I got back from a two-week trip to southern England recently, and while I was over there I got to sit in a number of several-hundred-year-old pubs with fireplaces big enough that you can sit and drink INSIDE them, although your clothes and hair will smell like wood smoke for the rest of the day. (Actually, they’ll do that even if you don’t sit in the fireplace if it’s winter – apparently central heating is optional for the country pubs.) Sadly, I found that cask ale just isn’t for me – it’s not the serving temperature, which is perhaps 50 degrees or so, or the very low carbonation levels, there’s something else to it that I just can’t describe. Part of my issue with cask may be that since I started brewing a couple of months ago I find that I need to have beer with character, and cask ales, at least the eight or nine that I tried, are in my opinion pretty wimpy. (I hope there are no CAMRA members on this board!) I found very low levels of hops in everything I tried – the IPA’s ALMOST had enough hops to call them hoppy, but not quite. There was something else about cask ale, too, that I can only describe as sort of a watery pucker. Sorry, that’s the best I can do to describe it, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that mouth feel in any other beers.
Every pub we went to, I found myself sitting under an ancient wooden ceiling beam with one of those nice Imperial-pint pub glasses in my hand, drinking a warm and flattish brew that didn’t taste like much, but enjoying the experience anyway. Sadly, the nicest draft beer I had there was a nice bitter served from a regular keg in an Indian restaurant (what CAMRA would call an "unreal ale", I suppose), and my overall favorite beer for the trip was a pint bottle of “Twisted and Bitter” that I found at Sainsbury’s (a big British grocery chain, comparable to a higher-end American grocery store but with real beer) in Brighton. (Lovely stuff, a bit like Bell’s Two-Hearted but more bitter on the front end and wildly citrusy at the back.) They had perhaps a hundred different local beers by the pint bottle, and I wish I could have brought back one of each...
Maybe I was just unlucky in my cask ale choices – on the other hand, the last time I was in England I didn’t get to very many pubs, but I think I remember that the beer I did drink was pretty decent. Still, with all the different cask ales that I tried, I think I must have seen a fair cross-section of the state of British real ale this time, so I don’t know what to think.
I wish I could list all the ales I tried, but I wasn’t taking notes as I didn’t want to look like an obvious beer tourist (although I doubtless did anyway) – I do remember that the Greene King IPA was better than most (Greene King, I found out after coming back to the States, is a huge brewing conglomerate, unloved by CAMRA), and Spitfire and Bombardier are okay, too, even though I think they’re pretty widely distributed over there as well. There’s apparently a trend toward large breweries buying up all the pubs and replacing all the beers there with their own brands, it could be that I just ran into that issue headlong and only got to drink the crummy stuff? I need to go back there and hit the north country to see if the cask ale is any different up there.
