Real Ale revolution

The July 1997 issue of All About Beer Magazine takes a wide-ranging look at cask-conditoned ale. Here Roger Protz explores the history of real ale.

by Roger Protz

If you want to make a brewer angry, ask him if he brews real ale. "All my beer is real," he will grumpily tell you. The Oxford English Dictionary has a different view. Real ale, it says, is "a name for draft (or bottled) beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide." The OED definition was drawn up following discussions with the Campaign for Real Ale and has become a benchmark for a style that is almost exclusively British. Brewers in a few other countries claim to brew something similar, but it usually turns out to be merely an unfiltered beer, as is the case with the ungespundert lagers of northern Bavaria.

A true, living real ale is one that enjoys a natural secondary fermentation in cask in the pub cellar. That second fermentation, or "fret" in brewer-speak, is lively and effervescent. Beer and carbon dioxide bubble and froth through the soft wooden venting peg on top of the cask. Sometimes the fierce activity inside the cask blows the peg clear out of its bung hole and the working beer, liberated from the confines of the cask, hits the cellar ceiling in a bibulous orgasm.

The few remaining pale ales from Burton upon Trent are especially famous for their volcanic second frets in cask. Beers such as Marstonâs Pedigree and Draught Bass have to be treated with all the love and care usually given to a precocious offspring. The casks must be stored for at least a week before they are tapped and vented. Once the venting pegs are inserted, they must be checked and the froth cleared away on an hourly basis, while small amounts of beer are drawn off from the tap to measure the clarity and the developing sparkling condition of the liquid.

It is little wonder that cask conditioning disappeared from most countries in the 20th century. Filtration, pasteurization and gas-assisted delivery to the glass replaced the slow and arcane rituals of casks, pegs and taps in bars and cafes where managers and staff had little knowledge and experience of looking after beer.

Cask-conditioned beer has survived in Britain-England in particular-as a result of a pub culture in which beer is meant to be savored and remarked about, rather than tipped mindlessly down the throat. An important element of that culture is the "tied pub" owned directly by a brewery, which gives close control over beer quality and the rigorous training of bar staff.

Both the tied pub system and the cask-conditioning of beer have their roots in dramatic changes in brewing practice in the 19th century. For as long as records exist, ales had been vatted-that is, stored for months or even years like wine in large wooden casks.

Even though porter and stout, developed early in the 18th century, helped create the modern commercial brewing industry based on large production sites, the "stale" or "old" element of the dark beers was still matured in vats, though the period was reduced to just a few months. (Whitbread, earliest of the great London porter brewers, did not dismantle its porter vats until World War I.)

Change came with the rise of India pale ales brewed in Burton upon Trent. Burton had for centuries been famous for the quality of its ales due to the remarkable hard, gypsum-rich waters in the deep wells of the valley of the River Trent. The ales were brown, as they were made from malt cured over wood fires. But at the turn of the 19th century, the invention of coke (coal with its noxious gases removed) allowed brewers to use pale malt as the main element of their beers, a malt high in enzymes that produce a fine sugar-rich "extract" from the brewing process. The Burton brewers found, to their delight, that pale malt and brewing "liquor" rich in gypsum (calcium sulfate) and Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) were ideal partners.

The salts encourage enzyme and yeast activity during mashing and fermentation, clarify the wort and draw the best aromas and bitterness from the hops during boiling. The harmony between hops and calcium sulfate enabled the brewers to use high levels of the herbs in their new pale ales, needed to rebuild trade lost to Russia and the Baltic during the Napoleonic wars with France.

The new pale ales were devised for export to India and other parts of the British Empire. While they had to withstand sea journeys lasting for three or four months, they could not be stored in vats as high as houses in the cramped holds of sailing ships. Vatting was replaced by running the beer into wooden 54- gallon casks known as hogsheads.

When the casks arrived at the docks in Liverpool or London the bungs were removed to release the build up of carbon dioxide-which could have led to the casks exploding en route-and were then resealed and hoisted into the ships. During the journey, the beer would undergo a slow secondary fermentation that created fresh carbon dioxide. With the hops helping to clarify the beer and keep infections at bay, casks of sparkling liquid arrived in Calcutta and other far-flung cities to be bottled immediately and stored in cool places.

In spite of its fame, its rightful place in brewing history books and its ability to inspire a new generation of craft brewers in both the United States and Britain, the hey-day of India pale ale was brief. By the 1880s, pale ale was being driven out of the colonies by German lager beer. One colonial critic of the British brewers complained that the beers had "too much alcohol, too much sediment, too much hops and too little gas."

There were other complaints about the narcotic effects of the heavily-hopped beers. Research by Bass of Burton has suggested that IPAs were around 7 percent alcohol by volume and had as much as 82 units of bitterness.

Once again, the Burton brewers had to look for new markets. This time there was one closer to home. The rapid spread of the new railroad system in Britain meant that beer could be transported from Burton-conveniently placed in the heart of England-to all the major towns and cities in the nation. When the St. Pancras railroad station was built in London, its cellars were designed to accommodate hogsheads of Bass beer.

T. R. Gourvish and R. G. Wilson, authors of The British Brewing Industry 1830-1980 (Cambridge University Press), describe pale ale as "the beer of the railway age." It appealed in particular to the new and aspiring middle-class who were anxious to drink a beer different from the dark milds and porters quaffed by blue-collar workers. Writing in The Brewing Industry in 1905, Julian Baker observed that "the light beers, of which increasing quantities are being brewed every year, are more or less the outcome of the demand of the middle classes for a palatable and easily consumable beverage." Pale ale for the home market could not match the old India ales in strength or bitterness: after all, both alcohol and hop rates had been high in order to act as preservatives during the sea voyages. The new pale ales were around 5 percent alcohol by volume and, as far as we know, probably had bitterness units in the low 40s. When sold in draft form in pubs, they were meant for quick drinking and rapid turnover and, as such, were dubbed "running beers" by the brewers.

Running beers, the forerunners of todayâs "real ales," were designed for a new method of retailing beer in brewery-owned pubs. A Beer Act of Parliament in 1830 had introduced a total free market in the selling of beer. Any citizen who paid two guineas (just over UK £2 sterling or US $4 in modern terms) could turn his home into a beer shop. The shops, intriguingly known as "Tom and Jerry houses," led to a rapid rise in beer consumption and outbreaks of drunkenness and riotous behavior.

When the government imposed tighter restrictions on the beer shops, most of the owners went bankrupt. Many of the pubs had been opened with loans from brewers, who lost their investment. They rushed to recoup their losses by buying up the bankrupt stock, but the spiraling cost of the real estate put them under further financial pressure. Suddenly, they owned thousands of pubs and could supply them directly with their products, but they could no longer afford the luxury of beers matured for months in either vats or casks. They wanted a quick return on their beer.

Running beers were the result. They were made possible by further improvements in brewing technology. In 1902, J. M. Hanbury told his fellow directors of the great London brewers, Truman Hanbury & Buxton: "Better barley means more weight, better extract, better quality of extract, better beer, increase in trade, decrease in returns, and better reputation."

An improved scientific understanding of yeast was also a powerful impetus to producing running ales. Single or double strain yeasts, rather than a cocktail of 10 or more strains, could be better controlled. Yeast packed down and cleared in casks within a few days of arriving in pub cellars.

Further help came from the use of a new type of malted barley called crystal malt (caramalt in the United States). This stewed malt has its starches turned to sugar during the kilning process. Much of that sugar is dextrin, which cannot be fermented by brewersâ yeast. As a result, crystal malt adds "body" to beer, a richness of flavor as well as a pleasing copper color. Any thinness or lack of maturity in running beers as a result of a short conditioning were balanced by the roundness of the crystal malt.

These beers were dubbed "bitter" by consumers when drunk on draft, but they continued to be labeled "pale ale" in bottle. Unlike the original India pale ales, which, brewed from pale malt and around 10 percent sugar, were genuinely pale, the bitters had a copper or amber color from the use of crystal malt. The tied house pub system may raise eyebrows in other countries-it is illegal in both the United States and France, for example-but it has been the savior and the bedrock of cask-conditioned ale.

While almost every brewery in the world transferred to brewery-conditioned ales and lagers in the 20th century, British brewers remained faithful to a system whereby rough and unfinished beers left the brewery to reach maturity in the pub cellar. It was not until the 1950s that brewers experimented with brewery-conditioned "keg" beers. The result of that venture spawned a dogged and influential consumer revolt in Britain that restored cask ale to its rightful place in the pantheon of beer.