Author: Bob

by Steve Renshaw

CAMRA members from Lincoln and Grantham recently met up in Newark to visit some of the town’s hostelries. All the pubs we visited were great and most of the beers we sampled were very good. But there were exceptions. One beer I tried looked and tasted like it had been drawn from the River Trent. I took it back to the bar and it was exchanged for one that wasn’t much better.

I’m sure that if we’d been keg beer drinkers, we’d have had no complaints about anything we were served. That’s the problem with real ale – the quality of the same beer served in different pubs can vary dramatically.

CAMRA members can use the National Beer Scoring Scheme to assess the quality of the real ale, each time they visit a pub. The scores range from “Perfect” to “Undrinkable”. Yes, I know it sounds a bit geeky, but it helps us to monitor the performance of pubs. And the data is very important when it comes to choosing entries for the Good Beer Guide.

Drinking beer goes back thousands of years but, somewhere along the line, humans discovered that beer could be carbonated by sealing it in a container and letting the “spirits” of fermentation go about their business. But fermentation is an unpredictable process and beer was prone to spoiling. Continue reading “Good Beer, Bad Beer”

by Greg Richards

In this age rich with new breweries and more guest beers than the most devoted beer-hunter can keep up with, there are still plenty of drinkers that prefer to stick to “a pint of the usual”. Many go for trusted brands, established beers that have been around as long as they can remember. But how many of these beers are actually the same brews they used to be?

Look at Bass, a beer that many pub-goers will recognise. The Bass red triangle was the first trademark to be registered in the UK. While it still appears on the pump-clip, what’s going on behind the label has changed drastically. The brewery was set up in Burton-upon-Trent in 1777 by William Bass and, by 1877, it was the largest in the world, with an annual output of one million barrels.

In the early 20th century , Bass acquired a number of other breweries and their pubs. The Strugglers Inn used to be tied to the Bass estate and, when the current landlady Anna took over, Bass was a permanent fixture. Now it only appears about once a week. “It’s a nice drink but not the beer it was,” according to the landlady.

In 2000, Bass brewing operations were bought by Interbrew (now AB InBev), the company behind Stella Artois, Becks and Budweiser. While Bass is still brewed in Burton-upon-Trent, it’s now produced by Marston’s and is currently a 4.4% ABV beer, having previously been brewed to 4% and 4.3%. Where a barrel used to have to settle in the pub cellar for over a week prior to serving, it can now be ready in two and half days. Some would say that’s progress, but such changes can’t happen without altering the beer itself. Continue reading “Pint of the usual?”

by Steve Renshaw

With Lincoln Beer Festival only a week away, Steve Renshaw answers questions from first-timers.

Isn’t a beer festival just old men sitting round drinking warm beer?
Certainly not – we get a really good mix of customers. Of course, this includes beer aficionados, but we also get workers popping in for a few pints at the end of their shift, clubbers starting off their night with us, visitors to the city, and plenty of students. And our bar manager won’t forgive me if I don’t tackle the warm-beer issue. Real ale is best served between 11^oC and 13^oC, so you can fully appreciate the flavours. We have the equipment to ensure that we keep it at just the right temperature.

But I don’t like beer.
There are hundreds of brewers across the UK producing thousands of distinctive ales, so perhaps it’s just that you haven’t found the right one yet. We’ve got over a hundred, so this is your chance to try some different ones. And the beauty of the festival is that you can buy a third of a pint, which allows you to appreciate the different styles and flavours without getting the worse for wear. We’ve also got some really unusual foreign beers to try. And if you really can’t find a beer that’s to your taste, we’ve some fantastic, farm-produced cider and perry.

So what is real ale?
In the early 1970s, CAMRA coined the term “real ale” to make it easy for people to differentiate between the bland keg beers being pushed by the big brewers and the traditional beers whose very existence was under threat. Real ale is a natural product brewed using traditional ingredients and left to mature in the cask through a process called secondary fermentation. It is this process which makes real ale unique amongst beers and develops the wonderful tastes and aromas which keg beers can never provide. Continue reading “Beginner’s Guide to Lincoln Beer Festival”