Celebrating 20 years of Homebrewing January, 1997 Volume 20, Issue 1

CAMRA by Chris Elworthy

Here is an article furnished to me by Chris Elworthy of the Canberra Brewers Club in Australia.

THE CAMPAIGN FOR REAL ALE

By Mike Day

In 1971, in Salford in the north of England, three beer lovers sat in a pub kissing & bemoaning the steady decline in the quality and variety of English beer. Fortunately, rather than just moan about the problem they decided to try and do something about it. Thus was born what was in later years to be described as the most successful consumer organisation of all time, the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale, which was soon renamed the Campaign for Real Ale or CAMRA.

So what exactly was happening to English beer at that time to provoke the formation of such an organisation? Through an aggressive expansion and takeovers policy, six large national brewers, Allied, Bass-Charrington, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Watney and Whitbread, had reached a position where they were producing 80% of the country's beer. The beers they were brewing, promoted by extensive (and expensive) national advertising campaigns, were bland, overpriced, keg beers, lacking in any character other than "inoffensiveness".

This was a far cry from what had been the situation in earlier years, when the English brewing industry consisted mainly of a large number of relatively small local breweries, each producing its own distinctive range of beers (almost exclusively ales), that would generally only be available in pubs within a limited geographical area. However the major difference was in the beer itself. What those early campaigners had christened "real ale" was in fact cask conditioned ale which is an English tradition going back several hundred years.

The difference between cask conditioned beer and keg beer arises towards the end of the brewing process. However before I can describe what happens I must first explain the difference between a cask and a keg. Whilst superficially similar, casks and kegs are fundamentally quite different. A keg has only one aperture, in the centre of one of the flat ends, into which a device known as a spear can be inserted. In the pub cellar/cool room the keg stands on one flat end with the aperture on top. The spear allows both pressurisation of the keg and extraction of the beer. A cask on the other hand has two apertures. One is in one of the flat ends, but offset towards the circumference rather than central. The second is half way along the curved part and diametrically opposite the first one. It is designed to sit in the pub cellar on its side in a special cradle with the second opening on top. In the normal brewing process, after primary fermentation, the beer is transferred off the bulk of the yeast to a second tank, where the remaining yeast in suspension begins to drop out. It is after a few days in this second tank, when the beer is almost bright, that the major intervention takes place. At this point beer which is destined to be dispensed from a keg is chilled to almost freezing, filtered to remove the remaining yeast and also protein which precipitates during the chilling process, and finally pasteurised. The beer is then transferred into kegs where it is artificially carbonated (no secondary fermentation can occur as the product is now sterile). In the pub the kegs are normally stored at a temperature of around 8 ° C. The beer is forced to the bar by the application of compressed carbon dioxide, flash cooled on the way, and enters the glass well carbonated, (some may say over-carbonated), and usually too cold

(around 4 ° C) for you to taste it properly.

Real ale follows a very different path. After a few days in the secondary, with some yeast still in suspension, the beer is transferred directly into casks. Once in the cask priming sugar is added, finings may also be added (and some brews may benefit from the addition of a handful of dry hops), then the two apertures in the cask are sealed with wooden bungs. As knowledgeable home brewers you will all realise that what happens next is that the beer undergoes a secondary fermentation during which flavours mature and conditioning occurs.

After the casks are delivered to the pub they have to be set up in their special cradles, tapped, and then be left undisturbed for several days at a temperature of around 12 ° C to allow the yeast to drop out and the secondary fermentation and conditioning to be completed. Only then is the beer ready to be served. No extraneous carbon dioxide is applied but the beer is drawn from the cask (hence the term draught beer) with a pump, often manually operated via a long handle on the bar, or in some set-ups the beer exits the cask by simply opening the tap and letting gravity get on with it. Also, when the beer is being served, the hole at the top of the cask is opened and as the beer exits the cask air enters through this hole, so a cask must be emptied within 2-3 days or off flavours can develop. The beer is not flash cooled so arrives in the glass at around 12 ° C and obviously carbonation rates are low compared with keg beers (hence Pommie beers are "warm and flat"). However you can taste them, and in many cases the taste is wonderful!

As you can imagine cask conditioned beers need careful looking after by an experienced cellarman in order to be served at their best. Hence the push by the big six breweries back in England for keg beers, which are much simpler to look after.

Of course you don't have to travel to England to sample cask conditioned beers. In Canberra we are lucky to have one of the few pubs in Australia serving real ale strictly as defined by CAMRA. That pub is the Wig and Pen on Alinga Street, with beers brewed on the premises by club member Richard Pass.

Back to CAMRA, and initially things were fairly quiet. However all that was to change in 1974 when they published there their first "Good Beer Guide". The guide covered the whole of Great Britain and listed pubs serving real ale of a consistently high quality. However, what caught the attention of the national press was the section at the back of the guide which listed all the breweries in the country with a brief comment on each brewery's beers. Alongside

Watneys was the comment "avoid like the plague". Suddenly CAMRA was making headlines and membership skyrocketed. Awareness of the campaign was further enhanced when the Guardian newspaper started publishing a weekly column by Richard Boston called "Boston on Beer", which was extremely sympathetic towards CAMRA and its aims. A monthly newspaper, "What's Brewing", was already being distributed to members, and regional local branches began to be formed. Local beer guides started to be published alongside the annual national guide. Local beer festivals were organised to give drinkers the opportunity to come along and find out exactly what they were missing, and soon a huge national festival was organised. Later the campaign diversified and was involved in such things as protests against brewery and pub closures, campaigns for full measures, fair beer prices, quality ingredients, etc. An offshoot of CAMRA, CAMRA Real Ale Investments, was set up to purchase and run a number of pubs which were aimed to be exemplary in their presentation of real ale. There was even talk of this offshoot buying its own brewery although this never came about.

Initially the big six breweries dismissed CAMRA as irrelevant, some sort of quirky throwback to a bygone age to be tolerated rather than taken seriously. Slowly however the tide began to turn as established local breweries that had always stuck with real ale began to enjoy increased success, and new small breweries committed to the real ale cause began to spring up all over the country. The bland and overpriced keg beers of the big six began to lose popularity as beer drinkers returned to their roots. I think we knew the big six were on the run when Watneys withdrew their ubiquitous keg beer Red Barrel. A spokesman for Watneys said that its demise was the result of a 'scurrilous word-of-mouth campaign against it by members of CAMRA'. Not bad for a product that they had literally spent millions on promoting.

25 years on and CAMRA is still a thriving organisation, with around 50,000 members. Indeed CAMRA is just as relevant in Britain today as it was in the early seventies. Once again the threat is coming from the big national breweries as they push their latest technical innovation "nitro-keg" (the addition of nitrogen to beer will be explained in a future article) beer onto an unsuspecting public.

It's a pity a similar organisation to CAMRA wasn't around to prevent the Australian brewing industry from getting into the sorry state it is in now.