Entertainment For Lively Minds
Do you English folk REALLY drink warm beer?
Posted by Mousey on 11 March 2010 - 7:43am.
Pardon my ignorance but this is one of the great "Pommy" myths (or not) in Australia, where beer is ALWAYS cold, in fact the phrase "a cold one" refers to a beer not the weather the other day.
I have to say I cannot imagine drinking beer that is not cold. We go to great lengths to chill the stuff, we buy bags of ice at service stations for $5 a pop solely for the purpose of keeping the beer cold at a picnic.
My enquiry is prompted by the threads about Massive meet-ups etc - if I was in the UK I would love to attend but I couldn't face the thought of a tepid lager.
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Lager is always served cold
Just like in Oz. But beer (which should not be confused with lager, because it ain't the same drink) is served at cellar temperature (not warm), which is carefully controlled... because that's the temperature it tastes best at.
Having said that...
British pubs will sometimes serve room temperature lager, which is never good.
Good grief
Deliberately? I've never experienced that. Where British pubs can fall down is by not replenishing their fridges quickly enough, so that bottled lager that's been sitting around at room or cellar temperature isn't chilled properly, but no-one in their right mind would actually drink it, surely?
I don't think it's deliberate...
But I have certainly tolerated not-that-cold lager from a pub tap in my time. Here in NZ, the norm is very, very cold. For the removal of doubt, some of the relevant pipes that lead to the tap are even surrounded by ice. Cellar-temperature beer of any kind is rare.
So if you are having a quiet one at home
(with or without company)
does this mean you keep the lager in the fridge but for a "beer" or "ale" you keep it in the cupboard/pantry? Doesn't this mean it'll either be cold in winter or luke warm in summer?
Sorry, I'm baffled, confused and hungry for knowledge.
Here we often have a separate fridge in the house which is the "beer fridge".
Cellar temperature
is well below room temperature so you really have to keep your ales in the fridge, or, fairly obviously if you have one, in the cellar. Mine live in the garage.
So does that mean
you drink them at "garage temperature"?
Do you have an air-conditioned garage?
Again, sorry but I'm baffled. Surely it all tastes better slightly chilled.
You're forgetting that
the UK ambient temperature only rises above 55 Fahrenheit on two or three days a year, so a garage rarely if ever needs aircon.
Taste test
Draught beer in a pub is the best way to drink it - hand-pumped out of a cask in the cellar. I usually drink lager at home (from the fridge) and bitter in the pub.
As far as the 'warm beer' myth goes, it's a combination of taste and temperature. An ice-cold lager is a lovely thing, but you get less taste from such a cold drink. Bitter tends to have more complex, subtle flavours which would get lost if it was super-chilled.
Also, even the hottest summer's day in Britain can't compare to an Aussie scorcher, so there's less need for ice-cold drink - pleasantly cool works just fine.
Slightly chilled is colder than cellar temperature.
But if you are drinking Ale at home you can't expect it to be as perfect as a good pub will manage.
I also find when I'm drinking real ales that a bowler hat helps improve the taste...
The headline answer is
Bitter is served at room temperature.
(Yes, I know cellars are slightly below room temperature but I suspect that'll only muddy the issue for the OP. To all intents and purposes, by the time it reaches your lips it's at approximately room temperature)
Every room...
...is at room temperature.
Indeed...
and THAT'S the exact temperature at which bitter should be served :-)
Flat beer
From my extensive experience, there have been a good number of pubs that sell real ale with no head and generally warmer than I would like. Suffice to say most were in London. Up here in the MIdlands and further North you get a head which normally seems to indicate a cooler pint for some reason.
Proper beer should be served "cool" and not "chilled" in my opinion. Clearly, this gives an issue to those pubs where the cellar is not underground with a more stable ambient temperature. Any dispenser of quality real ale sorts this out with chillers and aircon. The trendy bars offering a real ale alongside a vast array of lagers will frequently fall short.
Another bugbear of mine is when a busy pub takes a clean glass fresh from the washer, still steaming, and then pours a pint of nice cool real ale into it. Ridiculous.
Apologies
Slow computer + impatient tapping on "post" = double post.
This article is worth a read...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/feb/23/beer-myth...
The key section is as follows:
"According to the late, great Michael Jackson (no, not that one, the beer expert) lager should ideally be drunk between 7 and 10˚C, ales between 10 and 13˚ (cellar temperature in your average pub), and stouts around 15˚C."
So, according to this, 'beer', for which read' ale', would tend to be 3-6 degrees warmer than lager.
I keep mine (ale, that is)in the garage. In the autumn/winter, my garage is probably at a temperature of between 0 and 10 degrees, so I would tend to bring the beer into the house for half an hour or so before drinking it. Similarly, in the spring/summer, when the garage is warmer than this, I'd pop the beer in the fridge for a bit to chill it a bit before drinking. If I ever have lager (which is rare) I keep that in the fridge. Works for me.
blimey I thought this
post was a wind up well you live and learn.
Excuse me whilst
I get my bowler hat, I'm off to cycle to evensong. Now, where did I leave my confounded monocle?
Have you heard the one about....
Actually it's probably best not to name this chain of music-free freehouses..
A colleague of mine studying business models, picked * * *********** pubs as his model of choice. He was advised they have such a speedy infrastructure that beer, close to the BBE date, is regularly bought in lorry-load quantities at knock down prices, then shipped into pubs at low-priced offers just before it 'turns'.
The offset is you may get a cheap pint, but you run a much greater risk of buying a bad pint
Not so, apparently
I'd heard that, and it may have been the case in the past, but nowadays the pricing is down to purchasing-power, in much the same way as the supermarkets do business.
'Purchasing power'
Or 'bullying', if you're a small brewery on the receiving end.
Why ?
There are so many good real ales brewed in the UK - so why do people feel they have to drink lager - which tends to be bland and instantly forgettable.
And whilst we are at - beer/lager brewed under licence shouldn't be allowed - you cant get away with this with champagne or stilton - so why does this not apply to alcoholic beverages ???
Good lord man
Why would you wish to share your pleasures with the great unwashed? Keep them out, keep them far, far away! The unseasoned palette of the British dunderhead is our firewall against their march.
As for brewing under license, aren't the exceptions you quote regionally protected items? It's logistics, logistics!
30 years ago,
most UK drinkers favoured bland, factory-brewed bitter, now they favour bland, factory-brewed lager.
I think the 'bland, factory-brewed' element is the key. Many people just want to drink something easy to drink and without a strong flavour. It used to be Red Barrel, Worthington E and Brew XI.
There's nothing wrong with lager beers per se, as any Czech or German will tell you.
There are many things you don't know about us:
Not only do we drink beer "a chambre", but we also have phenomenally large genitalia. Furthermore, it's common knowledge over here that we're bad at cricket on purpose to give you poor chaps something to be proud of apart from that lovely weather of yours and sentences that go up at the end.
Went into a wine bar in town with colleagues...
.. and found they'd put lovely local brew Pale Rider on tap. My excitement at being able to avoid the lager faded as they served me a pint chilled to lager temperature. I gave it a go, but it tasted cack (or rather of not much), so I've never drunk a pint more slowly as I waited for it to get warmer (but not actually "warm" of course).
The cold does kill some of the flavour, which means that beer that was sold a while back as "brewed to taste better cold" must have been specifically brewed to be nasty...
Many pubs in Ireland
had two Guinness taps only one of which passed through a chiller. You then had a choice of ordering 'warm', 'cold' or 'half-n-half' the latter being the conisseurs choice.
'Cold' of course should not be confused with Guinness Extra-Cold which is a marketing abonimation and the work of the devil!!!