Quote Originally Posted by Bucking Fastard View Post
I'm with you on this,it's all about the taste. I do wish that if key keg is being served,that fact is at least acknowleged on the beer menu,perhaps with an additional note that conditioning has occurred away from the brewery if that is the case.That information rarely happens .Maybe I'm being too fussy and maybe that also contradict my first point.....it really should be just about the taste .
Of course it's about the taste! And in that I include the way that the carbonation and extreme cold temperature affects our appreciation of the beer. I don't think it's fussy to expect as much information as possible about the beer that is being offered for sale in pubs. Your experience - "rarely happens" - matches mine.

I can see arguments for serving beers in keg rather than cask if they are specialist types of beer (such as saisons, sours, barrel aged stouts, etc) that it would be difficult to sell in cask format, i.e. open to contamination by oxygen. In the key keg format the beer is not in contact with extraneous carbon dioxide and can develop in the bag if not filtered/pasteurised, and this would be a good way of serving those types of beer already mentioned, or *any* cask beer in pubs with low turnover.

The down side of key keg is that it's a new type of container that was launched onto the market before vital concerns such as cost and recycling/reuse had been properly addressed. If the pubs were to make it clear (with Camra's help?) which beers were key keg as opposed to old fashioned CO2-driven, 1970s-style keg, perhaps they would become more popular and hopefully also cheaper and more eco-friendly too.