Bottom of the Barrel

You know how it is. The pint you have just ordered doesn't seem quite the same, or as good as your previous one from the same handpump. You'd enjoyed the last one and this purchase somehow doesn't seem to measure up. It isn't as clean or satisfying. It's flatter and just, well, just inferior. You can't quite put your finger on it, but it leapt out at you on your first sip. What could have gone wrong?

Now of course I am talking about cask beer here. Real Ale if you like. The live stuff. Because it is live, you need a little more care in both serving and drinking it. So hopefully this will help when you get the experience desribed above. There are a few possible causes: you may have got a dirty glass. Not so common and it usually doesn't get as far as taste. Usually you can smell a dirty glass, but in bad cases it can taint the beer in some way. Most often it just smells bad. A much more likely cause is that the beer is reaching the bottom of the cask. After all, all good things come to an end and it is a living product. Now my experience tells me that with some beers, particularly if they are fast moving, you can squeeze almost every last drop out of a cask with little loss of condition, though there will always be some. Some beers pick up taint from the sediment (aka trub or lees - deposits of dead yeast or residual yeast and other particles that precipitate in cask conditioned beer at the bottom of the cask) more quickly than others too and some sediment is just heavier and stronger tasting and more likely to affect the last few pints of liquid.

In the case of the "not quite the same" pint there are one or two tell tale signs to look for. The first is that the pint will take a bit longer to clear and secondly, it will not have the same condition. It may well have a cloudiness or haze that was not apparent before.  In the worst case you will get a tell tale sign of "bottoms" - the sediment at the bottom of the cask, which will often taste very yeasty, but not in a good way. A faint (or not so faint) whiff of vinegar will sometimes be evident. These are signs that you should hot foot it to the bar and say in your best apologetic manner "I think this might be getting near the bottom."

Good luck with that. Perhaps I'll do a tutorial on that too.

The apologetic bit is most important. You are British for God's sake, so it is your fault.