Written by Clive Harris, RBBC Beer Club Ltd
Clive Harris is founder of Round Britain Beer Club, a craft beer subscription club, where each month, Customers receive a case of beer from a different craft brewery. www.roundbritainbeerclub.co.uk
If you’re coming out of ‘Dry January’ and looking for a beer that really rewards you for that sacrifice, make sure you consider the massive variety of craft beers available - there really is one (in fact dozens) to suit every beer lover’s taste right here in the UK. One thing though before you hurry down to your supermarket, please make sure you are drinking it Fresh! Why? Well, this article looks at several reasons, but consider this, you don’t buy anything else you eat stale or past it’s best do you, so why your beer?
At Round Britain Beer Club we are passionate about Craft Beer from the many UK independent breweries! Our main goal is to bring you not only the best, but the freshest beer. We believe it’s simply the best way to truly savour your favourite ale. Not convinced? Here’s some good reasons why you should be:
Craft Beer is at its Best when fresh!
One of the most amazing things about craft beer compared to most mainstream, mass produced brands is the incredibly distinguishable taste. Brewers from all over the UK (and indeed around the globe) have put in countless painstaking hours to create beers which are bursting with flavour. They carefully select the type and quantity of hops and malt they use and experiment with different yeast and brewing methods, just so they can produce a brew for you that is unique in character and flavour. Increasingly, this flavour represents geography. Many breweries have started growing their own hops local to the brewery or will only use hops that are grown locally.
Others even go to the extent of foraging for ingredients to give their beer a taste that no other beer has. Many others boast the type of water they use from local springs, or maybe a spa, is the key ingredient that makes their beer so special. However, that unique character and flavour these local ingredients give to the beer produced is only at its best if you catch it when it is truly fresh. Over time this flavour begins to lose what makes it special, as the hops become less hoppy and the bubbles begin to burst. Buying your beer the way the brewer intended will undoubtedly lead to enhancing your drinking experience. The best way to achieve that is fresh from the brewery.
Supermarkets can be misleading
Whilst you may think the brews you buy from your local supermarket are fresh, often this may not the be the case. Supermarkets often use ‘best before’ dates to tell you by when you should consume the beer, but this isn’t technically true. Yes, the beer won’t necessarily be causing you any harm in the near future, but depending how long it has been sitting in a warehouse somewhere, it might well have lost its kick, or truly intended flavour. Most experts agree that beer is past it’s best and therefore may well lose some of its full flavour after around 3-4 weeks.
Further, supermarket distribution often requires beers to travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles to reach its destination. The freshness of a beer can be affected by many factors such as vibrations during transport, light exposure, less than ideal storage conditions en- route and frequent movement, so you’re almost never getting to experience the brew in its prime, never mind the affect it has on the environment!
The Guinness theory
How often have you heard someone say ‘the Guinness is always better in Dublin’ and then justify it with fables about the Liffey water and secret ingredients only added to the brew sold in Dublin. Well, a reliable source tells me that the reason it tastes so good in Dublin is that it is just about always ‘fresh’. The reason being that many pubs in Dublin turn over such a quantity of the black stuff, that stocks are replenished several times weekly, so it’s always fresh. The same source also told me that when working in the USA, they did a blind tasting with a well known imported lager, that was a few months old by the time of the tasting. Some of the amateur tasters commented on a particular taste that stood out so much. That taste was actually the staleness of the beer!
You work hard for your money, so don’t you think you deserve the best bang for your buck (or whatever your local currency is!)? Yes, you can get a case of imported or mass-produced beer in a supermarket for just over a tenner, but do you savour that as you drink it – unlikely. Do you say to your pals ‘I had a lovely can of (mass produced lager) last night’? You’re worth more than that! It seems that the price of a pint is soaring year on year for a variety of reasons, so choosing a beer that tastes as good as it can, should be important to us!
Hopefully after reading this, you can see why we’re such fresh beer enthusiasts. If you’re interested getting your beer ‘Fresh from the Brewery’, join our ‘club’ and monthly you will receive a case of fresh beer direct from a different craft brewer. www.roundbritainbeerclub.co.uk
…and if you don’t believe us, then take a look at what beer expert Colin McDonell says:
“Beer tastes best fresh. Full stop. Such a small number of beers taste better with age, that it's not even worth throwing a 'most' into that statement. Beer tastes best fresh. Of course, freshness can't make any bad beer taste good, but staleness can make any beer taste muddled and lame”
Pretty conclusive I think you’ll agree.
Clive Harris (author) is a co-founder of Round Britain Beer Club.