Serving perfection (Temperature)

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silverbrewer

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I have been brewing now for a couple of years, making English style bitter, because that is what I like best. The point of this post is that the single biggest discovery I have made to improve the drinking pleasure from my beers and also bought bottled beers is SERVING TEMPERATURE, followed by SERVING TEMPERATURE, with SERVING TEMPERATURE following up the rear.

This may seem a little mad, especially to those who insist on drinking their Bitters and IPA styles freezing cold, but bare with me, and hopefully you will see the light and try out the ability to simulate English cask Ale very closely, using either your own, or a bought bottled beer.

I do not know whether to waffle on now about the scientific reasons behind the English habit of drinking beer served at about 13 degrees C, or to just explain how to rig up a test to compare three pints of bottled beer that have been poured into the glass with varying methods, so that they are now as dissimilar as chalk and cheese, and let you decide what suits you best? Let's go for the second option

Minimum, you need 3 mates, 3 bottles of room temperature beer, 4 pint glasses, and a freezer. If you want to do a comparison with a cold version you will need 4 mates, 4 bottles, 5 glasses and a frdige

You need bottles of the same Commercial English bitter. Any will do, but Fullers ESB or London Pride do it for me, but anything that has a cask relation is good, so Courage Best (Out of fashion, but a good session beer, and dirt cheap at ALDI) or Marsdons Pedigree, etc etc

You take the room temp bottles, keep one at room temp (20 deg) and put 1 in the fridge. Next day, put the remaining 2 bottles in a freezer (-22 deg) for EXACTLY 25 minutes, and OR do the much more sensible option and put the bottles in a spare fridge with an STC1000 controller rigged to it, set to 13 degrees, and leave it for a day or so to settle to temp.

When you have 1 bottle at room temp, 1 bottle at fridge temp, and 2 bottles at 13 degrees, (+ or - a degree) pour into glasses as follows.

Pour the room temp bottle gently into the glass, to simulate most peoples beer.
Pour the fridge temp bottle gently into the glass, to simulate the American style serving.
Pour one of the 13 degree bottles gently into a glass, to simulate a correct temperature but probably overly carbonated beer.
Pour the second 13 degree bottle from as high above the glass as you can sensibly manage (say a foot) and get ready with the spare glass as you will be getting mostly foam. when the bottle is empty, pour the fullest glass into the emptiest glass, once again from about a foot, waiting for the head to subside until you have a full pint. This simulates a pint of cask ale.

Drink and compare each glass within 15 minutes so the beers stay near their target temperatures.

The room temperature pint should be too warm and may present as flatter or fizzier than the "cask" pint.
The fridge temperature pint should seem relatively tasteless and very carbonated by comparison to the "cask" pint
The 13 degree gently poured pint should have taste, but too much carbonation.
And finally, the roughly poured pint should be absolutely bloody marvelous


The roughly poured 13 degree beer will have lost a good bit of it's carbonation, but critically, not all of it, because PROVIDING it is at 13 degrees when it was poured, there should still be about 1 pint of Co2 gas within the body of liquid, so you should get a reasonable rendition of a pint of cask ale, which, in your average British Pub, has first been cooled to 13 degrees while it is under delivery pressure, has had it's excess pressure released so it is at atmospheric pressure, then is served relatively roughly through a hand pump style "beer engine" If the room temperature pint was poured roughly virtually all of the carbonation would escape and you would have a truly flat, warm pint of beer!!!!!!!

It would be interesting to see the outcome of anyone's empirical testing, but I bet there is not a single idiot still reading this far into this example of sadness!
 
I am unable to say how your Hefeweizen will taste after applying this method, but for English style bitters you get a much "creamier" taste when the carbonation is reduced to these levels.

The trade calls this level of carbonation "1 volume per volume" and it happens naturally if a pre-pressurized beer is allowed to reduce pressure to atmospheric while at 13 degrees C, provided the gas above the beer is CO2.

It is hard to get your head around the fact that if you had a glass of freshly served beer, carbonated to 1VpV in a room full of CO2 at 13 degrees and at atmospheric pressure, the beer in the glass would stay at that level of carbonation forever!!!! That's why pub cellars should be about 13 degrees....or with a bit of artistic licence, if you live and drink in a country that is at 13 degrees, you never have flat beer!!!

If you were to let the pressure gently out of a 13 degree C corny of beer. and then connected it to a Co2 supply at 5 psi via a "cask aspirator" you would achieve the same state. The cask aspirators job is to supply CO2 at atmospheric pressure to the corny if some beer is served, and should the beer pressurize itself in any way due to continued fermentation, it would let that CO2 escape as well. A simpler method would be to connect the corny to a beach ball full of CO2. this would achieve the same thing with the proviso that if fermentation is lively the ball could explode and if beer is served in quantity, the ball could run out of CO" to supply the demand, so you would need a 4.5 gallon beach ball and a watchful eye!!!!

In the UK, cask aspirators cost about £70
 
It is hard to get your head around the fact that if you had a glass of freshly served beer, carbonated to 1VpV in a room full of CO2 at 13 degrees and at atmospheric pressure, the beer in the glass would stay at that level of carbonation forever!!!! That's why pub cellars should be about 13 degrees....or with a bit of artistic licence, if you live and drink in a country that is at 13 degrees, you never have flat beer!!!

That's really cool! :O
 
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