Understanding the formats beer comes in
The story of a beer may well start as an idea in the brewer’s mind, or with the ingredients that enable their recipes to shine. The container plays just as important a role in the development, transportation, and enjoyment of beer by the drinker. Different containers allow specific types of beer to be enjoyed at their best. Understanding containers, like getting to know hops and malts, allows us to make more informed choices when selecting that next glass at the bar.
On the way from the brewery to your glass, beer is delivered from a variety of containers, including bottles, cans, kegs, casks and various ‘membrane kegs’ (of which KeyKeg is the most common). You all know about bottles and cans, you probably know about casks but what about the different types of keg?
Before we go on, we had better briefly mention the difference between container conditioning and brewery conditioning – this subject will be covered in future Learn and Discover pages.
Conditioning refers jointly to the processes of maturing beer to develop its final rounded flavours and to the method by which beer is carbonated – two processes which go hand in hand to produce a finished beer. Most beer is force carbonated – literally forcing carbon dioxide (CO2) pressure into a sealed tank until it dissolves in the beer – this can only be done in the brewery.
The alternative is to condition beer by the action of yeast on residual sugars to generate CO2, a method also known as secondary fermentation. This latter method of conditioning can also take place in tanks in the brewery before beer is packaged or can take place in its final container. Whether that container is a cask, a keg, a can or a bottle, the process is similar – the beer put into the container isn’t finished. It contains live yeast and sugars and continues to ferment and mature in the container.
In the 70s and 80s most draft beer clearly divided into either cask-conditioned ales or filtered, pasteurised and force carbonated keg beers. However, as with many brewing processes, modern technology has brought more complexity to the conditioning process than we can cover here. The modern generation of tech blur the boundaries as the beer can be conditioned in their container and may even be brewery–conditioned as well, as well as being force carbonated in the “normal” fashion.
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