Tag Archives: Pale Ale

An Enigmatic Beer

As a beer, we were pleasantly surprised by TED from Flat Cap. It smelled great — citrus hops leaping out of the glass — and tasted, we thought, not at all unlike Brooklyn Lager. (Which is odd given that it’s a pale ale, but we tastes what we tastes.) The carbonation is restrained, which we always appreciate, and, apart from a slight out-of-place burnt flavour in the first mouthfuls, there was nothing to fault. Like Brooklyn Lager, TED would be great to drink from the bottle at a party.

As a brand… well, we can see what they’re trying to do, but agree with most of Kristy McCready’s comments here. If we could change one thing, it would be shape and maybe size of the bottle: the standard UK 500ml ‘real ale’ bottle, combined with the flat cap imagery and the words ‘pale ale’ suggests an old-fashioned beer. A 330ml bottle, or something with a more unusual shape would cue us up for the more American-influenced, Brewdog-like product inside.

Or, to put that another way, people might not buy it because they think they’re going to get a boring brown bitter. (Hence pleasantly surprised in the opening paragraph above.)

The thing that really makes us uneasy, though, is the mystery of the manufacture, which has been prodded at and probed by Zak Avery and commenters here. We know Flat Cap don’t own a brewer; nor are they brewers using someone else’s kit. Could we call them ideas men? The label describes the beer as ‘craft brewed’, but by whom? Where? And to what extent did the Flat Cap chaps shape the recipe?

With so little clear information on the bottle — less than we get from Marks and Spencers on their own-brand beers — it might as well be a product of Integrated Bottling Solutions.

We know that Flat Cap are trying to address the question of transparency and look forward to seeing future versions of the packaging.

The chaps at Flat Cap were kind enough to send us a bottle of TED gratis, at no charge and for free. This probably did influence our opinion of it. What are we, robots?

Session #64: Pale Ales

Beer Mat advertising St Austell Extra c.1960

Phew. The Beer Babe has chosen a Session topic we can address without hunting high and low for exotic imported bottles: she wants us to write about pale ales. In Britain, pale ale, under its other name, bitter, is the staple offering of almost every pub in the land.

Yes, John Smith’s, Bass and all those other ‘brown bitters‘ are pale ales. In the small town where we live, we’ve got a choice of about thirty cask-conditoned pale ales/bitters at any one time, but we’ve written about most of them before, or have made a decision not to do so for diplomatic reasons.

But there are plenty of Cornish pale ales we haven’t tried and never will.

Throughout World War II, St Austell brewed nothing but PA (pale ale), ceasing production of mild, stout and porter altogether. In 1944, their PA used Tucker’s English malt, a little invert sugar (No 2), a big slug of caramel for colour and (we think) English hops — ‘Wickham’ being the producer. (A letter from the hop merchants tucked into the log promises at least a small allowance of best ‘East Kents’ for dry hopping.) All this produced a beer with an original gravity (OG) of 1.030 — about as weak as English beer ever gets, probably equating to less than 3% ABV.

In 1960, they were making beer intended for kegging and called Extra. It used Tucker’s English malt as its base, just like the 1944 brew. It also  included a small proportion of  ‘enzymic’ malt (acid malt?) and glucose alongside invert sugar 3 (darker than 2). In fact, it had three times as much sugar in as the 1944 brew — would it have been drier? Its OG was 1.040, so a bit stronger, but not that much. The name is pure marketing.

We’re still learning to read old brewing records (literally – the handwriting is terrible) and interpret them, hence the rather reticent descriptions of the two beers above. We’ll probably come back to them at a later date.

No Marketing Budget in Post-war Devon

Pale "A" Ale -- the Best Bitter in the West of England -- Brewed only by the Plymouth Breweries Ltd.
We found the above on the flyleaf of a The Homeland Guide to Dartmoor (undated but c.1947). It’s hard to imagine a plainer advertisement or, indeed, a plainer name for a flagship product. Post-war austerity and all that, we suppose.

On a related note, we also know from our recent nosing in their brewing records that, for the duration of World War II, St Austell produced nothing but “PA” (pale ale).

It must have been hard to get anything but bitter in the West Country in the 1940s.