Before I can get onto that, I have to mention some other beers. I started drinking beer in Britain in the 1970s. At the time, many pubs had got rid of traditional draught beers and started serving beer from kegs – ease of maintenance, no wastage. Gawd, it pains me to recall that I once spent good money on pints of Double Diamond.
But then the Campaign For Real Ale (CAMRA) became active, and began educating the beer drinking public in the error of their ways. We should not be drinking these pressurised beers that are produced to make life easy for the landlord. We should be pressing for our right to drink REAL ALE, brewed by traditional means and served in barrels – no chemicals, no funny processes (pasteurisation is fine for milk but not for beer) and no carbon dioxide pressure, if you please. Well they had a good point. English beers had become weak since WW1. Before WW1, beers had a strength of around 10% alcohol. But the government needed sober workers to work the munitions factories, so beer was weakened, and licensing laws were introduced to control the hours of availability. The CO2 pressurisation came as a technological “advance”. But shoving CO2 into beer is
bad! It reacts with the water to produce carbonic acid, and that’s one of the components that can cause a headache. I weaned myself off the pressurised crap, and started drinking real ale in the 1970s. Once I’d learned to appreciate the real thing, there was no turning back. Real ale is not pressurised, but is “lifted” to the tap by means of a beer engine or handpump. This engine is often assisted by air pressure, but that pressure is behind the piston and not in the beer.
But then America beckoned, and I knew I was going to have to give up proper beer. Gawd, I thought I might as well sign the pledge. All the beer was in tins, all of it weak and fizzy and cold! – a completely different drink from the real ales at home. I was fascinated by American beer advertising. I remember some of the slogans.
- The weekend belongs to Michelob. Fine, but what am I supposed to drink during the week?
- This Bud’s for you! Thanks, but no thanks. As far as I’m concerned, you can shove it back in the horse. Besides, how can you have a King of beers in a country that doesn’t even have a Monarchy?
The other very surprising trait about American beer advertising was that adverts were never allowed to show the act of imbibing!
They could show a beer being poured, they could show people toasting, but they were not allowed to show anyone in the act of actually drinking it. That’s crazy. That’s like advertising a car, and showing the driver getting in and starting the engine, but not showing the car being driven. OK, I could understand the reasoning if we were talking about a condom advert. That’s right – some countries have condom ads on TV, but I won’t digress...
Many years later, I went to Antwerp, Belgium with an American friend. Belgium is the beer capital of mainland Europe. Some pubs have hundreds of beers to choose from. Some of those beers, like the Trappist beers consumed by monks, are incredibly strong – in excess of 12%! Personally, I don’t like the taste of a beer if it’s more than about 5%. The Belgians also have fruit beers – strawberry, lemon, cherry, peach, blackcurrant etc. – around 3%, and form the beer equivalent of a sorbet between courses, to cleanse the palette. Well, we talked a lot about beer that weekend, and my American friend began telling me about the Microbreweries that were springing up all over the US. I wanted to know why this was happening, and he explained that America had finally realised that its beer was crap (stuff like Blatz, Splitz etc.), and had begun brewing beer at small breweries using proper brewing methods. I was a bit sceptical at first, but later on when I was on business in Denver, I went along with that same friend to the Chop House – opposite Coors Field. And I tried a couple of the draught(draft) beers out of the 14 available, produced right there down in the basement brewery. And guess what? They were very good! They were not quite like English ales, but were a big step up from what went before.
Now I am pinning a lot of hopes on American microbreweries. And that’s because England has gone full circle. The 20-somethings have fallen prey to the advertising media, and have gone away from real ales in favour of bottled Bud, and lager lout beers like Tennants strong lager. There’s a lot of rubbish on sale in British pubs these days.
But, as was pointed out to me many years ago, whatever happens in America happens in Britain a few years later. So I live in hope that if the current crop of techno beers displaces our remaining real ales and the breweries producing them, we might see a resurgence in the form of Microbreweries like the one at the Chop House.
