Monthly Archives: March 2016

Confessions of a volunteer key-keg barman at a CAMRA festival.

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Warning – some may find these views controversial!

A brief overview regarding the provision of key-keg dispensed real ales at the recent Leeds CAMRA beer festival:

Leeds beefest empties

Wasted Key-kegs

Firstly, despite the belief of one irate gentleman who carried on like a spoilt nine year old for well over an hour, I was not the person responsible for inventing key-kegs. Neither was I the person responsible for making the decision at CAMRA national level that key-keg beers may be real ales, nor the decision to have them at Leeds CAMRA beer fest, not even the decision of which beers to have. No, all I did was volunteer to supervise the bloody bar.

I am 100% certain that there were people at Leeds beer fest who didn’t even venture out of the main hall to have a look at the separate key-keg/cider/global beer bar – Nowt for us up there mate, just a load of rubbish! A lot of people did come for a look though, some out of curiosity about this key-keg thing, some for ciders and perries or for the superb bottled beers on sale. Fair enough, there were many people I spoke to who thought that key-keg beers had no place at a CAMRA beer festival. We discussed it, debated it, they formulated their own opinion and I respect that. I have no problem with that; different isn’t wrong and what’s right for one person isn’t right for another. We are all entitled to our own views and I enjoyed the stimulating discourse on the subject.

Over three days I sort of became a key-keg expert and I’m not going to bore you on the many fascinating facts and the argument, but I must point out that ALL the key-keg beers on sale at Leeds beer fest were ‘real ales’. That means they were relatively unfiltered, or not at all in the case of Brass Castle whose beers are also unfined, and definitely not pasteurised. You really do have to let the key-kegs stand for the sediment to settle out and when a keg runs off all the crap at the bottom comes up the line, just like cask beer. Any carbonation in the beer is there solely from the natural action of live yeast in the beer.

Leeds beerfest kk bar

View from behind the Key-keg bar

Some people had never tasted real ale dispensed from key-kegs and many were instantly converted, others were more sceptical; at least they had a go. Strangely the people who headed directly for the key-keg bar tended to be the younger, more open minded visitors; please hold this thought for future argument.

Whatever people thought, I think that this experiment by Leeds CAMRA was a resounding success. The key-keg bar was closed by late afternoon on Saturday after fourteen key-kegs of ten different beers had been sold. There was some more beer on standby, but it was on ‘sale or return’, so in the interests of saving CAMRA a bit of dough, the fact that it is a ‘real ale’ festival and still plenty ale from the cask left, an executive decision not to broach any further kegs was made. This suited me because it meant I could stand down from official duties, listen to the bands and sample the excellent real ales in the main hall. Believe me, there were some crackers, just the same as there were some cracking real ales on the key keg bar – they just got served up a different way!

What is the difference then, I hear you say? Well, along with others whose experience I value, I did a side by side tasting of both the Ridgeside Nautilus and Brass Castle Sunshine from cask and key-keg. Both excellent beers, Sunshine a particular favourite. The consensus being that they tasted the same but the key-keg dispensed ale is colder and has more carbonation. One chap came up with the theory of the cask ale being like the pork pie you buy fresh and still warm from the butchers while the key-keg was the same pie that had been taken home and chilled; an interesting one that. I’ve also done a side by side taste with Bad Co Wild Gravity before and it’s clear that some modern styles of beer are far superior from a keg than they are a cask and probably vice versa with other more traditional styles.

To sum up my feelings simply, I will echo the rude man who just wouldn’t shut up on Friday morning: Yes, you’ve been fighting for real ale for forty years, and do you know what mate? You’ve won! Just look at all the superb beers available from myriad small, medium and larger breweries. In fact you won years ago and it’s now time to move forward. Of course there will always be a place for real ale, the centre piece, the jewel in the crown, but there’s room for something else, something more modern.

Why do you think Elland are doing 1872 Porter in keg? I’ll tell you, because despite being an outstanding ale, unless you have a really big turnover, a lot of pubs will struggle to sell it before it turns; mainly on colour (dark), ABV (strong) and price (not cheap). Put it in a keg and it has a longer cellar life and more places can afford to stock it and more people can taste it and the brewery will sell more beer; it’s a win-win situation for everyone. Okay, I would rather have it in a cask, preferably a wooden one, in fact I would rather have it in a key-keg than a fizzy Fosters style keg, but I’d rather have it that way than none at all. Better that than the mass produced product dispensed from a cask that purports to be real ale in a lot of pubs.

Leeds beerfest sat pm

Saturday PM – Main Hall

Key Keg comes to Leeds CAMRA Beer Festival

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Wednesday 16th March – 0915 x 1530.

BF Phil S

Phil Saltonstall showing us how it’s done

After two buses across Leeds, I managed to get to Pudsey Civic Hall just in time to see The Brass Castle brewery van pull up outside the hall. Fortunate, because I was the one who was going to receive tuition on how to manage the key keg dispense and supervise the bar during the festival.

After three large trolley loads full of key kegs and various bits and pieces, including a bloody heavy cooling system we got down to business setting things up. Phil Saltonstall of Brass Castle was pretty thorough and very knowledgeable around not only the logistics of dispense but the whole key keg argument. There’s a full post, if not more, coming, but basically he reckons that the key keg beer, or at least his own, is probably more real than the cask versions – he does produce both.

Now please don’t go thinking this is a Brass castle bar, it isn’t, okay there are several Brass Castle beers; Hoptical Illusion (Gluten free), Session, Heretic, California Steamin’ and another one I can’t remember now I’m back home. There are also two from Bad Seed: Cascade and Cascadian (dark). I’m betting that will cause some confusion with both punters and staff. Fortunately the dark one is exactly what it says. There’s also Northern Monk Rapscallion and Ridgeside Nautilus.

A little bit of quality control was going on as we set up the taps and got the flow right and I can tell you that there are some really cool beers here.

One thing the sceptics will be able to do is to compare cask and key keg, same ale, different dispense as we have both Nautilus and  Sunshine in both forms. If you want to compare you’ll need a mate or cadge a glass from somewhere, but it’s an interesting idea that I will certainly be trying.

BF key keg

Key Keg fonts

By the time I left, as well as setting up the key keg bar, I’d also washed around 2,000 glasses and helped to (temporarily) flood the civic hall kitchen. Amazingly enough, our little glass washing team only managed to smash one glass and find another damaged on arrival. Not bad really.

Overall, when I went home there was a real buzz. A real feeling of satisfaction. The team of around twenty volunteers have really worked hard over the last three days. I’ve got another beer festival meeting this evening – Clifford this time. After a couple of pints of OBB and festival discourse it will be another early night and back for as near to 9.00am as Harrogate travel and First bus can manage, ready for opening at 10.45 am (CAMRA members preview) and the official opening at 11.00am.

Remember, the festival is running from Thursday 17th to Saturday 19th, two sessions per day. Get yourself down and have a few ales and a chat. If anyone is interested in more detail on the key kegs then please speak – I’ll not be far from the bar; tallish, baldish, Eric Morecambe style glasses.

BF weds eve

Nearly complete!

More from the diary of a (Leeds CAMRA) beer festival volunteer

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Tuesday 15th March 2015: 0850 x 1530 hrs

Not as much heavy lifting today. all the barrels were on the stillage and the bars in place. Still, plenty to do though. Things like the front of the bars and the hand pulls. Looking round, I don’t think I have been to a beer fest with as many hand pumps on the bar.

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Bar fixers

Pipes started to crawl across the floor, seething see through snakes with mesh skeletons, stretching out from the casks to touch the beer engines. A beery smell pervaded the room as spiles were knocked into casks and taps were stuck into the heads of so many silver pigs lined up in hopeless anticipation of the mallet, while files of brass topped guardsmen watched from the bar.

There’s a host of other things too, things that people sort of expect, but never really think how they got there; breweriana and memorabilia got numbered up and displayed on a tom-bola stall; we made a shop with lots of books and t-shirts and other goodies and there’s stacks of freebies if you join CAMRA at the festival; a guy set out a stall with quality crisps and snacks and pork scratchings; foody people took over the professional kitchens.

BF shop

Beer festival shop

A lot of the work is quite had graft but there’s a staff room with a big kettle and the locale sandwich shop provides an excellent variety of beer festival volunteers lunches.

The cider arrived, thankfully there’s no need to use the apples and pears up to the second floor bar and it was all transported in the service lift. The second floor bar has also started to take shape and the fruity goodness was stacked next to sixteen feet of bottle bar, featuring brewers from all around the world, including a case that came with it’s own real coconut. At the other end of the cider is the key cask bar, the main part of which will arrive tomorrow.

BF cider

Cider bar taking shape

The Diary of a (Leeds CAMRA) Beer Festival volunteer

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LBF start

  • Monday 0830 start of Leeds Beer Festival Pudsey Civic Hall.
  • Team briefing, significant H & S focus.
LBF briefing

Team briefing

  • Humping tables and chairs left from a postcard collectors fair into storeroom.
  • Laying plastic sheeting to protect carpet.
  • Erect stillage.
  • Lift barrels from many renowned and artisan brewers onto stillage.
  • Empty van after van and even some medium size lorries of, ‘the’ bar, beer lines, cleaning products and multiple other beer festival ancillary items.

LBF lorry

  • Take some photographic evidence and send a few tweets out.
  • Order lunch from sandwich shop: eat lunch.
  • More shifting of boxes, fridges, esoteric bottles of beer from around the world.
LBF dummy

Some people did a bit more than others!

  • 1500 leave and go to another meeting.
  • 1800 couple of pints of Sam Smith’s OBB in local.
  • 2000 watch Leicester beat N’castle on TV.
  • 2145 bed: set clock for 0630.

 

Why Save The Roscoe Head?

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Roscoe Head

Sat in the little room at the back of the pub, she asked me why I’d called in? I said I was a bit sceptical and I’d come to see for myself what all the fuss was about?

She asked straight back what I thought, so over the best part of the next hour, I told her.

I just took to Carol Ross as soon as I met her. She’s confident, distinguished and a very passionate lady where her pub is concerned, at all times remaining pleasant and polite, despite this woolly back asking stupid questions.

Carol told me all about the pub and it’s plight, which is well documented elsewhere; one of the famous five included in every GBG, family run for over thirty years, now owned by what are effectively property developers who are currently enveloping the boozer on three sides with an apartment block.

Roscoe Head Carol

Yeah, the beer was excellent, a big selection for a little pub, well kept, well presented, local bias, top marks here. I expect decent beer, in every pub I go into, but you don’t always get it. The beer isn’t everything though, I could take over any pub and put on a good selection of well kept beer. Having said that, I could also go into The Roscoe Head and implement a regime of laisse faire cellar management and be dispensing undrinkable beer within a couple of weeks. For me it’s not the transient beer side of things that need saving, it’s far more complex than that.

Lets start with the people: Saint Theresa of The Roscoe didn’t know I was going to write this when she first started chatting with myself and Mrs C. We just got that lovely down to earth discourse I remember from the Liverpool of thirty years ago. I was always told to say hello and to chat to people and it should be second nature for everyone. Sadly this isn’t always the case. If you could bottle Theresa and the other girl, sorry I thought I’d written your name down pet but I can’t find it; you told us you were originally from Scotland. Anyway, if you could sprinkle what these ladies have behind every bar in the country then the world would be a much better place. I think that’s what a lot of pubs need, a sprinkling of Roscoe Head magic.

Roscoe Head bar staff

It was obvious that Carol and I had a lot in common, things like Brasso, furniture polish and other cleaning sundries. It’s not so much that you can see the place is clean, more you feel it, inhale it. Not just on the surface neither, it’s got that lustrous patina that can only be built up over years.

I was surprised that Newriver refuse to sell the freehold. I hope they change their minds and I’ll do anything I can to help them, because a heritage like this is something that can’t be bought or planned for, it just sort of happens and when it does it’s really good and deserves to be cherished. Okay, it might not last for ever, but we need to encourage it to last as long as it can.

Roscoe Head back room

If you haven’t been to The Roscoe Head then here’s a bit of descriptive for you; It’s a quaint little place with four rooms, the main bar and three small side rooms, each one slightly different, if you got forty people in at once then you’d hardly be able to move. Lots of wood and memorabilia and more CAMRA awards than most people will ever see assembled in one pub. Six cask ales and on two visits I tried thirds of six different ones, all very good beers all in cracking condition: Roosters Calypso (3.9%), Empire Brewing Jonah (4.3%), George Wright Brewery Steve’s Brave New Beer (4.7%), Rock The Boat brewery Dock of the Bay – Otis Redding’s fave beer according to one local wit, Weetwood Cheshire Cat (4%) and Barghest Oatmeal Stout (4.5%). I passed on the Timmy Taylors and The Tetley Walker.

The outstanding feature for me, amongst the chequer tiled floor, the bar staff, the friendly punters, the cosiness, was the fact that it’s a boozer that’s not been tampered with. No trendy designers have produced this. No uniform Pubco design catalogue fittings here. No, it’s all real, it’s naturally evolved into what it is and no one can produce this, it’s unique. Yeah, they can try, but they’ll never succeed and that’s why it’s so important to keep places like this going.

Roscoe Head saloon

I know I’ve been sceptical for a while around ACV’s. Yes, they have a place, but before you go to that place there has to be consultation, with everyone involved, especially the owners or whoever is running the pub and I mean hard working independent publicans here, not the big Pubco’s. I’m not worried about an ACV here though, it’s deserved and needed, even though in the end it might prove to be a bit toothless and indicate something more efficacious is required?

I sincerely hope that at sometime in the future Carol eventually takes over the freehold of this wonderful little pub, for everyone’s sake. In the meantime I wish the campaign to ‘Save the Roscoe Head’ my very best.

 

No Dead Pony Club?

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I’ve noticed a theme building recently which came to a head in Liverpool BrewDog, when I discovered yet another BrewDog bar with no Dead Pony Club on draught. A phenomenon experienced in other BrewDog establishments ; Edinburgh, Leeds (both bars), Sheffield and now Liverpool.

Now, if I were BrewDog I would make sure that DPC would be available, on draught, all the time; it’s really nice and it’s ABV makes it more suitable for a session than some of the more esoteric offerings. I also get it in the earhole from Mrs C when they don’t have it, as it’s one of her ‘go to’ favourite beers, so much so she’s fetching the canned version back from Morrisons in ever increasing quantities.

Spurred on by this ostensible sellout, I thought I’d find out what the official position is, so I had a chat with Sarah Warman, Master Gunner up at BrewDog HQ in Ellon; that’s BrewDog speak for media officer. Now I think BrewDog are no different from any other business people, they think the same, they have the same ideas, it’s just they aren’t priggish/pompous/pious/risk averse/pro-establishment*. There’s no way that my previous employer would have let anyone get away with terminology like Master Gunner … ‘Oh no Rich we couldn’t do that (whatever next!).’ Having said that, if my old company had let people get away with that sort of thing, the media officer would undoubtedly have been called the Rear Gunner – making sure no one crept up on us and ensuring the carnage left in our wake stayed there!

I asked Sarah why no DPC, is it some rotational policy, logistics or what? She explained the reason why they had no DPC on was because they will have run out, lack of supply and high demand, simple as that! I was reassured to hear that DPC is one of BrewDog‘s most popular beers and as one of their ‘Headliners’ should be on in all their bars, all of the time.

I asked if they were struggling to keep up with the current appetite for DPC? Apparently production at BrewDog is pretty much at full capacity and they are eagerly anticipating the opening of Site 3 at their existing brewing plant up in Aberdeenshire, a completely new brew house which will increase production five fold and alleviate the problem; construction began in mid 2015, .

I remarked that things must be going pretty well at the minute. Sarah said that sales had been ‘pretty positive’ so far this year and were exceeding expectations, especially at a time of year when things can dip a little.

Now this bodes well for myself and all the others who took a punt on the Brewdog crowdfunding ‘Equity for Punks’ initiative and hopefully there will be some significant financial gain when Mssrs Watt and Dickie either take over the world or are bought out by one of the big four world brewing companies.

Anyway, until the £25M Site 3 project, originally planned to open in Feb 2016, comes on line it looks like supply of DPC will be a bit hit and miss in BrewDog bars, so in the meantime you’ll have to go to Morrisons and stock up with four cans (330ml) for six quid.

* Delete as appropriate.

BrewDog Liverpool

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Brewdog Liverpool

I stumbled across Liverpool BrewDog  by accident. I knew there was one, but not where. It definitely wasn’t in The Guardian top ten craft beer pubs in Liverpool, which I found on the internet.  Now, The Guardian guide says it was published in December 2014 and Liverpool BrewDog opened up in November 2014 so that’s a bit funny? Perhaps the editors had been sitting on Tony Naylor’s review for a few months, maybe he missed it, maybe he didn’t rate it? Or is it because The Guardian guide doesn’t hit the spot and is really a top ten of pubs that do craft beer rather than Craft beer pubs (I prefer the term bars here)?

Brewdog inside

Liverpool BrewDog is tucked away on Colquit Street which is apparently in The historic Ropewalks district of L1. which is a term I’ve not heard before. I always remember the area between Bold Street and Duke Street as a maze of dimly lit narrow streets and dank back alleys that were home to a few small clubs, a lot of cardboard boxes, rats and not much else. Since then, sometime over the last thirty years, the area seems to have transformed itself into a destination night time economy venue. Thankfully, Liverpool BrewDog seems to be just on the edge of the more commercial part.

First impressions; it’s quite big, not many people in for a Thursday afternoon, but I like it. There’s an almost subliminal nautical theme going on with the partitions which break up the single room being fashioned from a flotilla of sails and the bars formed from concrete, resembling a corrugated quayside. Otherwise the decor follows the standard Brewdog fit out. Think lots of neon and moody lighting.

Brewdog sign

In terms of beer, then it’s all bottles or keg lines, thirty of them and surprisingly they had no Dead Pony Club on. This seems to be happening quite a lot now and I don’t really get it. It might not be Brewdogs most esoteric product, but it is a tasty 3.8% drinkable pale ale that hits the spot and, to my mind, should be a staple in all their bars ALL THE TIME. We ended up with a Punk IPA which was a bit stronger than we fancied, but still nice. We could have gone daft and had something really nice, really strong (and expensive) but there was quite a lot of Thursday left in front of us, so we took a rain check on that.

Brewdog bar

As you come into the bar there’s a takeaway bottle store cum merchandising shop area incorporated to the left hand side. In Brewdog speak that’s a BottleDog. I had a quick skeg, they stock some interesting bottles. They also do food, which is not something on offer in the older versions of BrewDog bars. Ironically, when all the ones in the iconic Liverpool real ale pubs were disconnected years ago, Liverpool BrewDog boasts bell push buttons to summon table service!

I like Brewdog, as a brewer, as a concept, a product. I know it doesn’t suit some of the die hard CAMRA types, but they sell decent beer and it suits me. If they ever start selling mediocre keg beer, like many of the joints just down the road in Concert Square and Seel Street, then I’ll start to get worried and do something about it, until then, bring it on Brewdog.

As far as Brewdogs go then I rate this Liverpool one very highly, top three out of the ones I’ve been in.