Floaters: the good kind

Natural-conditioning. I've always believed that's the best way to go. The general public doesn't seem to have been quite so convinced.

The majority of British bottled beers very quickly moved away from bottle-conditioning in the first decades of the 2oth century. Look at old adverts and you can see how it was sold to the public: no bits in your beer and you can drink every last drop in the bottle. It's surprising that anyone kept bottling with yeast.

Nowadays brewers are often perceived as the bad guys, trying to dumb down their products. But that naturally-conditioned bottled beers survived at all in Britain seems to have been due to the enthusiasm of brewers for this method. Guinness brewers were unenthusiastic about the flavour of pasteurised Stout. Worthington and Bass stuck with bottle-conditioning for their flagship Pale Ales (White Shield and Red Triangle) but introduced filtered versions (Green Shield and Blue Triangle) due to public demand.

But I still don't like things floating in my beer. I always leave the yeast in the bottle, if humanly possible. Even with Hefeweizen. Remembering to ask the barstaff, especially in Germany, not to pour in the yeast is vitally important. I often forget. Perhaps it's just psychological, but lots of yeast overpowers and dulls the flavour of a beer. At least that's how it seems to me.

What is a good floater? One that isn't there.