Hey there everyone.  My name is Keith and I love the Red-Gate tools.  I also love going to a good pub in England and downing a pint or two of Bitters.  Unfortunately, for me, I live in Colorado.  What am I to do?  Do you know how hard it is to find good Ale, Bitters or Stout?

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Keith Barrows
ASPInsider
http://schema.sol3.net

StarPilot:

Hey there everyone.  My name is Keith and I love the Red-Gate tools.  I also love going to a good pub in England and downing a pint or two of Bitters.  Unfortunately, for me, I live in Colorado.  What am I to do?  Do you know how hard it is to find good Ale, Bitters or Stout?

If you're having problems finding good ale in Colorado, then something is seriously wrong with the bars or liquor stores you frequent.  There are lots of great breweries in Colorado -- such as Breckenridge, New Belgium, and Flying Dog -- which brew excellent ales.  Bitters and stout, maybe not :)

 

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Oh, don't get me wrong.  I like most of those.  Even Left Hand Brewery makes some good stuff.  All of it pales when compared to the good brews from the UK.  [:)]

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Keith Barrows
ASPInsider
http://schema.sol3.net

Ah, yes, to sit in a pub at Southwold overlooking the beach, sipping Adnam's best, or to taste Nethergate's Draught Umbel Ale in a Suffolk village pub. What better could life offer? Perhaps the next time Red-gate have a stand at one of the conferences, they should hand out Red-Gate beer as well as pamphlets. I have asked one of the local breweries if they would do a special 'Red-Gate' brew and they would be most willing.

Oh, how we tried. A Red Gate Ale was on the cards for Tech Ed, but the Microsoft beverage police had other ideas. The official beer supplier appeared to be Budweiser (not the Czech one), and so we settled for handing out T-Shirts.

Which local brewery would this be?

SQL Squirrel

Well, you have another opportunity.  PASS is coming up in a few months... I will be glad to man the tap.

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Dammit
1/ Budweiser (the american variety) is not a beer in any real sense, so how could they claim to be the official supplier. Politeness forbids me to say exactly what it is.
2/ Wait 'til the Open-Source commuinty gets to hear of this heavy-handed, monopolistic scandal. Budweiser is the Microsoft of the Brewing industry.
3/ East Anglia is to beer what the Champagne region of france is to fizzy wine. Red-Gate have much to celebrate.
The brewery I raised the idea with won the Cambridge Beer Festival several years running. Bob the Brewer did a special beer for me last year for another project.

My only beef with East Anglia is the evermore ubiquitous Greene King. They are becoming highly acquisitive (and continue to sell beer under the old brewery's name, which really irritates me) and are increasingly difficult to avoid in parts of EA. In Cambridge it's not too bad, but I've heard many people say that in their town it's Greene King or nothing. And let's face it, 9.5 times out of 10 GK IPA is a very disappointing beer.

The brewery you mention wouldn't happen to be Oakhams would it? Bishop's Farewell is definitely one of my top three favourite beers.

I would love to have a Red Gate ale available at PASS, though I suspect the logistics of getting loads of bottles of British real ale shipped over to Seattle might be interesting. Adam, you probably know some good CA or WA microbreweries that we could contact about this?

Getting back to the original question about the availability of UK real ales in the US -- I'm afraid I don't have too much information right now. I know that Fullers ship to the US (I once had a pint of London Pride in Florida) as do Youngs. Aside from that, I'm not sure -- but I'm keen to find out and will let you know what I uncover.

Cheers,

Tony.

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Tony Davis
Simple-Talk editor-in-chief
editor@simple-talk.com
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I hate to shatter any illusions, but the small breweries do not actually bottle their own beer and they don't even brew the beer that is bottled with that cute rustic label. It isn't econmically viable to ship beer to the bottling plant. You're all right with the draught beer but bottled beer is not the real item.

That bottle of 'Bishop's Badger' that you're sipping would have come from a vast industrial unit in the midlands somewhere.

When a small brewery runs out of bottles, the Chief Brewer gets onto the phone to the bottling plant, phones through the recipe and waits. In the midlands, a boilersuited Jobsworth taps the code into a computer, taps in the volume and Bzzz Whooosh, a container-load of 'Bishop's Badger'

The up-side to this is that, instead of 'Bishop's badger' phoning the Midlands, they can phone a similar unit in the states, fax over the recipe and get 'Bishop's Badger' to you in colorado or PASS if you order in large-enough quantities

WB --

While this is true of the majority of bottled beer you'll find in the supermarkets, I don't think it's really fair to say that all bottled beer is "not the real item". While it will never be quite the same, many small breweries do make the effort to replicate their draught beers as closely as possible in the bottle -- with live yeast and no pasteurization. CAMRA supports these as "real ale". The "Good Bottled Beer Guide" by Jeff Evans is a good source for finding bottled beer that is at least as close as possible to the real thing.

Tony.

 

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Tony Davis
Simple-Talk editor-in-chief
editor@simple-talk.com
[blog] [articles]

HenryH:

3/ East Anglia is to beer what the Champagne region of france is to fizzy wine.

I beg to differ.  I'm going to have to say that would be Payottenland, in Belgium, where they make arguably the best and undoubtedly the most unique beers in the world.

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WBrewer:

I hate to shatter any illusions, but the small breweries do not actually bottle their own beer and they don't even brew the beer that is bottled with that cute rustic label. It isn't econmically viable to ship beer to the bottling plant.

That's certainly not true of small breweries here.  I've visted even tiny farmhouse breweries here that have a small bottling line.  It doesn't take that much equipment at all -- effectively, all you need is a CO2 tank, a pressurization system to keep the beer bottles and the beer at equal pressure (in order to keep the beer from foaming when it's pumped into the bottles), and a capper.  It's a surprisingly simple process to bottle beer on a small scale.  Only the megabreweries use the huge machines you see on TV that automatically pump the beer in and cap it at the rate of several hundred bottles a minute.

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Tony Davis:

My only beef with East Anglia is the evermore
ubiquitous Greene King. They are becoming highly acquisitive (and continue to
sell beer under the old brewery's name, which really irritates me) and are increasingly
difficult to avoid in parts of EA.

. Actually, the Draught Greene-king beers are surprisingly good. The fault is often with the pub landlords who show surprising ignorance in how to serve live draught beer. We have a Greene-King pub near us where all the regulars buy bottled beers as the draught beers are disgusting. Just a mile and a half away, the same brand of draught beer is absolutely excellent- but then the landlord there is a craftsman, who is meticulous in his work.

There are plenty of breweries in Colorado that aren't Macro (Anheuser-Busch) breweries.  The craft brewing industry is really taking off in the U.S. and I recommend you try some beers from Great Divide, New Belgium, etc. 

In fact there are quite a few breweries in Colorado (I'm a little jealous), check this link [beerme.com] out.  You can also check out Craft Beer Radio [craftbeerradio.com] which is a podcast devoted to craft beer and the craft brewing industry.  They review beer and supply great information on the breweries and beers available. 

Hope that helps :)