A beer apart

I was recently in a pub in north-east Derbyshire, and next to me were a couple of old boys who were talking quite knowledgeably about the old beers and breweries of the area – Stones, Whitbread, Mansfield, Home Ales, even Holes of Newark. However, even though the pub was listed in the Good Beer Guide and had a range of four cask beers, when one returned from the bar he was carrying pints of John Smith’s Extra Smooth and Theakston’s Mild, both keg.

If you go back thirty-five years, north of a line approximately from Worcester to the Wash, probably well over half of the cask beer in England was served by electric pumps. Home were one of the breweries where they were well-nigh universal in their estate, as, of course were Wolves & Dudley in the West Midlands. For most of its drinkers, it was just seen as beer, not as something different called “real ale”. My subjective memory is that electric dispense tended to produce a more reliable pint than handpumps, although whether that is down to the fact that it was used in higher-turnover pubs, or that it made it more difficult for bar staff to ruin a pint through incompetent pulling technique, I wouldn’t like to say.

Of course, if you want to promote real ale as something that stands out from other beers, it doesn’t help if it’s dispensed from bar mountings that are indistinguishable from those used for keg and tank beers. And so, over the years, brewers, encouraged by CAMRA, steadily replaced electric pumps with handpumps, to the extent that electric cask dispense has pretty much entirely disappeared now. I’m sure the fact that there was a saving to be had from replacing oversize glasses with brim-measure ones never entered their heads.

However, this has left a substantial population of older drinkers who would once have happily drunk real ale in the pub, although never thinking of it as such, but have now been deterred by bad experiences of that funny stuff that comes out of handpumps and prefer to stick to the likes of John Smith’s. Indeed on several occasions I’ve heard older drinkers ask bar staff “have you got any smooth?” when, in their drinking heyday, “smooth” as such had not even been invented.

And might there also be many younger pubgoers who will make a point of avoiding anything that comes from a handpump, but would be prepared to experiment with a chilled and carbonated “craft keg” if it came from the same T-bar row as San Miguel?