This is from Lloyd Hind, a renowned brewing scientist.
"It might be well to set out some of the disadvantages of top beer and then examine how they can be most easily overcome, either by the adoption of bottom fermentation or by improvement of present methods.
Quite apart from questions of flavour or brilliance, beer as generally brewed here suffers from the following causes:—
(1) It is frequently sent out from the brewery in an unfinished state, the last stages of conditioning and fining being left in the hands of the customer, a not altogether satisfactory state of affairs.
(2) There is a considerable amount of waste on account of the sediment.
(3) Export trade is severely handicapped through the difficulty of pasteurisation and the instability of any other than comparatively strong beers.
Chilling and carbonating has been adopted to a very large extent with a view to getting over some of these disadvantages, and has met with a great measure of success for quick trade, but it cannot be said to be altogether a success. Typical characteristics of British beers are their hop aroma and the flavours produced by secondary fermentation. Chilling, filtration and pasteurisation tend to remove these very much-desired flavours, so that chilled and filtered beer generally suffers in comparison with naturally conditioned beer. Chilled and filtered beer also has the very serious disadvantage of instability. Haze and fermentation often set in very rapidly. This may be very largely due to the fact that the chilling process has been adapted to beers brewed on lines which were worked out or have been developed for natural conditioning and are totally unsuitable for really good chilled and filtered beer."
Journal of the Institute of Brewing, Volume 30, 1924, page 322.
Quite apart from questions of flavour or brilliance, beer as generally brewed here suffers from the following causes:—
(1) It is frequently sent out from the brewery in an unfinished state, the last stages of conditioning and fining being left in the hands of the customer, a not altogether satisfactory state of affairs.
(2) There is a considerable amount of waste on account of the sediment.
(3) Export trade is severely handicapped through the difficulty of pasteurisation and the instability of any other than comparatively strong beers.
Chilling and carbonating has been adopted to a very large extent with a view to getting over some of these disadvantages, and has met with a great measure of success for quick trade, but it cannot be said to be altogether a success. Typical characteristics of British beers are their hop aroma and the flavours produced by secondary fermentation. Chilling, filtration and pasteurisation tend to remove these very much-desired flavours, so that chilled and filtered beer generally suffers in comparison with naturally conditioned beer. Chilled and filtered beer also has the very serious disadvantage of instability. Haze and fermentation often set in very rapidly. This may be very largely due to the fact that the chilling process has been adapted to beers brewed on lines which were worked out or have been developed for natural conditioning and are totally unsuitable for really good chilled and filtered beer."
Journal of the Institute of Brewing, Volume 30, 1924, page 322.
The real problem was the drop in strength in WW II. Publicans had been able to get away with dodgy cask handling when beer was stronger and sold quickly. It took a while for brewers to adjust their recipes and methods to account for weaker draught beers.
And for publicans to get their act together. But they did, eventually.
Why did cask beer survive in the UK an almost nowhere else?
Typical characteristics of British beers are their hop aroma and the flavours produced by secondary fermentation. Chilling, filtration and pasteurisation tend to remove these very much-desired flavours
ReplyDelete!!!
It's like the manifesto of some sort of, what would you call it, campaign for the revitalisation of ale...
Thanks for that. Very interesting to see this being written in 1924: Typical characteristics of British beers are their hop aroma and the flavours produced by secondary fermentation. Chilling, filtration and pasteurisation tend to remove these very much-desired flavours, so that chilled and filtered beer generally suffers in comparison with naturally conditioned beer.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that no one in the brewing industry paid any attention, or only to the extent of thinking that these drawbacks could be overcome by advertising, or by simply ripping out all the hand pumps.
(BTW You have an anachronistic reference to World War II, which presumably was intended to refer to the Great War.)
I still reckon one of the most interesting years to drink in the UK was the one I was born in - 1955.
ReplyDelete"Why did cask beer survive in the UK an almost nowhere else?"
ReplyDeleteI've wondered about that, too. I hope you have an answer to propose.
"Why did cask beer survive in the UK an almost nowhere else?"
ReplyDeleteI have a theory that Britain had a larger amount of outlets under brewery control than any other country. The breweries were therefore able to exert a higher level of control over cask quality.
Thom, good point. In the USA for example after Prohibition, laws were passed in most states forbidding breweries to sell direct to saloons or stores - they had to go through a middle-man arrangement using numerous independant distribution companies. So hypothetically even if there had been cask beer in the US it would have been a nightmare to distribute and would not have survived prohibition. If for some reason the UK had gone down the same route then cask beer probably wouldn't have survived there either.
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