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.

Bass bottled beers 1956 - 1967

I've started going through the Whitbread gravity book I photgraphed on Tuesday. For no particular reason, I've started with the entries for Bass bottled beers.

Oddly enough, the 1960's were the one decade of the 20th century for which I had no real hard facts. Brewing logs and the Truman Gravity book have provided information on all the earlier decades. From the 1970's onwards, the CAMRA Good Beer Guide provides gravities. Now, thanks to Whitbread's industrial espionage, I can fill in the missing decade.

What can we learn from these figures? That Bass No 1 barley Wine has always had a massive OG, for one thing. They also blow one of my pet theories out of the water - that Barley Wine had a Bitter-like colour. The gravity book gives its colour as 100 and 110 - about the same as their Brown Ale. It's far darker than the Pale Ales, which are around 20.

Talking of Pale Ales, Blue Triangle was a filtered and pasteurised beer, Red Label was bottle-conditioned. Red Triangle was later just relabelled Worthington White Shield and was eventually dropped. An sad fate for the beer that had been the most famous Pale Ale in the world (as painted by Monet on the Folies Bergeres bar). You'll notice that the FG of some samples of Red Triangle is very low - 1003 to 1004. I think we can assume it was pretty dry.

I was surpised at the strength of the beers; the weakest are just a tad under 5% ABV. Remember that at this time the average OG was about 1037 equivalent to an average ABV of 3.7%.

I've never heard of Gold Triangle or Gold Label (thet appears to be the same beer). If anyone can remember it, please let me know.