Revere your beer

Much has been written about storing, serving and enjoying fine wines. The right temperature and conditions for storage, the perfect humidity for keeping the cork moist; the best temperature for serving the wine; the benefits of decanting and the optimum shape of glass to drink it from. But let’s hear it for beer!

Beer is at the heart of traditional British life and a carefully brewed real ale deserves every bit of the same esteem as wine.

Real ale should be served at cellar temperature rather than room temperature – but if the beer is too cold is will kill off the subtle flavours. Like red wine it should be entirely clear.

And in the same way that wine should be carefully stored and decanted as necessary to ensure that any sediment doesn’t make it into the glass, beer casks should be stored on their side to encourage the sediment to sink into the belly.

Whilst a few pubs still dispense real ale directly from the cask, most use either a hand or a gas pump to either suck or drive the beer from the cask to glass. This final journey along the beer lines is one that can make or break a perfect pint.

All sorts of nasties can lurk in a poorly cleaned line from deposits of calcium oxalate that appear as small flakes in a pint to bacteria that will make the beer cloudy and taste of vinegar. Whilst they are not harmful they do affect the taste of your pint.

The trick is in the line cleaning. Most pubs use an automated glass washer to ensure the glass your pint is served in is sparkly clean, allowing you to admire the colour, head and flavour of the beer. However many still adhere to old-fashioned manual line cleaning methods that are tedious to carry out and rely on the operator doing the job properly. Not only is it harder to achieve a consistent result, manual line cleaning also involves the publican pouring valuable beer straight down the drain!

Conrad Boucher of Beer Piper, the UK’s longest established provider of automated beer line cleaning systems commented: ‘We try and encourage the philosophy that good beer should be treated with respect. Allowing bacteria to contaminate a good pint between the cask and the glass is simply a waste of first class brewing skills. Using an automated system such as Beer Piper will modernise the cleaning process and maintain the beer lines to ensure beer drinkers are served a quality pint.’

Beer deserves to be treated with respect, served at the right temperature, in a clean glass and without any trace of contamination in delivery.