Having visited the GBBF this year I was impressed at the improvements for customers and was surprised at the reasonable (cool) temperature within the hall. Every beer that I tried was of good quality.
A few observations
Some organisation called NEF has organised a ballot where the question is "Would you like your local pub to sell a locally brewed beer?" The only possible answers were Yes or No
My answer had to be No. I would prefer to drink something _better_ than that brewed locally.
The national blands must also be brewed on someone's doorstep and I'm sure that many people already have local pubs selling this locally produced beer.
I was disappointed (again) by seeing a large stack of boxes containing a well known keg larger (Bud) behind the foreign beer stand.
It was also noted at the same bar that the staff could not pour anything from many of the taps without a 90% head on the beer. I wonder if these were also keg beers, artificially gassed up?
No-one was smoking! Not quite true but a quick count at 6pm on Tuesday and one about an hour later revealed that less than 1% of the people in the hall were smoking. What does this say about the future of pubs with stickers stating 'smoking throughout' their establishments?
Need a new set of glasses, love, it was Buvar, the czech original...
The lagers (yup, lagers... mostly unpasteurised, though) served through those taps are designed to be served under gas pressure, any other way of serving them, such as air pressure or handpumps leads to 90% head...we non-CAMRA EBCU organisations have tried repeatedly to get Bieres Sans Frontieres bar staff to cut the crap and sell the beer the way it should be.
Budvar is a proper lager, all-malt, lagered for 60 days, with a decent hopping. Anheuser-Busch's dishwater is more than 30% rice, unperceptible hops, and a mere fortnight's conditioning. Taste them before you launch such misinformed rubbish, please.
There is NO such thing as cask-conditioned / bottle-conditioned lager on the continent... unfiltered ones you may find, which are nevertheless quite clear, as lagering at a cold temperature causes the beer to drop bright. Leaving live yeast in lager kept in a cask / bottle at room temp would mean allowing a top fermentation to develop, which would impair the flavour.
It usually is the case for keg lagers meant to be sold in on the local market, about 20 miles around the brewery, in germany or the Czech republic, and GBBF organisers try to get this kind of kegs. But some of those lagers are nevertheless pasteurised (and so was quite a bit of the bottled stuff). But that's the way proper lager is conditioned and served. Wanting to impose the "real ale" norm to proper continental lager is very narrow-minded a way to consider the issue, and not one which shows much respect for other brewing traditions.
[Or is it just the presence of non-british beers at GBBF that's a problem to you ?]
Not a century ago, but they've been served under gas pressure for at least 50 years now, and it often is the only form in which you can get them on the market anyway. So if the taste is worth it, you have to dispense them properly. Question of coherence.
BTW, a century or so ago, proper lagers did not condition in casks. As they were drawn off the lagering vessels, they were de facto racked bright and already conditioned. This form does still exist in some parts of Bavaria and Rhineland, in particular, and is also to be seen every year at GBBF, for it is the chosen form whenever available, but in no way is this "real" the way it is meant for cask-conditoned beer either...
You're off the mark by a long run, here, time to try and see beyond the white cliffs of Dover for a sec, if you dare... Those beers you mention are marketing-fuelled *tasteless* thingies with no proper tradition behind them, and no special resemblance to what the product was like 20 years ago, whereas Budvar, for instance, has... And the beers you mention would anyway never make it to GBBF, whatever you may think.
Besides, John Smith and Caffreys being British Isles beers, the desirable form would be cask-conditioned ale (and there was some Cask John Smiths at the ScotCo stand...), Fosters is bland s**te anyway, and would be even in cask form... nothing to do with the dispensing method, really. Gas pressure or filtered bottling is not reliable indicator that the beer served is s**te, it's as plain as that... But then if you don't want to know, that's your problem, and you are missing on some great beers.
Oh, and before you mention them : Weizenbiers / Hefeweizens / Weissbiers may be bottle-conditioned, but they are ales, ie top fermented, and no valid counter-example.
It's pretty pointless debating every little point without acknowledging the basic point that CAMRA are not affiliated to the 'Little Englander' party (despite what some on this group may claim) and recognise all traditional beer styles around the world, as long as they are of good quality. CAMRA may well have been set up as a campaign for real ale, but times change and thankfully so have CAMRA, and let's not forget, cider has been an integral part of the campaign since day one, that ain't RA either.
In the historical context of brewing and beer drinking, artificial Gas dispense is /not/ traditional, and should not be used as an excuse for the fact that other countries have not experienced the campaign-driven revival that this Isle saw, which pretty much stopped real beer becoming extinct in the 1970s.
Just because gas dispense has become the norm doesn't mean it is right, nor indeed that the trend can't be reversed.
Look at the USA: 20-30 years ago, cask beer really had died out. But over the last couple of decades, the microbrewing revival has brought handpumps back to the States, and real ale availability - though still by no means mainstream - is increasing, even in areas that were previously beer deserts - e.g. the midwest. Some of the best cask beers in the world are now brewed in the USA.
No, but in general the campaign only promotes real - e.g. cask - Cider Which was and is far far far harder to get hold in most of the country than real ale.
Personally, while I like (real) cider and perry, I do tend to favour a seperate consumer group to campaign on this front, as the presence of cider within the CAMRA mandate rather clouds the issue.
But would there be sufficient interest for APPLE/ any other real cider/perry campaign to exist on it's own?
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