@milo re your Staropramen mention, I am not sure if it has any truth (but I know someone who would know, and will ask him).
However, Czechs are just as prone to patriotism lurching into xenophobia when it comes to their beer, as any other beer drinking nation. You get CAMRA equivalent types queueing up to tell you how (fill in name of global co.) ruined (fill in name of local brew). Often it's not backed by any factual evidence. InBev didn't do anything good with Staropramen, but the question is whether it was any good (relative to the competitors) in the first place. I've been here since 1993, and I never liked it as much as Pilsner Urquell. Bass bought it first, and they invested quite a lot in new steel tanks and generally cleaning up an operation that probably wouldn't pass modern hygiene laws. A lot of Czech beer drinkers outside Prague question whether the water supply which I think is from right in the centre of the city, where the brewery is, would ever help create decent beer..but then again it may just be parochial talk.
What the anti-globals here won't admit is what South African Breweries did to improve Pilsner Urquell. First they put a stop to brewing it anywhere other than Plzen, because they said only the traditional water source near Plzen delivers the taste. Thumbs up. Then, they stumbled on the Tank revolution. It was an accident because the tank was really created to transport test samples around and they suddenly realised it was tasting better than the regular fresh brewed beer. The rest is history, there are pubs with Tank Plzen in more and more places (including, for now, London) and Staropramen have copied the innovation. It tastes fantastic, and means that it is a rare case of a big brewer producing beer that is actually better than 10 or 20 years ago. All down to SAB who were always committed to quality, and fortunately the new owners, Asahi, are so far leaving well alone.
I prefer PU to any German beer I have ever tasted, and generally Czech beers give a fuller flavour and longer finish than most German beers. That said, some beers from Saxony have those Czech characteristics, but that's surely to do with the fact that Saxony borders north Czech, and the water and soil it flows through will have similar characteristics (just my guess, though) and also that the ancient brewing traditions will be very similar to CZ ones. I'd never bother with Bavarian beers or any of the big national German brewers.
...As for the German purity laws, these were invented to
control taxation and to keep the price of bread down, it had nothing to do with
making the beer taste superior. Also, there
is a fourth component in German beer, yeast – although they would not have been
aware of this in the sixteenth century. German
white beers also do not obey the purity laws and contain wheat. I would argue that obeying the purity laws actually holds German
beers back, as good as they are. For example,
adding a very small amount of rice to a beer can improve the ‘head’. An analogy of this was when some of France’s
wine producers had very strict rules on wine production which had to be aged in
oak casks, the Australians found by
aging wine in cheaper, longer lasting metal casks and just chucking a plank of
oak in the barrel you got the same affect at a fraction of the cost. They also found screw tops were superior to
corks, which the French rejected for a long period of time...
Chucked some down my underpants this morning. Nothing to report so far.
...Within the UK, CAMRAs insistence that real ale cannot use carbon
dioxide can have a negative effect on price and quality. If a landlord was allowed to release a small
amount of carbon dioxide into a barrel of real ale, it being heavier than the air
in the barrel, would provide a protective layer stopping the beer from going
off as quickly. It would also stop it
being tainted by cheese and onion crisps, rat droppings or any other assorted crap
hanging about in a landlord’s cellar.
Why CAMRA insist on this I don't know, perhaps they think we all still
dance around the Maypole and duck witches in the pub beer garden with our pint of best...
Is this right? Camera are just a campaigning body, they aren't the law. It seems very odd that we are so lax here as to allow absolutely any old shyte to be described as cider, even when it clearly isn't, and yet ale can't be described as real even if it's packed with another substance. What's to stop a publican or a brewery adding CO2 to their product and still calling it Real Ale? Can't say I've noticed beer being tainted by crisps or rat droppings, but then I love crisps and have no idea what rat droppings taste like.
...As for the German purity laws, these were invented to
control taxation and to keep the price of bread down, it had nothing to do with
making the beer taste superior. Also, there
is a fourth component in German beer, yeast – although they would not have been
aware of this in the sixteenth century. German
white beers also do not obey the purity laws and contain wheat. I would argue that obeying the purity laws actually holds German
beers back, as good as they are. For example,
adding a very small amount of rice to a beer can improve the ‘head’. An analogy of this was when some of France’s
wine producers had very strict rules on wine production which had to be aged in
oak casks, the Australians found by
aging wine in cheaper, longer lasting metal casks and just chucking a plank of
oak in the barrel you got the same affect at a fraction of the cost. They also found screw tops were superior to
corks, which the French rejected for a long period of time...
Chucked some down my underpants this morning. Nothing to report so far.
...Within the UK, CAMRAs insistence that real ale cannot use carbon
dioxide can have a negative effect on price and quality. If a landlord was allowed to release a small
amount of carbon dioxide into a barrel of real ale, it being heavier than the air
in the barrel, would provide a protective layer stopping the beer from going
off as quickly. It would also stop it
being tainted by cheese and onion crisps, rat droppings or any other assorted crap
hanging about in a landlord’s cellar.
Why CAMRA insist on this I don't know, perhaps they think we all still
dance around the Maypole and duck witches in the pub beer garden with our pint of best...
Is this right? Camera are just a campaigning body, they aren't the law. It seems very odd that we are so lax here as to allow absolutely any old shyte to be described as cider, even when it clearly isn't, and yet ale can't be described as real even if it's packed with another substance. What's to stop a publican or a brewery adding CO2 to their product and still calling it Real Ale? Can't say I've noticed beer being tainted by crisps or rat droppings, but then I love crisps and have no idea what rat droppings taste like.
Yes CAMRA are a campaigning body and one of the things they campaign for is cask conditioned ale, with late hopping of the beer, etc. They’re not the law, they just stipulate what ‘real ale’ is as I think they invented the term or, at least, defined it. They campaign for other things as well. I’m not knocking them as an organisation, I have been a member in the past, I just think for some things they’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of this is from their inception where they were fighting back against keg bitter rather than a battle against lager. I could bore on about this but I’m really going to just derail the thread, which was about whether we like Apple products or not,I think.
Lager in England is largely pants. Almost as bad as American beer (but not quite as bad - Bud Lite, my god...) Yet we drink it by the ocean load. I include myself in that.
Try the beer in Germany, where they have strict laws on what's allowed to be put into it: only water, barley and hops. It's a world apart from ours and it doesn't taste like liquid Ginsters.
I agree Lager in the UK is largely ‘pants’ and I agree Bud Light
is too. But my experience of beer in the
US, admittedly this was San Francisco, was that craft beer far outnumbered lagers. I went into a touristy Café in a San Francisco
park (the local equivalent would be the café
in Greenwich Park) and they had twelve beers on tap, four bitters, two ESBs, a
stout, an imperial stout, three IPAs and a pale ale. If you wanted a lager you had to have a
bottle out of the fridge. I didn’t even
see a bud light in The US until I got to Las Vegas, maybe I was lucky.
As for the German purity laws, these were invented to
control taxation and to keep the price of bread down, it had nothing to do with
making the beer taste superior. Also, there
is a fourth component in German beer, yeast – although they would not have been
aware of this in the sixteenth century. German
white beers also do not obey the purity laws and contain wheat. I would argue that obeying the purity laws actually holds German
beers back, as good as they are. For example,
adding a very small amount of rice to a beer can improve the ‘head’. An analogy of this was when some of France’s
wine producers had very strict rules on wine production which had to be aged in
oak casks, the Australians found by
aging wine in cheaper, longer lasting metal casks and just chucking a plank of
oak in the barrel you got the same affect at a fraction of the cost. They also found screw tops were superior to
corks, which the French rejected for a long period of time.
Within the UK, CAMRAs insistence that real ale cannot use carbon
dioxide can have a negative effect on price and quality. If a landlord was allowed to release a small
amount of carbon dioxide into a barrel of real ale, it being heavier than the air
in the barrel, would provide a protective layer stopping the beer from going
off as quickly. It would also stop it
being tainted by cheese and onion crisps, rat droppings or any other assorted crap
hanging about in a landlord’s cellar.
Why CAMRA insist on this I don't know, perhaps they think we all still
dance around the Maypole and duck witches in the pub beer garden with our pint of best.
The flavour of beers is not just affected by its ingredients
but how it is stored and made. Apparently
the quality of Staropramen went down hill after In-Bev bought the company, not because
they changed the recipe but because they stored it for less time before releasing it (to save
money). I couldn’t comment having never tasted
the original Staropramen.
Sorry, didn't mean it to be quite such a long post, went off on one a bit there. My apolgies to Chunes.
No need to apologise, it was a great post! You seem to have in-depth knowledge, are you in the trade?
I agree there is a decent craft beer scene in America. I went to a few micro-breweries in Chicago and the beer there was world-class. I don't know if it's what people drunk en masse, though. The mass-market beers like Bud-Lite are beyond awful.
My understanding of the German purity laws are that, though they were invented to control taxation, they've been kept in modern times because of the standards the beer companies want to uphold and because of the quality it creates. I know there can be problems with particular barrels and that's even echoed in this country. A friend of mine who ran a pub in Brighton used to complain about Harveys (great brewer) being strict on offering money back for ruined barrels. They took them off tap in the end.
@milo re your Staropramen mention, I am not sure if it has any truth (but I know someone who would know, and will ask him).
However, Czechs are just as prone to patriotism lurching into xenophobia when it comes to their beer, as any other beer drinking nation. You get CAMRA equivalent types queueing up to tell you how (fill in name of global co.) ruined (fill in name of local brew). Often it's not backed by any factual evidence. InBev didn't do anything good with Staropramen, but the question is whether it was any good (relative to the competitors) in the first place. I've been here since 1993, and I never liked it as much as Pilsner Urquell. Bass bought it first, and they invested quite a lot in new steel tanks and generally cleaning up an operation that probably wouldn't pass modern hygiene laws. A lot of Czech beer drinkers outside Prague question whether the water supply which I think is from right in the centre of the city, where the brewery is, would ever help create decent beer..but then again it may just be parochial talk.
What the anti-globals here won't admit is what South African Breweries did to improve Pilsner Urquell. First they put a stop to brewing it anywhere other than Plzen, because they said only the traditional water source near Plzen delivers the taste. Thumbs up. Then, they stumbled on the Tank revolution. It was an accident because the tank was really created to transport test samples around and they suddenly realised it was tasting better than the regular fresh brewed beer. The rest is history, there are pubs with Tank Plzen in more and more places (including, for now, London) and Staropramen have copied the innovation. It tastes fantastic, and means that it is a rare case of a big brewer producing beer that is actually better than 10 or 20 years ago. All down to SAB who were always committed to quality, and fortunately the new owners, Asahi, are so far leaving well alone.
I prefer PU to any German beer I have ever tasted, and generally Czech beers give a fuller flavour and longer finish than most German beers. That said, some beers from Saxony have those Czech characteristics, but that's surely to do with the fact that Saxony borders north Czech, and the water and soil it flows through will have similar characteristics (just my guess, though) and also that the ancient brewing traditions will be very similar to CZ ones. I'd never bother with Bavarian beers or any of the big national German brewers.
Thanks, you’d know more about it than me and interesting regarding the tank beer - it reminds me of when Heinz changed the coating for their tins for baked beans and consumers didn’t like the taste, with the old tins reacting with the beans and adding flavour. So they reverted back to the old tins, maybe they know how to mimic this now.
I visited the Satropramen brewery ten years ago, ironically, as a guest of someone working for InBev. I thought it tasted fine as a lager, although there were several different types and quite a bit consumed and the good times can cloud your judgement.
Apparently, Staropramen supplied beer to the local ice hockey arena at the time and found that it was cheaper and easier to just lay a pipeline between the brewery and the arena than take lorry loads of beer by road each week. You know when a city has a beer pipeline as part of its infrastructure, they take it seriously.
As for criticisms of water supplies, most breweries can mimic the type of water of different parts of the world (or the amount of minerals in them), I think the process is called Burtonisation (as in Burton on Trent), but that’s another boring brewing story.
I too am in awe of @milo obvious knowledge of brewing. I can claim a fair bit of experience in and knowledge of beer marketing, and agree with @Chunes; whatever its origin, the German purity laws are today very much used as a modern marketing tool. However what I've learnt, which is relevant to this thread, is that such a German beer will not necessarily strike you as the best beer you've tasted, just because of their application to that beer. Much depends on the particular recipes, the water, and the role of beer in the society over the years. So eventually I decided that Munich beer is overrated, (or rather, I previously overrated it, because of the purity law hype) in that it looks great, clearly doesn't have anything dodgy in it, but lacks body and finish and is essentially a thirst-quencher to be drunk in huge quantities in gardens under weather which is generally far more reliably warm than in the UK.
My nephew knows stuff and reckons his Huawei is great. He reckons all the phone companies and such like can access your life anyway and thinks the anti Huawei stuff is about Apple etc wanting to dominate.
Your nephew may know about mobiles but he should leave it at that.
Some excellent nominations on here. Please can I add:
KFC - poor quality chicken, saturated in grease Chinese food (or at least the version we get over here) - a plate of MSG Miracle-Gro - I've poured it on my plants, I've poured it on my knob. No magic beanstalks in either scenario. Ray Ban sunglasses - nothing wrong with them, but outrageously expensive. What am I missing? What do I get for £150 that I don't get for £50 somewhere else, apart from a little squiggle in the corner of the lens?
That's a takeaway thing rather than a restaurant generally - there's some really fantastic sit-down restaurants around. Some suggestions:
- Gold Mine, Bayswater (whole duck for £18!!) - Kaki, Caledonian Road - Sanxia Renjia (one in Bromley, another has moved to Goodge Street which was in Deptford, great and authentic Sichuan. Adventurous stuff available!) - Dumplings Legend (Chinatown). Have the xiaolongbao (soup dumplings) - fantastic.
There's a few others. I would, however, avoid Hutong and Park Chinois, which are for the uber-rich to be seen and not really eat that authentically. Heard good things about Barshu but no idea what it's like personally.
The flavour of beers is not just affected by its ingredients
but how it is stored and made. Apparently
the quality of Staropramen went down hill after In-Bev bought the company, not because
they changed the recipe but because they stored it for less time before releasing it (to save
money). I couldn’t comment having never tasted
the original Staropramen.
Staropramen is awful now, it used to be good. Same with Belgian Stella Artois (not the muck Whitbread used to brew over here, that was always dreadful). Thank heavens the US Budweiser never got their hands on the Czech one.
The flavour of beers is not just affected by its ingredients
but how it is stored and made. Apparently
the quality of Staropramen went down hill after In-Bev bought the company, not because
they changed the recipe but because they stored it for less time before releasing it (to save
money). I couldn’t comment having never tasted
the original Staropramen.
Staropramen is awful now, it used to be good. Same with Belgian Stella Artois (not the muck Whitbread used to brew over here, that was always dreadful). Thank heavens the US Budweiser never got their hands on the Czech one.
Yeah, true but that's another one. They add sugar, and as a result add to the hangover quotient.
Anyway, my Samsung TV, which is unrepairable on its sixth anniversary because they've withdrawn parts support. I complained to the email address which allegedly goes to their General Directorate. Got a reply from a hapless Czech who says basically its too bad about my TV and I can't know when parts support is withdrawn because the information is "internal". So I replied offering them a lecture on what a brand is, free of charge, and informing them that I will tell the world that their 3 year old Samsung products may be obsolete.
I further informed them that I am looking forward to delivery of my new LG TV, not that I kid myself they will be any better or more transparent, chip off the same Korean block. Still, that'll learn 'em.:-)
Lager in England is largely pants. Almost as bad as American beer (but not quite as bad - Bud Lite, my god...) Yet we drink it by the ocean load. I include myself in that.
Try the beer in Germany, where they have strict laws on what's allowed to be put into it: only water, barley and hops. It's a world apart from ours and it doesn't taste like liquid Ginsters.
I agree Lager in the UK is largely ‘pants’ and I agree Bud Light
is too. But my experience of beer in the
US, admittedly this was San Francisco, was that craft beer far outnumbered lagers. I went into a touristy Café in a San Francisco
park (the local equivalent would be the café
in Greenwich Park) and they had twelve beers on tap, four bitters, two ESBs, a
stout, an imperial stout, three IPAs and a pale ale. If you wanted a lager you had to have a
bottle out of the fridge. I didn’t even
see a bud light in The US until I got to Las Vegas, maybe I was lucky.
As for the German purity laws, these were invented to
control taxation and to keep the price of bread down, it had nothing to do with
making the beer taste superior. Also, there
is a fourth component in German beer, yeast – although they would not have been
aware of this in the sixteenth century. German
white beers also do not obey the purity laws and contain wheat. I would argue that obeying the purity laws actually holds German
beers back, as good as they are. For example,
adding a very small amount of rice to a beer can improve the ‘head’. An analogy of this was when some of France’s
wine producers had very strict rules on wine production which had to be aged in
oak casks, the Australians found by
aging wine in cheaper, longer lasting metal casks and just chucking a plank of
oak in the barrel you got the same affect at a fraction of the cost. They also found screw tops were superior to
corks, which the French rejected for a long period of time.
Within the UK, CAMRAs insistence that real ale cannot use carbon
dioxide can have a negative effect on price and quality. If a landlord was allowed to release a small
amount of carbon dioxide into a barrel of real ale, it being heavier than the air
in the barrel, would provide a protective layer stopping the beer from going
off as quickly. It would also stop it
being tainted by cheese and onion crisps, rat droppings or any other assorted crap
hanging about in a landlord’s cellar.
Why CAMRA insist on this I don't know, perhaps they think we all still
dance around the Maypole and duck witches in the pub beer garden with our pint of best.
The flavour of beers is not just affected by its ingredients
but how it is stored and made. Apparently
the quality of Staropramen went down hill after In-Bev bought the company, not because
they changed the recipe but because they stored it for less time before releasing it (to save
money). I couldn’t comment having never tasted
the original Staropramen.
Sorry, didn't mean it to be quite such a long post, went off on one a bit there. My apolgies to Chunes.
No need to apologise, it was a great post! You seem to have in-depth knowledge, are you in the trade?
I agree there is a decent craft beer scene in America. I went to a few micro-breweries in Chicago and the beer there was world-class. I don't know if it's what people drunk en masse, though. The mass-market beers like Bud-Lite are beyond awful.
My understanding of the German purity laws are that, though they were invented to control taxation, they've been kept in modern times because of the standards the beer companies want to uphold and because of the quality it creates. I know there can be problems with particular barrels and that's even echoed in this country. A friend of mine who ran a pub in Brighton used to complain about Harveys (great brewer) being strict on offering money back for ruined barrels. They took them off tap in the end.
No I’m not in the brewery trade but had a very brief flirtation with it, which I’ll explain later. I’m absolutely, no expert either, I think there are members on here that run pubs who probably know much more than I do and if you spend 30 minutes on a home brewing forum you’ll be blown away by the knowledge of the average post on something as trivial as best shape of beer glass.
Funnily, the American craft beer tradition dates back from prohibition when the only instruction (for the illegal) brewing of beer in English using imperial measurements was from Great Britain. Some of this tradition remains today. I was surprised to see a number of US beer pumps had specific gravity rather than ABV on them.
I have brewed beer before and have a friend who was in to it. A couple of years ago he got medically retired from work and took most of his pension as a lump sum (due to his illness). With this he announced that he was going to set up his own brewery and started looking to get set up. I thought I’d like in on it too and began researching. I thought an amateur home-brew forum was full-on but professional brewing advice is like astrophysics if you want to do it right.
It soon became apparent for every Brewdog or Camden Town Brewery there are thousands of failed startup breweries. There were stories of people sinking their life savings, remortgaging their house, working 18 hour days trying to make it work.
In short, my friend decided against it, which was probably wise, and the dream was over.
Lager in England is largely pants. Almost as bad as American beer (but not quite as bad - Bud Lite, my god...) Yet we drink it by the ocean load. I include myself in that.
Try the beer in Germany, where they have strict laws on what's allowed to be put into it: only water, barley and hops. It's a world apart from ours and it doesn't taste like liquid Ginsters.
I agree Lager in the UK is largely ‘pants’ and I agree Bud Light
is too. But my experience of beer in the
US, admittedly this was San Francisco, was that craft beer far outnumbered lagers. I went into a touristy Café in a San Francisco
park (the local equivalent would be the café
in Greenwich Park) and they had twelve beers on tap, four bitters, two ESBs, a
stout, an imperial stout, three IPAs and a pale ale. If you wanted a lager you had to have a
bottle out of the fridge. I didn’t even
see a bud light in The US until I got to Las Vegas, maybe I was lucky.
As for the German purity laws, these were invented to
control taxation and to keep the price of bread down, it had nothing to do with
making the beer taste superior. Also, there
is a fourth component in German beer, yeast – although they would not have been
aware of this in the sixteenth century. German
white beers also do not obey the purity laws and contain wheat. I would argue that obeying the purity laws actually holds German
beers back, as good as they are. For example,
adding a very small amount of rice to a beer can improve the ‘head’. An analogy of this was when some of France’s
wine producers had very strict rules on wine production which had to be aged in
oak casks, the Australians found by
aging wine in cheaper, longer lasting metal casks and just chucking a plank of
oak in the barrel you got the same affect at a fraction of the cost. They also found screw tops were superior to
corks, which the French rejected for a long period of time.
Within the UK, CAMRAs insistence that real ale cannot use carbon
dioxide can have a negative effect on price and quality. If a landlord was allowed to release a small
amount of carbon dioxide into a barrel of real ale, it being heavier than the air
in the barrel, would provide a protective layer stopping the beer from going
off as quickly. It would also stop it
being tainted by cheese and onion crisps, rat droppings or any other assorted crap
hanging about in a landlord’s cellar.
Why CAMRA insist on this I don't know, perhaps they think we all still
dance around the Maypole and duck witches in the pub beer garden with our pint of best.
The flavour of beers is not just affected by its ingredients
but how it is stored and made. Apparently
the quality of Staropramen went down hill after In-Bev bought the company, not because
they changed the recipe but because they stored it for less time before releasing it (to save
money). I couldn’t comment having never tasted
the original Staropramen.
Sorry, didn't mean it to be quite such a long post, went off on one a bit there. My apolgies to Chunes.
Avoid Fosters, Carlsberg and Carling and you have some nice lagers left. Although I do prefer real ale
Hi @milo I reckon you've been told a tall one about the pipe from the brewery to the ice hockey stadium :-), but stranger things have turned out to be true here, so I'm going to try and track the story down and get back to you in a PM. Also would like to discuss the Burtonisation thing with you. it was the local marketing director of Staro at the time who told me about that, and I was really depressed about it, but seemingly SAB didn't buy it; but again there may have been other factors in play,in bringing it all back to Plzen. More later.
Comments
However, Czechs are just as prone to patriotism lurching into xenophobia when it comes to their beer, as any other beer drinking nation. You get CAMRA equivalent types queueing up to tell you how (fill in name of global co.) ruined (fill in name of local brew). Often it's not backed by any factual evidence. InBev didn't do anything good with Staropramen, but the question is whether it was any good (relative to the competitors) in the first place. I've been here since 1993, and I never liked it as much as Pilsner Urquell. Bass bought it first, and they invested quite a lot in new steel tanks and generally cleaning up an operation that probably wouldn't pass modern hygiene laws. A lot of Czech beer drinkers outside Prague question whether the water supply which I think is from right in the centre of the city, where the brewery is, would ever help create decent beer..but then again it may just be parochial talk.
What the anti-globals here won't admit is what South African Breweries did to improve Pilsner Urquell. First they put a stop to brewing it anywhere other than Plzen, because they said only the traditional water source near Plzen delivers the taste. Thumbs up. Then, they stumbled on the Tank revolution. It was an accident because the tank was really created to transport test samples around and they suddenly realised it was tasting better than the regular fresh brewed beer. The rest is history, there are pubs with Tank Plzen in more and more places (including, for now, London) and Staropramen have copied the innovation. It tastes fantastic, and means that it is a rare case of a big brewer producing beer that is actually better than 10 or 20 years ago. All down to SAB who were always committed to quality, and fortunately the new owners, Asahi, are so far leaving well alone.
I prefer PU to any German beer I have ever tasted, and generally Czech beers give a fuller flavour and longer finish than most German beers. That said, some beers from Saxony have those Czech characteristics, but that's surely to do with the fact that Saxony borders north Czech, and the water and soil it flows through will have similar characteristics (just my guess, though) and also that the ancient brewing traditions will be very similar to CZ ones. I'd never bother with Bavarian beers or any of the big national German brewers.
Chucked some down my underpants this morning. Nothing to report so far.
Is this right? Camera are just a campaigning body, they aren't the law. It seems very odd that we are so lax here as to allow absolutely any old shyte to be described as cider, even when it clearly isn't, and yet ale can't be described as real even if it's packed with another substance. What's to stop a publican or a brewery adding CO2 to their product and still calling it Real Ale? Can't say I've noticed beer being tainted by crisps or rat droppings, but then I love crisps and have no idea what rat droppings taste like.
Yes CAMRA are a campaigning body and one of the things they campaign for is cask conditioned ale, with late hopping of the beer, etc. They’re not the law, they just stipulate what ‘real ale’ is as I think they invented the term or, at least, defined it. They campaign for other things as well. I’m not knocking them as an organisation, I have been a member in the past, I just think for some things they’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of this is from their inception where they were fighting back against keg bitter rather than a battle against lager. I could bore on about this but I’m really going to just derail the thread, which was about whether we like Apple products or not,I think.
I agree there is a decent craft beer scene in America. I went to a few micro-breweries in Chicago and the beer there was world-class. I don't know if it's what people drunk en masse, though. The mass-market beers like Bud-Lite are beyond awful.
My understanding of the German purity laws are that, though they were invented to control taxation, they've been kept in modern times because of the standards the beer companies want to uphold and because of the quality it creates. I know there can be problems with particular barrels and that's even echoed in this country. A friend of mine who ran a pub in Brighton used to complain about Harveys (great brewer) being strict on offering money back for ruined barrels. They took them off tap in the end.
Thanks, you’d know more about it than me and interesting regarding the tank beer - it reminds me of when Heinz changed the coating for their tins for baked beans and consumers didn’t like the taste, with the old tins reacting with the beans and adding flavour. So they reverted back to the old tins, maybe they know how to mimic this now.
I visited the Satropramen brewery ten years ago, ironically, as a guest of someone working for InBev. I thought it tasted fine as a lager, although there were several different types and quite a bit consumed and the good times can cloud your judgement.
Apparently, Staropramen supplied beer to the local ice hockey arena at the time and found that it was cheaper and easier to just lay a pipeline between the brewery and the arena than take lorry loads of beer by road each week. You know when a city has a beer pipeline as part of its infrastructure, they take it seriously.
As for criticisms of water supplies, most breweries can mimic the type of water of different parts of the world (or the amount of minerals in them), I think the process is called Burtonisation (as in Burton on Trent), but that’s another boring brewing story.
Anyway, Apple...:-)
Sadly, they also kill birds and provide a subject for videos that sad people place on the internet.
I further informed them that I am looking forward to delivery of my new LG TV, not that I kid myself they will be any better or more transparent, chip off the same Korean block. Still, that'll learn 'em.:-)
No I’m not in the brewery trade but had a very brief flirtation with it, which I’ll explain later. I’m absolutely, no expert either, I think there are members on here that run pubs who probably know much more than I do and if you spend 30 minutes on a home brewing forum you’ll be blown away by the knowledge of the average post on something as trivial as best shape of beer glass.
Funnily, the American craft beer tradition dates back from prohibition when the only instruction (for the illegal) brewing of beer in English using imperial measurements was from Great Britain. Some of this tradition remains today. I was surprised to see a number of US beer pumps had specific gravity rather than ABV on them.
I have brewed beer before and have a friend who was in to it. A couple of years ago he got medically retired from work and took most of his pension as a lump sum (due to his illness). With this he announced that he was going to set up his own brewery and started looking to get set up. I thought I’d like in on it too and began researching. I thought an amateur home-brew forum was full-on but professional brewing advice is like astrophysics if you want to do it right.
It soon became apparent for every Brewdog or Camden Town Brewery there are thousands of failed startup breweries. There were stories of people sinking their life savings, remortgaging their house, working 18 hour days trying to make it work.
In short, my friend decided against it, which was probably wise, and the dream was over.