British beers and clear bottles

Tradition.

 

This has always bothered me.
If I'm about to
grab some Old Speckled Hen
I always opt for the Cans..those clear
bottles don't taste the same..it's not exactly skunk,
it's just not the same.

I'd love to hear Jesskidden's input on the matter.

 

Apparently they never learned form the ol' Samuel Smith's going over to brown bottles recently as opposed to when they first arrived on our shores many moons ago in clear. Hey that skunk small went away pretty fast didn't it?

Now someone at Belhaven is putting their Wee Heavy into clear bottles. Perhaps some new marketing director got back form a 'holiday' in the Yucatan peninsula and had too many Coronas. And flew back with one of the hands-down dumbest ideas. Ever.

 

The guy from Innis and Gunn said that the "low IBUS" in their beer is what makes it ok to put it in clear bottles.

 

The guy from Innis & Gunn is full of shit. Innis & Gunn is in clear bottles because clear bottles sell better and they don't care that it gets lightstruck because uninformed consumers don't notice the difference.

Greene King beers are also in clear bottles because clear bottles sell better and they don't care that it gets lightstruck because uninformed consumers don't notice the difference. Belhaven beers are now in clear bottles because Greene King (which owns Belhaven) closed Belhaven's own bottling operation and the Belhaven beers are now tankered south to be packaged at Greene King in Suffolk.

Most other British beers are in fact sold in brown bottles.

 

Sam Smith's brown bottles *have* helped. I couldn't give any stone-cold factual data on it, but from personal experience, it seems the Nut Brown Ale in particular but all of their brews are much more consistent these days (and consistently good!).

That consistency might come from other things, too, but the brown bottles can't hurt. I love me some Newcastle brown ale for a cheaper English malt-brew fix, but those damn clear bottles ... you feel like you've got to smuggle them out of the store inside a trench coat here in Texas, where the sun's kicking off a good 105 to start September.

 

There will be a variety of reasons. Most beers on the shelves here are in brown bottles and on the whole it seems to be the bigger breweries which use clear glass.Skunking simply isn't a problem in the UK and if the majority of sales are here the breweries may not consider it worth while to use different glass for export.

 

There you go - just tidied up your statement a little.

Think of the last 100 bottled UK beers I've had at home and in the pubs a big fat zero were clear bottles!

 

I'd believe them more if the had said it was the "low SRM" #science

 

UK beers in clear bottles is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. Beer in clear glass bottles (or green for that matter) often tastes skunked, ruining otherwise good beer. Therefore I either avoid buying these beers or buy them by the case. Old Speckled Hen is available in Nitro cans but it tastes like a totally different beer than the bottled version and all of the subtlety and nutty goodness gets obliterated by that nitro widget. I wish UK brewers like Moorland/ Greene King would switch to brown bottles tomorrow.

 

it's more than just that uninformed consumers don't notice the difference when beer gets spoiled by being lightstruck. Many people actually prefer lightstruck beer, thinking that's just the way that "good" beer tastes.

 

They use clear bottles in the UK because the weather sucks and the sun is almost never out over there.

 

Why is "skunking, simply not a problem" in the UK?

 

I'm yet to have a "skunked" beer out of a clear bottle.

 

99% of UK bottled beer is brown. I can't think of anything in a clear bottle worth drinking anyway.

 

The wording should be "less of a problem" as I've heard at least a few reports of it from the UK (but usually from people who've been to a country where there actually are skunks). If I were a betting man I'd bet Marquis has never actually encountered either a skunk or the distinctive fragrance they produce.

However, be that as it may, one hypothesis about why is that the intensity of UV in the UK is significantly less than in the US. Do a UV Index comparision and on a day when many areas in the US will have an 8, 9 or even 10, places in the UK will be 3 or 4. I haven't checked for sure, but it may never get up to 10 in the UK. Probably because of the lattitude and the angle of the sun there is simply a lot less of the critical wave lengths for skunking beer.

Edit: BTW we have to discount at least some of the US reports since many people don't know or can't tell the difference between the hint of sulfur natural in some beers and actual skunking.

 

I have had many from clear and green bottles. Might be your northerly location working in your favor. Some beers have the skunk proof hop extracts (tetra) used for bittering, Miller in the US.

 

Because many consumers in the US are willing to buy the beer in a clear bottle. Some even think its an indicator of the quality of the contents.

Edit: And some of us live in areas where the beer stays protected in the sealed case until we buy it, so the retailer never has a chance to skunk it either on purposes or unintentionally.

 

Innis and Gunn supposedly had a passionate internal debate about this. In the end, they felt like the color of their product was a strong selling point and their beers weren't very susceptible to skunking (if I remember their thoughts correctly). Their story leaves me wondering, if it was as clear cut as this, then why the big internal debate?

As far as the beers coming over to the US - in my experiences I've found that no matter the color of glass, oxidation is the real off-putting issue, not skunking.