The truth about bottle conditioning

Some people love it, some people hate it, but what’s the deal with bottle conditioning? Nigel Huddleston reports

It might not seem like much, but when British retailer Marks & Spencer decided to launch four bottleconditioned beers from various small-scale producers around the United Kingdom, it marked a significant step forward for the fortunes of what the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) calls “real ale in a bottle.” For as Iain Loe, the campaign group’s research and information manager, points out, it’s not that long ago that such a development would have represented a doubling of the number of bottle-conditioned brands on the market.

But as small regional and microbrewers have driven the cause of cask ale forward, so too have they embraced bottle-conditioning as an antidote to pasteurised and artificiallycarbonated brewery-conditioned beer in a bottle.

The CAMRA-published Good Bottled Beer Guide – written by Beers of the World contributor Jeff Evans – lists more than 500 of them and has enough material in bottleconditioned beer to be able to shun breweryconditioned products altogether.

Should we infer from this that in CAMRA’s opinion the exclusion of brewery-conditioned beer from the Good Bottled Beer Guide means that they are all, by definition, no good?

“A lot of them taste metallic and are lacking in complexity of bottle-conditioned real ale,” argues Loe.

One of the reason many brewers still eschew bottle-conditioning is that very complexity. It’s technically very difficult to get right, a problem Loe admits some of those already trying are still struggling to overcome. But he .....

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By Nigel Huddleston

Section : Beer Trends

Page number : 54