Real Ale, Craft Beer & Nebulous Definitions
We’ve recently created a customer survey to try and get a clearer picture of what makes you lovely people tick, your interests, etc. (So we can sell you more delicious Arran beer.) Please fill it out when you get a chance – it really does help us out, and it helps make sure we’re giving you the kind of content you want to read.
We’ve deliberately included a question asking what your preferred alcoholic beverage is – with the options including “Real Ale” and “Craft Beer”. Which begs the question: what’s the difference?
Real Ale is, thankfully, clearly defined as:
Beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.
In practice, this usually means beer from a cask rather than a keg, dispensed from the ornate & serious looking handpulls in Proper Pubs™. Because of the natural carbonation caused by fermentation inside the cask in the pub cellar, the beer has a softer, smoother mouthfeel compared to kegged beers, which tend to have a higher level of carbonation. (Don’t ever say cask beer is warm and flat, you’ll just sound daft and earn the righteous ire of cellar managers across the land.)
So that’s that, then – Real Ale comes from a cask, Craft Beer doesn’t. Right?
So by that logic, the mass produced lager from a faceless, continent spanning macro brewer is as equally accurately described as a Craft Beer as the unfiltered, barrel aged Rosemary & Habanero Gose from the local independent brewer. Which seems to go a wee bit against the spirit of the definition, doesn’t it?
The problem with the term Craft Beer, at least in the UK, is that it was never accurately defined from the beginning – and now it’s so nebulous and entrenched in the lexicon that definitions would be pointless. The term “Craft Beer” really only appeared on the scene in the UK in ~2011 (according to Google Trends – data is fun!). From my perspective, the term only really started being used as a replacement for “microbrewed”, when the early pioneers of the microbrewing movement suddenly found themselves so successful, they were producing the same volumes as the large regional breweries they had been in opposition to. “We’re not a microbrewery any more, we’re a Craft Brewery!”
Unfortunately, there wasn’t an equivalent to CAMRA* for Craft Beer at this early stage to properly define the term – although there was the brief appearance of United Craft Brewers, formed in 2015 with the first objective of doing precisely that. It didn’t work out.**
Which brings us to the present day – supermarkets have shelves dedicated to Craft Beer; bottle shops have a wide and rotating selection of the newest Craft Beers; bars & pubs have Craft Beer taps next to the traditional handpulls for Real Ale. If you’re a newcomer to the world of beer, it can understandably seem a bit confusing.
The way I see it is thusly – here at the Isle of Arran Brewery, we are a Craft Brewery that produces Real Ale. The brewing staff are trained to operate an extremely manual & complicated system, brewing beer to high standards by hand, sight, smell & taste; the mash tun and the copper are both dug out by hand at the end of each shift; and the bottling machine is a terrifying blur of activity and motion when it’s in operation. There’s a genuine art and craft in what we do: and when pubs re-open, we’ll be delighted to resume filling casks with Real Ale.
In other words – drink what you like, and don’t let definitions confuse you.
Cheers!
- Craig
* (The Campaign for Real Ale, who coined & defined the term Real Ale in the 1970s)
** Credit to the wonderful Boak & Bailey for covering this part of the story.
Craig Laurie