"Definition" of draught beer (vs., say, Lager)

Draught is not a style. Draught just means the beer is in bulk form, drawn from any kind of cask, keg, tank, etc.

Indeed, and you were right !

"draught" cans or bottles are supposed to duplicate the "freshness" or taste of beer from the barrel. Typically this is sometimes achieved by using mixed gas insert (aka widget) in the can (technique started by Guinness in the early nineties, cans sold as Guinness Draught) as to give the same kind of compact head you get from mixed gas (aka nitrokeg) dispense. Another way of using draft for pacvkaging was "Miller Genuine Draft", reportedly called this way because it is cold-filtered and is reputed to have the same crispness as the draught version.

From what I mentioned above : Draught / Draft is NOT a style of beer, as it's used for thins as diverse as a pale ale (Coopers), a stout (Guinness) or a "lawnmower lager" (Miller GD). It's a word marketing men like to use for their packaged beer, as it seems to add value to it in the eye of the average beer consumer. It actually just makes thing confusing...

Cheers !

Laurent

In the US, "draft" beer in a can has been around since the 60's, (tho' the popularity comes and goes), when most of the major brands offered a "draft" version. Here it meant beer that was canned and marketed WITHOUT being pasteurized, altho' it was heavily filtered using a process known as "cold filtering". (In the US, kegged draught beer is not pasteurized.)

Perhaps the most long-lived product was Piels Real Draft Beer (now an economy brand, owned by Pabst, brewed by Miller) and, in the Mid-West, there was Hamm's Draft (in it's famous barrel shaped can). Miller "revived" the technique but it didn't quite catch on the way the way it did in the 60's. Coors, of course, had used the cold filtering process for many years (starting in the late 50's) but never jumped on the use of "draft" for their canned (and bottled) beer, the way Piels, Schaefer, Schlitz and many other brewers did. Coors apparently came across the process in Germany, where the original filters were cotton and asbestos.

So, in the US, the term is for a type of packaging the beer (which was almost always light lager) and has nothing to do with the nitro-widget cans from the UK and Ireland.

I know this is not the answer to the question, but I've noticed beer from a keg is almost always better tasting than the same brand from a can/bottle.

The main issue there was (well, is) the fact that canned and bottled beer (from the large breweries) is typically pasteurized, whereas keg beer is not. MGD, due to its filtering, was not pasteurized, and therefore was more like keg beer. Hence the name.

-Steve

I wonder why then UK brewers (IIRC Boddingtons, Greene King & others) market their nitro-canned ales as "pub draft" in the US?

These types of products are sometimes called "draughtflow", "draught in a can" but also "widget", "creamflow", "smooth" or something similar in UK.

Also, do many US breweries actually package filtered but unpasteurised

AFAIK UK breweries always pasteurise beer for canning (for shelf-life & flavour stability & to ensure yeast/infection didn't cause the beer to ferment further & become beery shrapnel? - as cans are weaker than bottles?) MikeMcG

I don't think there's a big overlap in the market between the two types of beers/syles, not enough to worry about the confusion.

Well, not anymore- the big boom for "real draft beer in a can" was in the late 60's. In fact, there just aren't that many US breweries of the size that can beer left. At the end of the boom, some were actually marketing "pasteurized real draft beer in a can"- who knows what that was. Today, I can only think of Miller Genuine Draft and Coors as canned beers that are filtered, not pasteurized. Don't even know if Piels is even still marketed.

That's the way it used to be before the micro-boom even. And it was always confusing when US and UK beer fans got together, because here, for all the evil the big brewers did, there was no "real ale" vs. "keg", and the term "keg" was synomous with "draft", etc. (In the early days of homebrewing, some folks used UK books and, believe me, they didn't get far when they read that they could "...culture yeast from draft beer brough home from the pub...") eh Of course, our big brewers were selling such bland beer, so heavily filtered, that it didn't make much difference.

Yeah, well, I think the filters they use do a pretty complete job of rendering the beer lifeless. These aren't the typical filtering a big brewer does to his bottled beer; they are thick (several inches), solid things and the beer has to be forced through under high pressure, IIRC.