When good beers go bad

Des de Moor explores what can go wrong with bottled beer

If you’re a dedicated drinker of speciality beers from small brewers, then the chances are you will have experienced “gushing” – and not just from overeffusive beer writers heaping eloquent praise on their latest discovery.

With great excitement and anticipation, you prise open the cap of the quaintly-named obscurity you pounced on delightedly at the farmers’ market or beer shop, but instead of a reassuringly gentle hiss you get an exploding facial yeast pack and a very sticky floor.

Determined to salvage what’s left of your prize, you hazard a taste of what’s left in the bottle, only to find a thin, sour liquid you wouldn’t even want to sprinkle on your chips.

Experiences like these are, sadly, not yet rare enough, and with the rapid increase in brewers bottle conditioning their beers (particularly in Britain), they are arguably more frequent than before. Beer quality is understandably a sensitive issue in the industry: I heard more “don’t quote me”s and “off the record”s in researching this piece than in the average interview with a senior civil servant.

You might even shrug and say that, since beer is a living, natural product, the occasional mishap goes with the territory. But for those promoting the virtues of distinctive and characterful brews in a market dominated by bland industrial product, off beers are at best an embarrassment, at worst a major setback – particularly when trying to persuade major retailers to give more shelf space to small brewers’ products.

F.....

To read the rest of this article you can buy this issue or subscribe to Beers of the World to have every issue delivered direct to your door.

By Des de Moor

Section : Beer at Home

Page number : 24