Having seen quite a few “bottle conditioned” beers lately I’d like to reassure you all that ours are not cloudy and that each bottle does not have an inch of sediment in the bottom. There’s a bit – yes – but it’s quite compact and doesn’t get disturbed that easily. We use a rather long winded method in bottling which ensures that our ales reach you in tip top condition. We don’t just chuck it in bottles straight from the fermenter and hope for the best. Our bottling process begins with casks of beer just as they would be delivered to a pub. We stillage the casks for 2 days and draw off the bright beer, having tried a pint from each cask of course. The beautifully clear beer is then dosed with a precisely measured amount of sugar and special yeast and bottled by hand. The yeast gets to work consuming the little bit of sugar and generates natural CO2 in the process. After about 2 weeks the yeast has done its job and settled into a compact slurry in the bottom of the bottle. It’s at this stage then that we release the bottles for sale. The yeast will have formed a fairly compact sediment, partly helped by the finings in the original cask beer but also aided by the type of yeast we use for conditioning. Our bottle conditioned beers don’t suffer from ‘fluffy bottoms’. The bottled beer will improve with a little more ageing in the bottle and provided you’re reasonably careful and leave a little bit in the bottom of the bottle the beer in the glass will be as clear as you’d expect in a pub.
We’re hoping to soon be able to use the CAMRA Real Ale in a Bottle logo on all of our bottle labels. We ran out of bottled beer just before Christmas and I apologise to anyone who missed out. I totally underestimated the demand. We’ve got some ISB, Gold and 1779 conditioning now and we’ll be bottling again next week.
cheers
Dave
