Wotz Bruin and imported beers (slightly OT)

In message , Mike Roebuck wrote

And why is CAMRA supporting a fizzy beer such as Bud?

Lowenbrau is a good example. A lot of pubs around here (Hertfordshire) have stopped selling it on draught because of its reputation as a 'fighting brew'. It's just too strong for quantity drinking. The culture here is different. I suspect that at many of your myriad bars in Germany you will be hard put to get beer served in a 'grosse' glass because the smaller ones, especially, do not even possess any. Here, beer is drunk by the numerous pint, and 3.5 - 4% is probably the optimum strength to enable sheer quantity of liquid on board to defeat extreme intoxication.

UK duty isn't all that 'inordinately high'. I recently considered microbrewing. Disallowing equipment costs, the cost of brewing a pint, INCLUDING excise duty, is less than 25p. Now, unless you already own a pub, the problems of marketing it, delivering, getting your expensive casks back etc. do make the economics problematic. A big brewery will undoubtedly be producing for even less. So, it leaves the brewery with an immediate 100% at least markup. Then it probably gets another 200% markup in the pub. Then VAT kicks in hard.

I'm sure you're right abut the dumbing-down and the double con. Guinness probably started it when they started brewing at Park Royal. No way was that the same as the Irish product. Then Carlsberg built their monster continuous production line at Northampton.

snip

I once invited a young lady from Munich to try a bottle of Loewenbraeu in a pub in London. She didn't recognise it as Loewenbraeu at all, and couldn't understand why her countrymen were exporting such an inferior product to the UK.

I really don't follow that comment. Apart from the new trend of some places only to sell specific beers in 0.3l glasses, it's usually possible to get a large (0.5l, sometimes 0.4l) or a small (0.2l or

0.3l) beer in practically any bar in Germany. Not, I accept, if you're in a Koelsch bar in Cologne, or an Alt bar in Duesseldorf, where the small measure is very traditional, due to the cask gravity dispense.

Here, beer is drunk by the numerous pint, and 3.5 - 4%

German beers at around 5% are drunk in German bars by the numerous

0.4l or 0.5l glass, similarly to the pint here in the UK. I write from many years' 1st hand experience of this:-)

Yes, but when I was importing real ale from Sweden last year (and exporting ours the other way) I made the discovery that duty is higher in the UK than in Sweden! The plethora of booze shops at the other end of the Channel Tunnel would suggest that it is high enough to justify huge imports from there.

True, but I was writing about beers brewed at their original sources, and being brewed to a completely different spec for the UK market. Don't forget that the Reinheitsgebot in Germany does not apply to beers brewed there for export, either.

Lucky that you didn't buy her a glass of Liebfraumilch then!

Fair point - this is another con that needs to be stopped. Too many people of my acquaintance seem to think that the bottled beer they drink is exactly the same as what they get in the pub, just because it bears the same label.

This is not to say that all pasteurised, bottled beers are bad - some are actually pretty good (I'm rather partial to a drop of bottled Bombardier myself) but they have no place being supported by a "real ale" organisation.

Anyway, this reminds me - must get a copy of the new edition of the Good Bottled Beer Guide...

d.

What's the difference? I thought the "smooth" thing was just because they used mixed gas?

The people I know from Munich (my firm has an office right next to the brewery) don't think much about Lowenbrau at all - even from the brewery itself :-(

LOL:-)

Doesn't surprise me. My then employer used to have an office there too. I don't remember drinking any Loewenbraeu there at all in those days, either.