about losing traditional beer styles, pretty much all major beer-drinking countries apart from the UK and Ireland had gone over to lager styles, which by definition are not cask-conditioned as ales are. The steady adoption of filtration, pasteurisation and force-carbonation would have been a much more gradual process than the abrupt British switch from real ale to keg.
Even fined bright beer contains yeast cells but I think you're right that the transition in other countries wasn't as abrupt as in Britain. Places where lager, stout or bottled beer was the norm won't have noticed as much as cask mild and bitter drinkers.
ReplyDelete