Wishlist #17: Decent UK Lager

Keg lager nearly killed cask bitter. When I were a lad, lager was cool - advertised incessantly and drunk by the bucketload. It may have tasted of bubblegum and chilled your teeth to the roots but at least it wasn't what your Dad drank - bitter or mild, the stuff that had twigs in and made him fart.

Nowadays, lager is still chucked down necks regularly although UK on-sales seem to be suffering. Erstwhile premium brands are watering down to reposition themselves in a market hung over with lager-lout and wife-beater connotations.

So now's the time to reclaim lager as a decent, tasty pint. There's been a quiet revolution going on for some time; Freedom have had a lager-only brewery in England for fourteen years; Moravka have been producing unpasturised (and even unfiltered) lagers in Derbyshire since 1997. In Scotland, Williams and Brewdog both bottle lagers. Outfits such as Meantime and Zerodegrees offer home-brewed keg lagers. The likes of Cains, Oakleaf and Harviestoun have all been knocking out cask or keg lager to appreciative customers. And it's not just the pale stuff; bocks, dunkels and schwartz have made their ways, kicking and screaming, onto UK bars in recent years.

The step change for me will be decent keg lager with national distribution. Good lager is out there - it's time to reclaim the style from the supermarket tinny-hoards and show that it can be as good in the UK as it is in Central Europe. I'd like to see Wetherspoons encourage lager brewers by offering one in each region a bar font for a UK Lager promotion. The mass market is nothing to be ashamed of and I think lager drinkers deserve better than the current fizzy swill.

3 comments:

  1. Which lager do Williams Bros brew? I must have missed that one.

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  2. What do you know, I post that comment and the very next walk into my local and they have Williams Bros Ceilidh cask-conditioned lager on as a guest beer. Very nice it is too.

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  3. Carlsberg-Tetley (as was) sold the rights to Wrexham lager for £1. Just think how many more classic lager names (ales as well) there are hanging about in the multinationals.

    I'd like to see the majors sell the brands back to local breweries/brewpubs (perhaps with a cut for themselves of the profits in return for technical help).

    It would recreate interest in local beer and grow the market, while encouraging interest in well-brewed beer.

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