Real Ale

The most wonderful of all a pubs products the “real ale”  the presence of which gives each and every bar an unique character, another level of interest you'd might say.  Good real ale is never kept it is sold and the quicker the turn around the better.  With micro breweries and big suppliers taking on regional ales and making them available national even to the tied house the real ale has seen quite a revival in the last few years.

That said, it is not to be said that all real ale is a delight and that if kept badly this wonderful asset can soon become the liability of any bar or pub.  I always like to check out the condition of any pubs real ale by trying their national brand first (if they have one) and the one I look for the most to try first is Bass, this will really show if the landlord knows his ale keeping.  Bass to me is slightly sweet and therefore shows its age readily as it begins to go bitter, it also does not suffer bad treatment very easily.  You see, tome if you are trying a local ale that you have never seen before let alone tasted you will have now idea what the ale is supposed to taste like, so really bitter ale may well seem off to you or indeed an “off” ale might just be passed off to you as meant to be bitter.

Yes cloudy ale or flat ale can be giveaways but these indicators do not always ring true as signs of an ales poorly kept condition.  You can have two hazes that can occur in ale one being a heat haze and the other being a chill haze one can be got rid off the other cannot.   The chill haze can generally be sort the heat haze cannot.   Perfect ale can be poured flat and it could be nothing to do with ale – but alas the cleanliness of the glass could be to blame.  Indeed too much rinse aid can be a big cause of flat beer.

My ambition  or wish has always been to own a pub in the middle of nowhere, the sort that you have to travel a good ten miles off the beaten track to reach.  Then I would like a squeaky beer engine and when pouring the ale my dream has always been to ask “come far ‘ave you?”  A strange, but never the less a true wish.

The sad thing about real ale is that many landlords just do not do the basics or indeed do not know the basics in storing and selling this wonderful beer.  Those who use extraction rods to dispense the ale very rarely place wedges under the barrel under the point where the extraction rod enters the barrel.  Nor do they close the breathers at night.  Cleaning of the lines can amount to nothing more than a quick flush through of fresh water, this often occurs when the barrel goes at busy times and the real ale lines are hardly ever included in the main line clean; on the assumption that they are cleaned as they go.  The best method for dispense that I have tried is the side by side approach, in which you have two lines for each ale, each on a separate handle or beer engine then as one goes the other may be pulled through and the one that has gone may be thoroughly cleaned and left in a soak of fresh water.

The joy of the side by side system is that you know your lines are getting the proper clean each and every time and that now beer is being lost to line cleaning.  You also enjoy double advertising for you product – two handles per product.  Your customers will know that you lines have been cleaned and indeed good regulars will know if they are on an old or new barrel when they come in (a barrel change would show up because you are on the other handle).

When I was a young man I would drink beer as opposed to lager, which was against the fashion of the day, I must state that it was not real ales I drank but top pressure beers such as triple crown, courage best (keg) and the one that always made me sick DD or double diamond.  It was because of this strange happening following a pint of DD that my friends convince me that whilst out on the town I should at least drink lager; after all lager, they argued tastes much the same from pub to pub.  Whereas I was drinking beer which meant I was going from a Courage house to a Whitbread house to a bass house and no two pubs would sell the same beer.  To a certain extent their argument rang true, so I relented and switched to lager drinking whilst on the town circuit.

Many years later I switch back to beer but this time the explosion in choice or the real ales on offer had taken place and I could once more indulge  myself in the wonderful new flavors now found in abundance.  Sadly though in later years I have as explained before come across some quite awful ales and have had to resort to testing out the national ales before jumping in with both feet.