The types of beer available on draught were pretty limited. Mild, Bitter and Lager were mostly about as much as you would find. In winter, a stronger beer might be available. Something like Young’s Winter Warmer or Adnams Old Ale.
There were an increasing number of outlets for draught Guinness. And draught Lager, which up until the 1960s was mostly in bottled form, was becoming much more common in keg.
Cask beer
The tied house system was vital in making cask beer possible. The highly simplified logistics – straight from brewery to pub – massively reduce the risk of the beer getting fucked up by some idiot in the delivery chain.
The availability of cask beer was incredibly patchy. In parts of the Midlands and the North, such as Nottingham or Manchester it was almost universally available. In other locations, for example Glasgow or Middlesbrough, not a drop was to be found. It was all very much dependent on who owned the pobs.
In general, towns dominated Big Six pubs tended to have less cask available. But there were exceptions, such as Leeds, where Tetley owned the vast majority of pubs but served cask in almost all of them.
The types of beer available in cask form were pretty limited. Mild, Bitter and Old Ale. That was it. Unless you count attempts, which met with varying success, to brew a cask Lager.
If Frank Baillie is to be believed, quite a lot of cask beer was either kept with a blanket of CO2 or served on top pressure. And might well be dispensed through a beer engine. The only way you could be sure of getting pure cask, short of inspecting the cellar, was if it was served by gravity from a cask behind the bar.
Bright beer
One step down from cask was a type of brewery-conditioned beer much favoured by larger brewers in the Midlands and North.
It was rough filtered and artificially carbonated, but not pasteurised and served through electric pumps rather than top pressure. Much closer to cask than to keg, and lacking the bad features of the latter: over-pasteurisation and over-carbonation.
The difference between indifferently-kept cask and bright beer wasn’t great. And it could be difficult to tell the difference between the two when being served from the same electric pumps. Which is one of the reasons most brewers stopped selling cask through electric pumps and reverted to beer engines. They wanted to make clear it was cask beer.
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I'm still vaguely nostalgic for a world in which you went to a Scrufton's pub and got a choice of Scrufton's mild and Scrufton's bitter (or if you were very lucky and/or went at the right time of year, Scrufton's old ale/special/winter warmer/etc); if you wanted something different you'd need to go to a Flitwick's pub, where you'd get a choice of Flitwick's mild and Flitwick's bitter (or if you were very lucky, etc etc). But that's probably just because it's the world I grew up in! Even in an area like Manchester, with five or six established breweries, the choice back then was nothing like it is now - and of course there were big areas of the country where the local Scrufton's owned everything for miles, or the local Flitwick's had gone keg.
I do wonder if the quality was more reliable, in those days when pubs served the same two or three beers year in, year out. But even if it was, I suspect that in quite a few pubs it was reliably poor.
Top pressure depended on the brewer – I grew up in Greene King territory, and many GK pubs were top pressure. In the South, at least, any Big Six pub would be pretty much universally keg.
So was bright beer a bit like tank beer that you find in parts of Central Europe?
When you say Guinness was expanding their draft stout business, were they the only one making much of a push? If so, I'd be curious why other brewers weren't competing harder.
There was another variety that was unique to North Country Brewery in Hull.
It was brewed in proper Yorkshire Stone squares but then filtered extremely bright and sent to the pubs in big plastic bags similar to the modern bag in a box polypins
Each large "polypin" was kept in a special sealed container and served on handpump by the surprising method of the hand pump sending air down to the container which squeezed the bag to send an equal amount of beer up to the swan neck tap!! Because of the big plastic bag the beer wouldn't get oxidised. Also the hand pump mechanism and the "down" line never needed cleaning out.Brilliant.
I saw this in action in Scarborough in around 1976. Excellent beer. Brewery got taken over by Mansfield and shut down eventually but a brewer took yeast and started the Ringwood brewery in Hampshire. Ringwood yeast from Wyeast is a really good back up if you cant get West Yorkshire yeast.
There was a story in "What's Brewing" CAMRA magazine.
Somewhat related to the Scottish "Water engine" system where air pressure was generated by the pressure of mains water acting on a pump, never worked out how that was done... and is the origin of the tall founts or fonts in Scottish pubs rather than hand pumps. I last tried a few pints served that way in Edinburgh, again in the mid 70s, from Maclays of Alloa, now sadly gone as well.
Anonymous,
by the 1970s, there weren't really any large Stout brands, other than Guinness and Mackeson. Most brewers had little interest in Stout because of the small volumes brewed.
Iain,
a bit, yes.
Iain, Pilsner Urquell were delivering tank beer to London "Tankovna" - I don't know if that survived after Covid.
Murphy's and Beamish stouts started being sold in Britain (in the north at any rate) sometime in the mid 80's. I was at a CAMRA meeting in about 1981/2 where there was a bottle of Beamish stout that got auctioned, it went for a silly price so it wasn't generally available that time. About the same time Sam Smith's started selling a draught Extra Stout, I had a session on it once, it was rather good.
Interesting Chris.
Oscar
In London in the early seventies, top pressure and keg were certainly the order of the day in most pubs belonging to the Big Six: Courage, Ind Coope, Whitbread and Younger’s each had only a handful of pubs with handpumps in the London area, and there was no cask-conditioned beer in London at all from Watney’s or Truman’s. However, one member of the Big Six – Bass Charrington – was a notable exception, serving handpumped beer (generally IPA, though Crown Bitter was available as well – mostly in east London and Essex) in a large number of Charrington’s pubs – probably around 300 or so across London. There was also a smaller number of Bass Charrington pubs that sold draught Bass (these were often former Wenlock Brewery pubs that tended to sell Bass rather than IPA). Not many pubs sold both Bass and IPA.
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