Real Ale, as frequently quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a name for draught (or bottled) 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.”
“Real ale” as an expression was adopted by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in 1973. First known as the Campaign for the Revitalization of Ale, its name change was an attempt to simplify and shorten what was an uncomfortable mouthful of letters at the most sober of times. The appellation is a convenient campaigning device that has attracted a number of crass comments about the “realness” of filtered beers. Certainly an excellent India pale ale, even if filtered, is considered by most beer enthusiasts very real indeed.
The simple, accurate, and nondidactic expressions “cask conditioned” or “bottle conditioned” might better describe beer with live yeast. The qualitative difference, of course, between cask-conditioned beers and filtered beers lies in the presence of live yeast, which is able to feed on any fermentable sugars remaining in the beer from the time it is racked into cask at the brewery and to impart its own individual imprint of aromas and flavors as well as life-enhancing carbonation.
However, what might be termed CAMRA’s “cause celebre” has inspired the fundamentalists of the campaign to insist that even a noninvasive blanket of carbon dioxide at atmospheric pressure to protect slow-selling beers from the ravages of oxidation must be construed as an unnatural interference with the aroma, flavor, and mouthfeel of cask ale, thereby rendering it “nonreal.” However, studies clearly demonstrate that the cask breather system protects the beer without actually adding carbon dioxide to the liquid. Why, then, the controversy?
The strongest claim is that the air drawn into a cask on dispense somehow softens the palate of the beer, resulting in beneficial flavor changes analogous to the effect of oxygen on a young red wine. In fact, research has found this “benefit” to be generally undetectable and a CO2 blanket produced by a cask breather to provide better overall flavor to the consumer. The fact that not a smidgen of evidence can be produced to support CAMRA’s thesis has not deterred the dogmatism at work within the organization. CAMRA’s influential “Good Beer Guide” persists in “excommunicating” pubs that protect their beers with cask breather systems. Their beer rendered unreal by this judgment, a country pub can easily fade from public view and finally fail, diminishing the overall beer culture. These are, of course, matters of opinion—some Bavarian brewers might claim that the Reinheitsgebot declares many wonderful British and Belgian beers to be unreal. Perhaps, then, it may be up to brewers and consumers to decide which ales are real and which are somehow false. One hopes that there is an eventual determination that British real ale is a beer that is traditionally brewed and fermented, properly conditioned on live yeast, honestly served with the yeast intact, and without the addition of artificial carbonation. If such a beer emerges beautifully into the glass in front of a happy beer drinker, no doubt it shall be found properly derived and quite real enough to provide genuine pleasure, which is of course the point of beer in the first place.