There's a tendency among, shall we call them for talking's sake, "new wave" brewers to push the envelope, discard the tried and tested, do things just because they can and to generally cock a snook at those old fashioned enough to produce beer by the pint that the large majority actually want to drink. Indeed, in some cases, to be plain, downright insulting about those that travel roads more traditional. I can think of one or two like that, though clearly they are the minority.
On a similar tack I noted today in
Phil's blog a bit of the same concern about the direction of travel, concentrating in this case on the tendency to lump odd things into beer - peanut butter and biscuit anyone? - and positing that the main point seems to be to chuck into the brew, things you wouldn't expect to find generally speaking. So, experiment with off the wall ingredients and flog it to the (admittedly) willing for
£8 a pop. Nice work if you can get it. After all, who can complain that
is is "off".
"You just don't get it Man". Now Phil's not making the same point as me actually - wait I'll get there in a minute - but it's a digression that I happen to agree with by and large and not unconnected with another point that Phil makes and leads me on to mine.
I tweeted an interesting article in the
Morning Advertiser, sadly to no response, by one of these pesky traditional brewers, this time Marston's MD, Richard Westwood. In a fairly wide ranging interview Richard made the point, as I often do, about excellent cask beer being ruined at the point of dispense by too many beers and poor cellar practice. I agree with his contention that there is a need to balance the customer requirement for choice with resulting (lack of) quality issues. What caught my eye though was his contention that keg doesn't really solve that problem, as it only keeps at its best when opened
, "one or two days extra".
Now of course you can regard Richard as a craft knocking dinosaur despite his 40 years in the industry - he isn't at all by the way - read the article - but he makes a point, often overlooked by most of us, that keg beer goes off too and maybe goes off a lot sooner than we'd like to think. The answer of course is to ensure, keg or cask, that you only sell what your turnover justifies. Does that always happen in the craft world? It doesn't in the cask one.
Mind you, if having just paid £8 a pint, you have no idea at all whether your beer contains odd tasting exotica, or is just plain "off", for peace of mind, best convince yourself it is the former.
Have a go at working out the GSP on Phil's blog. Some dodgy arithmetic methinks
I like @Robsterowski's wine analogy too, though I reckon that most wine makers don't make it up as they go along and charge their customers top dollar for their experiments.
20 comments:
for peace of mind, best convince yourself it is the former
As a veteran of this sort of drinking, I'd say best order a half if you're not sure it's going to be any good.
I've an idea.
If you drink summat, just be honest about whether you like it or not rather than try and fit in with people and whether you think you ought to like it in order to obtain the respect of your peers.
That way you can just say "i think it's crap and i ain't drinking that again", or "I liked that one, i'll have another of them"
But the status boost gained from being seen to like an awesome craft beer is far more delicious than any liquid.
One interesting suggestion Richard made, in an excellent article, was a possible move to Pins as a way of ensuring that a cask isn't broached one day and still on sale the next week as can happen all to often in multi tap establishments.
Sorry to reply to a digression, but surely it's a myth that new wave brewers are all about wacky ingredients and chucking out anything traditional? It might be the limited edition durian and sea-cucumber imperial kvass that gets the column inches and the instagram posts, but it's IPAs, APAs, amber ales, lagers and stouts that make up the core range and (presumably) bring in the revenue. Buxton - cited in Phil's post - are a case in point. Apart from a couple of fruit sours and the Yellow Belly things (which I've never been tempted by, I'll admit), I'd basically associate them with good honest stuff like Axe Edge, Moor Top, Black Rocks, Rednik Stout and then a lot of imperial stouts and double IPAs and some Belgian style things. No sichuan peppercorns or pickled onions in sight.
Well, yes, as I said the other day. And unpasteurised craft keg with weird stuff in it is likely to go off a lot quicker than John Smith's or Carling.
Cooking Lager is completely right.
An analogy: I can't stand fish and seafood. I couldn't care less if the fish is fresh or off, well prepared or not. My loathing of such food has nothing to do with quality - I just hate it.
Anyone who drinks something he doesn't like just to appear 'cool' and knowledgeable (I say 'he' because in my experience women are less susceptible to such silliness) has more money than sense.
Never mind all that, I want to hear about The Corporation.
Coming soon Kevin. Still trying to work out how to say it all.
Speaking to a friend who works as brewer a couple of weeks ago, he was of the opinion that "new wave" breweries seem to have bypassed the whole development cycle a new beer would normally go through before it was ever sold to the public. They are simply selling their experiments, whether the result is any good or not, and it seems there are people ready to buy them. Some of the undrinkable muck I have sometimes been served in "craft" bars suggests there is some truth in this.
@ABrewHaHa He wasn't talking about going to pins, he talked about "taking cask size down by half _to_ a firkin". I guess the average Marston pub takes Pedigree etc by the kilderkin, so a firkin seems "small" in his world.
Pubs are not unaware of the idea of pins, but they're by no means a total solution, particularly if its the kind of pub with long lines - I've known 4 pints disappear into the lines so your line losses can be a high %age of the total. Also beer doesn't condition in quite the same way in a pin - it's a bit like the difference between ageing wine in a magnum and a half.
@Beermunster
I think it depends - most of the "serious" brewers I know do a lot of experimenting behind the scenes, call it alpha testing - but there will always come a time when you need to scale up those experiments to beta status and if you're using £100's of materials then it's not unreasonable to recoup some of that by selling it, perhaps at their tap. Or qv Cloudwater's public experiments with their DIPA recipe. It's hard to object to commercial transactions between consenting adults.
And you need that experimentation for evolution to occur - we're at one of those "Cambrian explosion" moments where there's a lot of experimentation, but you can already see some of the long-term "winners", and some of them look like being less obvious styles like tea beers.
Beermunster: No problem with that if it is properly saleable, not just an exercise in getting the punters to pay for your mistakes.
The main point of this piece though was the longevity of keg question. Nobody has commented on that at all.
I don't know a great deal about the technicalities of storing keg beer, but I do know it can go off. I've returned a couple of pints of Punk IPA to bars in 'Spoons. the second time the lass behind the bar said she had never sold any before, so if it has a non-existent turnover, it can definitely go off.
I kind of straddle the divide here between enjoying cask real ales, but also buying in to whatever mad concoction the trendy breweries have come up with this week, so I can see both sides of this. I'm happy to try something unusual as a one-off, knowing that I may not like it, but I do still enjoy it for the experience of trying new things and expanding my palate. Just as I may order a cask ale in the Regal Moon and find it isn't to my taste either. I suppose the main difference is how much of my money goes down the drain in the case of an unpalatable craft ale.
I'm happy to accept some of the extra cost knowing that non-standard ingredients and small-batch brewing is bound to necessitate some of this. Though at times it does seem like some craft brewers are taking the piss a bit, or playing on the intentional scarcity to jack things up by a quid or two.
Also, one small correction, Yellow Belly - the peanut butter and biscuit stout referred to above - is brewed without peanut butter or biscuit in the recipe. Though this does make me question somewhat why is it described as such.
Sure keg beer eventually goes off, but just one or two days beyond cask? I'm highly skeptical.
In my experience, as long as it's kept under pure CO2 and below 15C or so, it should be fine for at least a month, probably more.
(Even stored properly the flavor will change over time, since you're basically lagering it, but it would be a stretch to say that was "going off".)
Brewdog seem to be making a big deal about freshness. They claim all the Punk IPA in their bars will be a maximum of 2 weeks old. It's Brewdog, so I have no idea if all their scientific gubbins has really detected something that changes in the beer, or if it is pure marketing bullshit.
I seriously doubt whether unpasteurised "craft keg" is going to last for a month, or anywhere near that, without a noticeable deterioration.
BrewDog's This.Is.Lager was withdrawn from Wetherspoon's because it just wasn't selling quickly enough to maintain quality.
i agree with john binckley, i'm not convinced keg goes off that quickly.
i stick homebrew in a cornelius keg and drink a batch over 4-6 weeks. there are changes, bitterness mellows and hop aroma fades quickly - although they both seem to plateau after a week or two rather than continuing their decline (i think we used to call this conditioning or maturing back in the days when we preferred a gentler hop character). there are thousands of homebrewers worldwide doing this and there's no real discussion of rapid staling of beers that are kept cold and under co2. there is lots of discussion of how to preserve hop character by elminating oxygen through purging kegs and hoses with co2 when filling, so an awareness that some aromatics can disappear quickly, but no discussion of the beer itself going off.
what would make keg go off quickly? i'm not saying it doesn't decline but we know why cask only lasts a couple of days, why would beer kept cool and sealed decline at a similar rate.
Is he still pushing that "fastcask" thing?
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