Ron said the bottle conditioned Guinness was one of the best beers on the planet. I don’t think I’ve tried it but possibly.
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the good old days…when the US was inspired by Europe, not vice versa.
aside from that it is the good old days, a case of Sierra Nevada costs me less than it did 20 years back.
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It was.
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I’d be interested in any gen regarding its demise. I probably drank my local pub (The Vine, in Stanmore, I wonder if it still exists) out of the stuff as it faded out, and upon first failure I was given some flimflammy-sounding story about Guinness blaming bloody Europe for not permitting bottle-conditioned beers to be exported, because you cannot guarantee the quality of something that changes in the bottle. So pasteurising was how it was to be.
The excuse isn’t a totally bullshit one, as two local spirits have been told they’re playing fast and loose with alcohol laws because the sugar crystalises out in the bottle, changing the ABV over time.
Of course, the story given would make all the trappists illegal, so definitely smells somewhat. I think it was just Guinness wanting to reduce effort.
I think it was more a case of why they didn’t start pasteurising earler. Guinness didn’t bottle much themselves but had other brewers and indeprendent bottlers do it for them. In Ireland a lot of the bottlers were small and without much equipment. They weren’t set up to process the beer.
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My recollection was that the BC variety came in a smaller-than-typical bottle - 187ml seems a bit small, maybe 250ml? Perhaps bottling facilities wanted to phase out that size, and the bathwater got thrown out with the bathtub? (Gold Label was also in a small bottle in those days too, IIRC, and that also disappeared - coincidence? Almost certainly, but speculation is free, in particular on a Friday afternoon!)
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I remember the Guinness boats coming over from Dublin to Liverpool. If I recall correctly they were basically big floating fermentation vessels. This was long after they built the Park Royal brewery. I think a lot of it was still being bottled by independents well after I started drinking in the early 70s. Then they built a big racking plant at Runcorn and a lot (if not all) of the beer went there for packaging. I’m not sure when that opened but was certainly operating in the 70s as I went on many tours there when I was at Liverpool University.
And a damn fine day out for an impoverished student it was. A couple of hours free beer - and they’d recently launched the stronger Triple X (perhaps essentially the same beer as FES?) so you could get well & truly bladdered - a three course meal with waitress service and as many ciggies as you could filch from drums of 50 that were set out on the tables to help yourself from.
I can only remember half pints and pints of Extra Stout.
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Park Royal only served the south of England. In the North and Scotland it always came from Dublin. In Leeds, the Guinnes was bottled by Musgrave and Sagar a former brewery that still owned a few pubs (the Town Jall Tavern was one).
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