Another one bites the dust :-((((( - Publican report

Sadly this is how commerce works. And much as CAMRA might like to stop these takeovers, basically it's a waste of time. The best you can say is that Gales is being taken over by a dedicated real ale brewer, not the likes of InBev.

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Brian

In message , BrianW writes

But I don't like Fullers beers much and I do love Gales'. They'll only end up selling the pubs off next time the wind changes.

In recent years Gales beers have generally been dismal, anyway.

But it's sad to see yet another independent brewer go.

I hope this doesn't mean the end for my favorite beer Gale's Festival Mild. I had many pints of this hard to find beer at the GBBF this past August. HSB is also a favorite of mine.

Cheers, Bruce CAMRA member from New Jersey

Gales Festival Mild is a superb beer, originally brewed for our CAMRA beer festival in basingstoke and subsequently added to gales' portfolio. A Save Gales group [1] was formed this weekend and of course a major objective is to keep the brewing of Gales beers at Horndean.

John B North Hampshire CAMRA Save Gales group

While I am in favour of the principle, I have to say that most Gales beers IMHO are complete cack.

John C

They had a yeast infection in 1984 and IMV have never been much good since. I remember having some in Portsmouth at the time of the Portsmouth AGM which was utterly dismal, just a glass of brown liquid.

Bizarre! I was at that Portsmouth AGM and I went on the organised Gales Brewery tour. All of the beers that I tried in their sampling room were superb.

Michael said:

So are we confusing bad beer with poor cellar management and dispense again? Is the reality that Gales is good when it comes out of the brewery but poorly looked after in the pubs?

We've discussed this before. Are there fewer "bad" beers than we think out there?

No, I just happen to think that Gales beers are muck. If you like he sweet malty style then they will probably be for you. if you like a touch of hop about your beer then you will give them a wide berth.

I suspect though that beers at the malty end of the spectrum respond more badly to indifferent treatment and temperature control than do hoppier ones.

John C

I've never particularly liked HSB, but then many of the strong sweet beers are well off my shopping list. I don't rave about beers because they are "wonderfully malty" and ignore sweet without anything else. Then on the other end of the spectrum there are various beers that have hop and nothing else - the epitome of that for me was (is?) Boddingtons which always was vastly over-rated. (After the initial hop blast there was nothing behind)

I do however have favourites on either end of the taste spectrum and all the way through.

I suspect your palate may be biased toward beers with hop and little malt and that minute variations in quality take a malty beer from "barely tolerable" when they are in excellent form through "mediocre" when they are quite good and on to "disgusting" when they are average.

How odd! I never found Gales beers particularly sweet, but then I grew up on that famous Camra-approved sugar water Bathams!

XXXD, however, was a truly world-class beer.

In my second year of Uni we had a student join the Real Ale society from Pompey, who used to tell us that HSB was far superior to anything we had up here. I bet him that he couldn't drink 3 pints of Bathams bitter before falling down. I won!

Not exactly - I quite like some malty beers is they have a good dry finish - Sam Smiths OBB for example.

John C

Again, not short of hops.