Real ale is back in a big way. A few years ago you were hard pressed to find a pub with draught real ale unless you had a CAMRA guide, now it seems every pub in the country (UK) has at least one guest ale, if not more. Further, drinking real ale used to be seen as something only old men, or people with neck beards did. Now, it’s quite fashionable to enjoy a pint of your local brew.
What’s causing this resurgence? Is the resurgence in the UK being matched by an uptake in ale consumption in other countries?
I think it’s mainly driven by the changing in attitude to food that’s taken place in the last 10-15 years in the UK. With all the TV programmes and campaigns raising awareness of food and environmental issues people have begun to think about how their food and drink is made and what’s in it. Many people have also become more discerning about the taste of what they drink.
Real Ale is often locally brewed, uses mainly natural ingredients and is British. Personally I also like the fact that I can drink different beers in different pubs and in different areas of the country. Compare that to something like Stella (aka Wife Beater ) which is produced in a factory, is full of chemicals and tastes equally foul in every pub you foolishly drink it in
CAMRA has also helped by promoting Real Ale to landlords and helping them to keep it in best condition and generally the beer has also increased in quality IMO. One of the main reasons lager became so popular to begin with is because post-war Ale used to be poor quality and badly kept.
I would say that it is true for the U.S. and has been greatly fueled by the craft beer industry, which seems to be predominantly ales. Heck, last week I went to a AAA ballgame in a local podunk town and they even had a couple local ales on tap.
I’ve noticed this too - I was in one of those shite megapubs last week for a quick pint - banging music, young crowd etc, but they were still offering T Taylor Landlord on tap. An unexpected moment of sublimity. British ale rules, basically, so maybe more people are waking up to that fact and taking a bit of pride in it.
There was a noticeable fetishisation of ale a while back. Sort of the opposite to what happened to wine, in the sense that wine seems to have undergone a de-mystification in the 80s, 90s such that most folk now know a bit about what wines they like and there’s huge choice to be had. You now see articles on beer being written in obfuscatory wine language, talking about the finish, the mouthfeel etc. whereas previously this sort of thing was exclusive to camra.
I do a bit of brewing and was pleased to see a brew shop open up round the corner from me - maybe another sign that interest in real ale is on the rise. I had thought that homebrewing was much less popular than it used to be.
I recall you are an Edinburgh man, Cpt. You may be displeased to hear that The Cloisters, a superb real ale pub by the Meadows, is currently in thrall to Stewart brewing. Last two times I’ve been in they’ve had 3 or 4 offerings from this local brewer and they’ve all been shite. Extremely mediocre outfit IMO.
I’m reading about it now on Wikipedia. I see what Real Ale is, but I’m curious. Does is have higher alcohol content than Lager? Tough times could lead to people wanting a stronger, but not super hard, drink.
It doesn’t have a higher alcohol content necessarily - there’s countless styles of real ale that will range from being mildly alcoholic (literally called ‘mild’ - a fine drink that has dramatically fallen out of favour in the UK in recent times) to some real monsters. It’s rare to see very high alcohol content real ales served on draft IME - you tend to get them in bottles.
‘Real ale’ in the UK is just a terminology invented by camra to distinguish between pasteurised, bland megabrews served with CO2 and the real thing. It doesn’t mean anything more than that - You could get ‘real lager’ in theory, if you found a place that did traditional lager brewing (never seen this on draft in me puff).
I don’t think this is it–most of your real ales fall in the 3.5%-5% ABV range. (At least that was my experience.)
I think it’s just another example of a general trend that seems to be going on in the UK, the US, and many European countries. A good segment of the population has burnt out on mass-market products and wants to rediscover how “real” food and drink were made. There’s a big push to eat local. To drink local. To buy produce locally. To make stuff at home from scratch. Etc. I think what’s going on in the UK is reflective of this general trend.
I agree. It’s helped by the fact that unlike organic, high-end food, Real Ale doesn’t even cost any more to drink in pubs than ‘premium’ lagers like Stella.
There is a vegetarian/organic cafe (also recommened for their live blues/jazz/swing music) called Greennote in Camden that has an organic lager called ‘Freedom’ on tap. You can really taste the difference between that and mass-market largers, and it’s delicious. Much like good German beer (excluding the tasteless Kolsh they have in Cologne).
I’m not in CAMRA but I’ve drunk real ale since the early 80s. It’s great seeing more pubs having beer I might actually enjoy instead of the identikit lagers I drank as a student.
As an aside, I was in Cloisters a couple of times last week and enjoyed whatever beer it was that I had. May not have been a Stewarts one though, I guess. (I tend to forget their names very quickly unless I have it regularly)
I think it’s tied in with the fact that in recent years fashions in food and drink have moved away from mass-produced brands to the ‘artisanal’ end of the market. Whether you see that as good or bad, real ales fit in with that pretty well.
Also, there’s the emergence of companies like Brewdog whose successes in marketing probably outweigh their achievements in brewing (although I am quite partial to the Punk IPA)
And Cloisters isn’t all bad - they usually have the quite tasty Caingorms Brewery Trade Winds on, and the excellent Munich Red from West in Glasgow - but I agree, Stewarts beers are gash in the extreme.
I think this captures it - it’s a “fashionable” drink for people who want to display their anti-consumerist tendencies on their sleeves, and ties in with the drive towards “localism” (which is closely linked to the artisan marketing approach).
Also real ale has tended to be found in smaller local and rural pubs - now that more and more pubs are serving food, they are attracting a different sort of customer and therefore exposing them to ales they might not see in a typical town-centre boozer.
They still need to lose the daft naming conventions and over-reliance on verbose tasting notes.
) which is produced in a factory, is full of chemicals and tastes equally foul in every pub you foolishly drink it in
