Just as the quintessential English pub experience began to feel threatened by corporate monopolies, a new model arrived to shake up the neighborhood watering hole.
Manchester’s famed youthful energy and Northern attitude have advanced a wave of beer culture, spawning a new generation of breweries and reinvigorating the bar and restaurant scene.
What started with a taste of real ale on a 1987 trip to Europe drew Steve Hamburg back to the UK over 40 times, and led him to co-found Chicago’s Real Ale Festival in 1996.
Of Newark-upon-Trent’s 35 pubs, only four served cask. All owned by Nottingham brewer Home Ales. Modern geeks wouldn’t have loved them. But they had a few things drinkers loved. They were cheap. And their cask beers were always in good condition.
Whitbread created one of the most useful documents for anyone interested in the history of British beer: their Gravity Book. In it, they documented thousands of samples of competitors’ beers, from the early 1920s to the late 1960s.
While America’s ales had their roots in Britain, they slowly began to adapt and change in their new home. By the 1890s, there were significant differences in the way British and American ale breweries operated and the equipment they used.
Everywhere you turn in London, history is meshed together vibrantly with the modern world. This clash of old and new is also reflected in the beer scene.
Good beer, it seems, is in the pink. So what better time to look at what craft brewers are doing wrong? For its amazing range of tastes, styles, strengths and colors, so much of American craft beer seems to taste naïve, unworldly and lacking in complexity
The UK-based organization CAMRA champions the sale of cask-conditioned “real ale.” And every year, Edinburgh-native and CAMRA chairman Colin Valentine crosses the pond to attend the New England Real Ale Exhibition.
At times of rapid change, people crave rules. For many British beer drinkers, it is a definition of good beer devised in innocence a few decades ago, when we worshipped yeast.
Over the years, brewers have come up with four basic types of packaging—casks, bottles, kegs and cans. Each type of package protects beer in different ways, and can cause the beer to taste quite different.
Mild needs an aggressive public relations campaign, an image consultant, maybe even a personal trainer. Otherwise, one of the world’s most misunderstood beer styles will never shed its reputation for mediocrity.
Drummond Brewing returns to Alberta; Cigar City Brewing shares brewing concepts; Budweiser vs. Budějovický; Rogue saves the Dragon; All-cask brewery opens in Oregon.
