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26-10-2016, 11:38
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‘How come the cask hand-pump system didn’t develop in mainland Europe? Or am I missing something?’ Jordan (@timelytipple (https://twitter.com/timelytipple)), BerlinInstinctively, we thought, yes, Jordan’s right — you don’t go into a bar or the local equivalent of a pub in France, Belgium, Germany or points east and see someone pulling on a handle to draw beer from a cask into the glass.*In Cologne and Düsseldorf you might see a cask on a counter with a trickle-tap on its side, or a grand and gleaming keg font, but not this:
http://i1.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/beer_engine_1937.jpg?resize=640%2C1123SOURCE: Advertisement in the Licensed Victuallers’ Yearbook, 1937.But then we paused — was this always the case or are we, and Jordan, making the mistake of assuming that how it is now is how it’s always been?
Commenters on Twitter chipped in pretty promptly.*‘Brussels estaminets had loads of handpumps’, said Joe Stange for starters, pointing us, via an online auction site, to this picture (http://images.delcampe.com/img_large/auction/000/234/055/019_002.jpg):
http://i0.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/handpumps_brussels.jpg?resize=424%2C336Het Spinnekopke, Brussels, 1954. SOURCE: Bruxelles Anecdotique (http://bruxellesanecdotique.skynetblogs.be/archive/2008/09/26/het-spinnekopke.html).And when we emailed beer historian Ron Pattinson (http://barclayperkins.blogspot.co.uk/)*to pick his brains*he said:*‘Münster Alt was often served through them in the 19th century. I’ve come across odd examples in Belgium, too.’
At the same time, on the flipside, we know they weren’t a*universal feature of British pubs either. Invented in the 1790s and, according to Brandwood/Davison/Slaughter in Licensed to Sell (2011), by ‘the 1920s… a regular feature of both the gin shop and the public house’, there were nonetheless pubs that continued to serve beer direct from casks mounted on or near the bar, or where the publican would scurry down to the cellar with a jug. Then, in the 20th Century, newer and more convenient methods joined the mix, as set out by Francis Yorke in his 1949 book*The Planning and Equipment of Public Houses:
‘[Beer] drawn from the wood’ is best, but this method is impracticable for the entire supply in houses of more than modest size… Generally there are three alternatives methods of delivering beer to the bar from outside, (a) by the beer pump, (b) by pressure, and (c) by gravity…
He mentions that (c) is*‘almost universally employed in Scotland’.*And as late as the 1960s it was almost the mark of a proper old-fashioned pub that the beer was ‘served straight from the wood (http://boakandbailey.com/2016/01/bits-we-underlined-in-kent-pubs-1966/)’. Not necessarily literally from wood but*straight from the cask via a tap, in the service area, as at Becky’s Dive Bar, arguably the first beer geek hangout (http://boakandbailey.com/2012/07/beckys-dive-bar-southwark/), which looked like this:
http://i2.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/beckys_dive_grant_w_corby.jpg?resize=800%2C574Beck y’s Dive Bar, photographed by Grant W. Corby (we’d still like to get in touch with him) and supplied by Eric Schwartz (pictured right).By the 1970s, with kegged lager and bitter on the ascent, hand-pumps were being ripped out of even quite traditional pubs. Gaskell & Chambers, who made the majority of hand-pumps for the UK market, reckoned they were producing only four handles a week at the all-time low-point in the early 1970s. They really very nearly died out altogether. This was one of the major challenges for the nascent Campaign for Real Ale who had to restore the entire infrastructure necessary to serve cask ale in many parts of the country, quite apart from whipping up enthusiasm among brewers and drinkers.
So, to summarise: there certainly was cask-and-hand-pull on the Continent; and it wasn’t anything like universal in Britain, but it is probably fair to say that it was more generally popular by a long way in England than it was on the Continent.
Our gut instinct was that this was down to the way the English pub developed, with a flood of new buildings in the mid-19th Century when beer engines were the height of beer dispense technology. Many were bigger buildings with bigger cellars further removed from the service counter. We also wondered whether England’s aversion to waiter service made a difference, requiring as it does a member of staff to attend to each customer one at a time rather than, as in modern day Cologne, fetching 20 drinks from a no-nonsense central service point and distributing them throughout the pub on their rounds.
Ron Pattinson again:
I think it’s more complicated than your theory…*I think the real explanation is that the move away from gravity dispense was much earlier in Britain. When it happened, top pressure wasn’t an option. But by the late 19th century, when Continental breweries were modernising, there were more possibilities.
So, here’s a tentative conclusion: the apparent ubiquity of hand-pumps in the UK, and their relative scarcity on the Continent, is actually a recent development — a product of the 1970s real ale revival, part of the stigmatisation of keg, and a deliberate harking back to a supposedly idyllic time before World War II.*If*CAMRA hadn’t existed, English bar counters would probably look today much like those in Brussels or Berlin.
We say*‘tentative’ because this really feels like a five year research project, and because we’re hoping Cunningham’s Law (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law) might kick in: if you know better (note: know, not reckon…) then let us have both barrels in the comments below, or via an email if you’d prefer.
Questions & Answers: Why No Hand-pulls on the Continent? (http://boakandbailey.com/2016/10/questions-answers-hand-pulls-on-the-continent/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (http://boakandbailey.com)


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