British Lager - A Rant

I had the misfortune to drink a glass of San Miguel on draught today. There was no real ale in the pub that I went to (the place was not my choice) and I was offered a bottle of Newcastle Brown or Black Sheep as the nearest they had got (what??). Regrettably I chose San Miguel, as an alternative, from an array of shiny pumps, and was charged �£2.00 for the privilege.
I had truly forgotten how utterly crap British lager is (and British San Miguel is included in this). How sickly sweet and lacking in body and leaving a nasty taste in your mouth.
I will never touch the stuff again. I really won't.
How people can drink this rubbish I do not know. Why doesn't it taste like the lager beers you get in Germany, or Belgium or even France?
Thank the Lord for all the CAMRA folks in the 1960s and 1970s who kept real beer going or else we could now have all been drinking Son of Watney's Red Barrel or Carling or some other nasty stuff.
Rant over.

Patience is the friend of the Homebrewer. :lol:

Absolutely agree there. I've had the San Miguel in Spain and to me was a totally different drink, what they serve over here is rubbish.

I think I'd have taken the Black Sheep over any British lager!

Had a friend tell me he didn't like the pub we were in last night, because it didn't sell Stella or carling?!?!?!?

He didn't like the bitter they had on because it wasn't Tetleys either...

I told him to try the TT Landlord (it was on form) he said it was too bitter?!?!? And he couldn't finish it.

Sigh...

Battleaxe said:

Had a friend tell me he didn't like the pub we were in last night, because it didn't sell Stella or carling?!?!?!?

He didn't like the bitter they had on because it wasn't Tetleys either...

I told him to try the TT Landlord (it was on form) he said it was too bitter?!?!? And he couldn't finish it.

Sigh...

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You just reminded me of a group I my local last weekend who had booked in for a meal.

When the barstaff said they only have one lager on (Veltins), the women in the group were not happy at the lack of Carling, until one of them tasted it and was shocked at how tasty it was.

Herb said:

You just reminded me of a group I my local last weekend who had booked in for a meal.

When the barstaff said they only have one lager on (Veltins), the women in the group were not happy at the lack of Carling, until one of them tasted it and was shocked at how tasty it was.

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Sometimes I'm shocked how some are so stuck in what they drink. It's as if they don't realise tesco have a whole aisle devoted to alchohol and there are many different types...

Thank your lucky stars you don't live here. They still sell Harp.....

Battleaxe said:

I told him to try the TT Landlord (it was on form) he said it was too bitter?!?!? And he couldn't finish it.

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Public disembowelment's too good for him :lol:

I took a friend to a small club near where I used to work that has a microbrewery in the cellar. I enthused about the Club Bitter, the finest ale I've tasted.

He ordered a pint of John Smiths!

Yuk Harp!

I discovered a long time ago it's an acronym for Have A Rotten Pint and have steered clear since!

Japan is in a tighter, narrower thinking path then most. Only rice lager. And that's only what they drink at the bar. 1 beer. So when I pull out one of my beers to let my Japanese friends have a taste, I have to prepare them for the taste.

terrym said:

Why doesn't it taste like the lager beers you get in Germany, or Belgium or even France?

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Because it's deliberately brewed weaker. Remember reading somewhere that the brewers did this because our volume of choice here in the UK is the pint, whereas on the continent it's smaller glasses, and also we tend to drink more on a night out.

Our drinking culture has definitely changed in the last 10-15 years and we're now much more interested in quality. I remember going out with my dad and his mates in the 80s and showing them real ale for the first time, they said it was very nice but they couldn't drink 8 pints of it, so went back onto the John Smiths Smoothe

Kman said:

Absolutely agree there. I've had the San Miguel in Spain and to me was a totally different drink, what they serve over here is rubbish.

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Reminds me of a tour around the Coors brewery in Burton-on-Trent. Every name under the sun in the bottling plant. My mate was bragging that he drank san Miguel and they didn't make that here.
The tour guide took him aside and showed him the view out of the side window - 4 tankers emblazoned with the San Miguel logo, just leaving for Spain he said.... We brew it, they bottle it.. My mate shut up then :lol:

In Germany they have the Beer Purity Laws which forbids beer being brewed from anything other then malt ,hops and water so that is a major improvement to start with. I am not aware of anything similar in other European countries but the quality and taste of what they produce in this style of beer is far superior.
Our big brewers were and perhaps still are using invert sugar as an adjunct which as homebrewers we know adds nothing other than alcohol content. I was brought up in Burton on Trent over 50 years ago and can remember road tankers coming into the town with Invert Sugar or Invert Syrup labelled on the side destined to be used in the towns breweries, and this was before lager became really popular.
Perhaps tastes will change again slowly as supermarkets continue to carry the range of different beers, and craft beers take a hold. We can only hope.
Dads_Ale
I suspect that Coors were brewing the Spanish San Miguel to a different recipe to the stuff we get. That happens all the time. Brewers have the expertise to do this, but will only provide the market place with what they think it needs.

For a good part of my life I couldn't be bothered with the terrible beers that could be obtained around here. They were thin and washed out and to be honest, I just thought that's what beer was and I didn't expect anything different. Even five years ago I was happy with three pints of Carling at a curry house and a nice Chicken Bhuna to wash down with it. There has been a revelation in recent years for me. I remember going into the Brandling Villa with my eldest son and having a pint of some sort of American Pale Ale style beer which was a guest beer, I felt like I was one of those characters in the Vikings who had gone to Valhalla to spend eternity at a party with the gods.

It's amazing how much the marketing machine gets its claws in. Not only do they manage to flog all that crap, but they manage to convince them that they like it out of brand loyalty...

I've one friend who was a hardcore Guinness man, drank nothing else and wouldn't drink in a pub with "bad" Guinness. Actually walked out of the Salt House in Galway (brewpub owned by the Galway Bay Brewery) because the only draft stout was O'haras. Thankfully I've managed to open his mind (and pallette) over the years, now he's a fan of hardcore NZ IPAs!

Dads_Ale said:

Reminds me of a tour around the Coors brewery in Burton-on-Trent. Every name under the sun in the bottling plant. My mate was bragging that he drank san Miguel and they didn't make that here.
The tour guide took him aside and showed him the view out of the side window - 4 tankers emblazoned with the San Miguel logo, just leaving for Spain he said.... We brew it, they bottle it.. My mate shut up then :lol:

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£2 for a pint of SM is an absolute bargain.

Of the mass produced stuff, there's far far worse than SM!

MickDundee said:

�£2 for a pint of SM is an absolute bargain.

Of the mass produced stuff, there's far far worse than SM!

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My glass was a half, I was driving. So not a bargain :-(
If there's worse I rest my case!

The British approach to food and drink has been pretty much lowest common denominator for a long time. Feed the masses as cheaply as possible. The whole mentality has affected everything we do. So the beer industry has been run by industrialists, who look to make quick turnover beer with low cost ingredients that perform to their requirements. And the masses know no better. So, of course we can't make a lager as good as the Germans. Cos as well as our approach to brewing, we also lack their centuries of brewing lagers, working with lager ingredients, developing yeasts and lagering for long periods. English lagers are produced quickly and cheaply and are designed to approximate to a lager. Good enough for the masses, big profit margin.

Tony1951: I had the kind of misfortune to begin my beer drinking when Boddingtons was a fantastic beer, and different from anything else. Light, hoppy and actually bitter. It quickly deteriorated in the 80s and I spent two decades knowing beer could be lovely but rarely drinking anything even vaguely lovely. Then one day around 1998 a tiny bar opened around the corner from my then house and I met some friends there to check it out. I asked for a pint of IPA, went and sat down, took a gulp and blurted out something like WOR! Mates looked at me so I said, "that's as good as Boddingtons at its best!" Possibly better! It was a life changing moment, I never looked back, discovered other micro breweries and things have got better and better. Where I live there are loads of bars now selling craft beer, Chorlton is like nowhere else, a suburb of Manchester that has about 25-30 bars competing with each other. Including that first one, the Marble Beerhouse, and it still sells Lagonda IPA, though it's a bit different now. And weirdly, after I separated from my Mrs, she got together with the bar manager there at the time, so we both found what we were looking for in there!

terrym said:

In Germany they have the Beer Purity Laws which forbids beer being brewed from anything other then malt ,hops and water so that is a major improvement to start with. I am not aware of anything similar in other European countries but the quality and taste of what they produce in this style of beer is far superior.
Our big brewers were and perhaps still are using invert sugar as an adjunct which as homebrewers we know adds nothing other than alcohol content. I was brought up in Burton on Trent over 50 years ago and can remember road tankers coming into the town with Invert Sugar or Invert Syrup labelled on the side destined to be used in the towns breweries, and this was before lager became really popular.
Perhaps tastes will change again slowly as supermarkets continue to carry the range of different beers, and craft beers take a hold. We can only hope.
Dads_Ale
I suspect that Coors were brewing the Spanish San Miguel to a different recipe to the stuff we get. That happens all the time. Brewers have the expertise to do this, but will only provide the market place with what they think it needs.

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So much for their purity laws. They just discovered all their top selling beers are contaminated with Monsanto Glyphosate. Absolutely gutting