Shut up about Barclay Perkins - Why was British beer crap in the 1920s?
Visit the Shut up about Barclay Perkins site
I think I know the answer to that question. But let's get another opinion first.
This is from Lloyd Hind, a renowned brewing scientist.
"It might be well to set out some of the disadvantages of top beer and then examine how they can be most easily overcome, either by the adoption of bottom fermentation or by improvement of present methods.
Quite apart from questions of flavour or brilliance, beer as generally brewed here suffers from the following causes:—
(1) It is frequently sent out from the brewery in an unfinished state, the last stages of conditioning and fining being left in the hands of the customer, a not altogether satisfactory state of affairs.
(2) There is a considerable amount of waste on account of the sediment.
(3) Export trade is severely handicapped through the difficulty of pasteurisation and the instability of any other than comparatively strong beers.
Chilling and carbonating has been adopted to a very large extent with a view to getting over some of these disadvantages, and has met with a great measure of success for quick trade, but it cannot be said to be altogether a success. Typical characteristics of British beers are their hop aroma and the flavours produced by secondary fermentation. Chilling, filtration and pasteurisation tend to remove these very much-desired flavours, so that chilled and filtered beer generally suffers in comparison with naturally conditioned beer. Chilled and filtered beer also has the very serious disadvantage of instability. Haze and fermentation often set in very rapidly. This may be very largely due to the fact that the chilling process has been adapted to beers brewed on lines which were worked out or have been developed for natural conditioning and are totally unsuitable for really good chilled and filtered beer."
Journal of the Institute of Brewing, Volume 30, 1924, page 322.
The real problem was the drop in strength in WW II. Publicans had been able to get away with dodgy cask handling when beer was stronger and sold quickly. It took a while for brewers to adjust their recipes and methods to account for weaker draught beers.
And for publicans to get their act together. But they did, eventually.
Why did cask beer survive in the UK an almost nowhere else?
More...
