When Being Alive is Not Enough

I am still recovering from spending a week at the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF), for the first time since 1984. Back then, I ran its press office, and I recall welcoming a zippy young pilgrim named Charlie Papazian, who had brought some “microbrewery beers” from the US for us to try.

What a journey some of us have traveled in a short time. Yet how far behind are the stragglers.

The British have been getting their knickers in a twist about US-style craft beers invading the UK and threatening our culture. The gist is that your IPAs are, to coin a phrase, “over-hopped, oversexed and over here.” Furthermore, they are corrupting our younger brewers, some of whom want to leave flat, warm, weak “real ale” behind and make “keg beer” instead.

Nowadays, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), which hosts GBBF, is a national treasure. As such, CAMRA should be worried about failing to react sensibly to changing times. The craft beer revolution is, after all, one of its children, even if it played little part in its upbringing. This year’s GBBF was a model of parental ambivalence. The space devoted to foreign beers increased significantly yet again, with many of the beers on sale being neither ale nor “real.”

The problem is the British fixation, enshrined in CAMRA’s policy, on the notion that for a beer to be “good,” it must contain live yeast. The Germans are similarly finicky about the use of 100 percent malt and hops, while for the American Brewers Association, the chosen ones must brew less than 7 million hectoliters (5.9 million barrels) a year. (And they say Americans lack irony!)

My spat with CAMRA is now entering month eight, and one of our sticking points is that the stalwarts maintain that you cannot tell whether or not a beer is good by its taste, because taste is subjective. The idea that experienced and discerning palates frequently agree about what tastes “good” and can persuade others of it cuts no ice with them.

As obsessions go, the UK rule is better than most. Beer that contains the right strain of live Saccharomyces generally stands a much higher chance of being impressive than that which does not. (This theory does not hold true for beers that are intentionally acidic, or for bottom-fermented brews that have been cold-conditioned for three months, but it works for most others.)

Likewise, the Germans have a point. A grain bill of 100 percent malted barley gives light beer in particular a higher chance of greatness than if it were made with dollops of corn syrup, rice or candi sugar. Whole hop cones and well-made pellets will usually out-box extract, oil or jam in a straight fight. Persistently replenished fresh yeast beats its skimmed or dried equivalent, most of the time. Room-temperature fermentation tends to trump body heat, and so on.

However, I can name beers in the “Yo! Respect!” category that are 100 percent hop extract, 30 percent syrup, fermented pretty warm and/or dead from the bottleneck downwards. Sadly, there is no clean method by which beer excellence can be predicted. Science can only go so far; the rest requires talent.

Though one rule may help, and it is this: The closer you come to defining good beer by a technical specification, the further away you move from being able to appreciate it. ■