Carlsberg "retires" Marston's (Burton) Union system

Such a shame to see this happen.

I was fortunate enough to drink both Bass and Marston's Pedigree on cask (in Burton and a nearby village) at the end of 2004/beginning of 2005. Really nice beers and great memories.

 

Never mind, we still have plenty of breweries making cans of sludge IPA, which is way more fashionable than that boring old Dad beer.

 

Being that the union sets were used for removing yeast from the fermented beer, I wonder how's much effect the unions actually have on the flavor of the packaged beer.

Ron, any chance you have an opinion on that?
@patto1ro

 

Does Firestone Walker still use the Burton system? I saw their set-up some time ago (2012?). Efficient isn’t what came to mind, but that’s where the art and craft comes in.

 

Firestone Walker's system is not a true Burton Union. It is more a glorified blow-off tube. It is used to impart oak flavour to the beer and the expelled yeast is not collected. In contrast, in the true Burton Union, oak flavour is not desired and the expelled yeast is collected for re-pitching.

 

Well, Draught Bass changed when they ripped out the unions. So my answer would be yes.

 

A former head brewer at Marstons told me it was a yeast collection system, rather than for fermentation. He also said it was an absolute bugger to keep clean.

 

Thanks for the response Ron. I wonder if the recipe was also changed when Bass pulled out the unions?

Would a beer that went through a union be a little less attenuated due to the yeast removal? I looked at Ron’s blog from 2007, he posted a table with Bass specs from 1943-1967. it looks like the average attenuation was around 82%, so my poor attenuation theory goes out the door based on that table.

I guess my question is how does a Burton Union really affect the final flavor of a given beer?

 

They said the recipe didn't change, but who really knows?

 

Ugh. I was trying to find cask Pedigree on my last London trip for this very reason, but I struck out. Now it's too late.

 

It's been announced that a second union set from Marston's has been saved and is being installed at Epochal Barrel Fermented Ales in Glasgow, Scotland.

https://refreshingbeer.blogspot.com/2024/06/burton-union-set-rescued-to-glasgow.html

 

That's a surprise... or then again, maybe not. What do you think of Epochal's beers?

 

I am happy to say they are very good. They are expensive, but they are very labor intensive to make. There is nothing else quite like them in Scotland.

 

They are certainly expensive here in the US as well (and not easy to find here). Currently, they seem to exist in a strange space of having one foot in the "historic Scottish/UK beer" approach and the other foot in a contemporary "craft mixed fermentation" approach (which takes from certain current Belgian frameworks)... but with a leaning towards the latter identity at the expense of the former. At least that's how it feels from a US perspective. If what I'm saying makes any sense, I'd be curious to hear if you have a take on it.

 

That's interesting because you seem to have gained the opposite impression to the one they want to give!

Although almost any beer aged in uncoated wood will have a certain amount of bacterial activity, Gareth, the brewer, discourages the term “mixed fermentation” because it gets him lumped in with Belgian brewers and their imitators. Rather, the message is that this is how British beer used to be made.

High hopping (partially to keep bacteria down) and non-phenolic yeast make the beer significantly different to most Belgian styles. 19th century writers insisted that the peculiar aroma produced by secondary fermentation with Brettanomyces was crucial to the “aged” flavour of British beer (even before they knew that Brettanomyces was the cause of it).

 

I've now had the opportunity to taste a beer made with the union, Thornbridge's Jaipur IPA. The difference is very small. Compared with the standard Jaipur, I found it slightly lighter in body and more astringent. I thought I tasted tannins, but I could be imagining that — it seems unbelievable that the ~36 hours in the union would permit the beer to pick up any wood character.