This page was last on 07 October 2007 14:36:37.

Real ales' basic ingredients - very simply - are barley, water, hops and yeast.  This is more or less the same as lager and keg ale.  The major difference is that real ale is then put into barrels and allowed to ferment again within the closed vessel.  As the yeast still gives off carbon dioxide, the pressure rises within the closed barrel and the gas is kept in suspension within the beer in a similar way to soda water.  It also naturally alters the beer to a give a more mature and rounded final taste.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REAL ALE AND LAGER?

Lager and 'keg' beer (Poacher is one in this area) are boiled - pasteurised - after the first fermentation to kill the yeast within the beer.  The beer is then kegged (is that a word?) up to be shipped to the pubs but has added carbon dioxide gas to create an effervescent drink.  The lack of cask conditioning - the secondary fermentation in the barrel - means that chemical alterations to the taste and/or chilling the drink are needed to make it drinkable.  What does warm lager taste like?  Chilling a drink removes most of the taste from it.  

Of course, I know that most beers, especially the mass produced brands, have additives but for the purists out there these should perhaps be limited to the trace elements added to the water.  These elements help to match the taste of the original water used when the beer recipe was first brewed (YES, it does make a difference!).  

For large brewers this can often be carried too far.  I well remember a head brewer for one of the largest national chains recalling that, to correct a basic problem caused by using cheap ingredients, chemical additives were used.  These gave rise to taste and brewing problems further down the process which were corrected by more additions.  It was eventually decided to purchase two expensive centrifuges to spin the sediment from the beer as it would not clear itself!  In the end the new head brewer reverted to using better quality barley and hops and the expensive additives were duly scrapped!

A later variation on this theme are the 'smooth' beers which use a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen to add the fizz to the drink and incidentally paying a bonus to the pubs owning businesses because of the large head on the drink - more of this is below.

WHY IS MORE REAL ALE NOT AVAILABLE?

As you will have read above, the yeast is kept alive in real ale to provide flavour and carbon dioxide within the barrel.  As the yeast dies it falls to the bottom of the barrel as sediment or lees.  The movement of the barrel to the pub causes the beer to be cloudy and the beer needs at least a couple of days of stillness before being served.  The process of clearing is aided by finings added to the beer.  Lager or keg ale has the yeast killed, and provided the dead yeast is removed, perhaps by filtering, the beer is clear when the barrel is filled.

The training of managers and bar staff is expensive when it gets more complicated than which button to press for Carling.  Let's be honest, most bar staff in large turnover pubs are trained on the job - at least it looks that way to me!  The idea of telling staff to keep movement of casks to a minimum, insert a softer bung (spile) to the cask to let it breathe, and ONLY serve it when it is ready etc, etc goes beyond the caliber of staff most national pubs chains would dream of paying for.  High turnover of staff does not help.

IF YOU WANT TO GET AHEAD.......

 And it is not just the training cost, of course!  A large head has been promoted by advertising men for at least twenty years.  Whilst the benefits to the pub may not be obvious straight away - and without going into details about how much beer you pay for and do not get - most large pub chains feel cheated if they do not serve more pints out of a barrel than it actually holds.  Put simply, serving you with a head instead of beer is excellent news for the pub.  YOU know the pubs which do this to you - you now know why!

The lees at the bottom of a barrel of real ale mean that you cannot serve a good pint of beer from the bottom of a barrel, although I am sure that someone has tried to do it to you!  If you don't tell them they 'don't know'!  

From the pub chain point of view, serving 75 pints from a 72 pint barrel with no staff training costs is better than 72 pints and some perceived intelligence from your staff.

Don't get me wrong, not everyone is the same (look at Wetherspoons), but since a large number of pubs are ultimately owned by a handful of companies (a very small hand that has been too close to a chainsaw) it is distressingly all too familiar.

LIKE A LITTLE SPARKLE IN YOUR BEER?

A major assistance to pubs which do this is the sparkler.  Going back quite a number of years, mill and factory workers in the North only had a short time for lunch and the pub owners and brewers obviously wanted to ensure that they sold as much beer as possible.  To enable more of their brew to go down as quickly as possible the sparkler was introduced to remove some of the naturally produced gas.  This also has the effect of reducing the bitter taste so the brewers involved made their beers more bitter to compensate.

A sparkler is simply a very fine sieve that fits on the end of the beer dispensing tube.  As the beer is forced through it, the dissolved gasses are released and form a large head.  So pleased were pub groups with this invention that it was rapidly introduced throughout the country.  Southern beer tends to be brewed without the sparkler in mind, and when served through one is bland, boring and most of the time less than a pint.  Of course, from the profit point of view taste is simply not an issue, so a variation on this featured a valve that would not let you pull beer through the pump unless the sparkler was fitted.  I remember that in the social club in the Flowers brewery in Cheltenham (God rest its soul) Whitbread had fitted these bayonet sparklers - the bar staff simply cut them off with a hacksaw.