Wotz Bruin and imported beers (slightly OT)

In message , Mike Roebuck wrote

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

Mike Roebuck a écrit :

It's lost in character, granted, about a year or so ago... besides, well, those GREEN bottles... :o(

Well, I always knew PU at 4.4% down here in Switzerland, for at least ten years. It's referred to in the Czech Repiblic as an 11 (degrees Plato)

no, there's been a IMHO been a dumbing down in general when SAB announced they wanted to make it an international brand, began brewing it in other locations than Plzen (Poland, among others), and IIRC, shortened th lagering time.

Could be said outlets sell the stuff in *unpasteurised* draught form ? And certainly under aligal (= mixed gas, but without the "smooth" thingy of nitrokeg) pressure, not CO2. Which means it's a lot less gassed up.

Cheers !

Laurent

Alan a écrit :

Referring to Budvar ? well, it's not meant to be fizzy... when treated properly, it's far from fizzy, and proof that "industrial" lager can be a balanced, flavoursome pint...

AFAIR it's always been 4.4% in the UK as well. And - by comparison with Budweiser Budvar - poor value for money.

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.

BrianW a écrit :

Value for money is a relative notion : half-litre cans (and a decent canning job, not too gassy, and at least is not sunstruck) of PU cost the equivalent of 50p down here, if you know where to look. Budvar from the same source is 5p dearer.

Anyway, bith are good choices to bring along at some party where you know there'll be swilling pigs (ie. the stuff's "expendable") and yet you want to have sth decent to drink yourself :o)

In message , The Submarine Captain wrote

I didn't realise that it was an unfiltered living bottled beer.

Looking at some old empty bottles that I still have knocking about Pilsner Urquell has been 4.4% ABV in the UK since at least 2001.

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

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

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.

Hmm - I was sure it was a 12, but there you go...

I didn't realise they had farmed out the brewing. These are the last bottles I buy.

Possibly. It tasted absolutely wonderful on draught in Moscow last week, too. Do the Russians use aligas?

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.

Alan a écrit :

Ah right... you can't imagine anything but a BC ale to be worth drinking out of a bottle... 'Course, them lagers thingys are all crap, guv'nor ! :o>

then I can only suggest you stay away fro lager, any kind of lager, avoid even mentioning it. You might actually discover it's not all crap.

Mike Roebuck a écrit :

and local traditions too... some place in Cologne use 0.4 l glasses along with the 0.2 l ones... and even if you're only having small ones, the next one land son your table before you've finished the current one, so it doesn't make much of a difference. :o)

Had a brilliant proof of that this summer. To cater for the hodes flowing in to Basle for the Tutankhamon exhibition, local Micro Fischerstube created a lager with unmalted emmer wheat and dates in it. Their probblem was they wanted to bottle it, but don't have the facilities... so they crossed the border to Lörrach (Germany) and asked local brewers Lasser could they please contract brew and bottle it for them... So we've got a Reinheitsgebot-abiding German brewery chtuning out a beer with dates and unmalted emmer wheat, but it's all right, it's only for export... :o>

k a écrit :

Common, but BIG misconception... :o)

Nitrokeg beers are pre-saturated in the keg with mixed gas. And then nitrokeg fonts force the first few drops of every glass through a tiny hole / grid, "ripping" the gas from teh beer, and starting a chain reaction of bubbles formation, tiny bubbles, which then forr the typically awful "creamy" froth of nitrokeg. So it's really the combination of beer saturation with mixed gas and specific fonts that makes the shaving cream, not mixed gas pressure alone...

Rig an aligal cylinder to a standard CO2 font and a standard keg of beer, and you won't get the "creamy" froth. The only difference is that the end of the keg won't be more gassy than the first few glasses.

Try to pull a nitrokeg beer through a standard font with an aligal cylinder rigged to it, and it won't give the thick head either.

Worse still, on a nitrokeg font, with nitrokeg beer and mixed gas cylinder rigged to it : open the tap, wait three to five seconds, leving a few CC of beer flow in teh driptray, and only then fill your glass. The wretched thing, without the "starter" of a few cc of beer forced through a grid, won't give you any head... stop in teh middle of the process, then re-open the tap, and you'll get the froth.

Cheers !

Laurent