2024 CAMRA Supreme Champion Beer of Britain. Yes, the number one. A superb premium 5% golden ale with wonderful aromas of Amarillo hops and a lasting spicy and orangy flavour. Cara malt provides a little burnished colour, but the light body belies its strength. Dangerously drinkable! Wine-Boutique buyer John Greenwold writes.... Last year, a beer that we have enjoyed in bottle for so many years was awarded CAMRA Supreme Champion Beer of Britain 2024. This is no small achievement and is actually the third time Crouch Vale has won, having done so twice before with Brewer’s Gold in 2005 and 6. We are partners with Crouch Vale in that we carry out all their retail mail-order of bottles nationally and this Christmas we got a lot of extra orders as a result of the award. But here’s the thing. The ale that won was from cask and was, therefore, “naturally-conditioned”; a thing people talk about without always really knowing what it means. And it means everything. Something I bang on about a lot is texture/mouthfeel and the effects that texture has on the drinking experience. Arguably we spend a lot more time considering flavour than we do mouthfeel, even though they are inseparable on the palate.Naturally-conditioned means that production of the beer starts in the brewery but finishes in the container (be it a cask, can or bottle) when yeasts and sugars still present in the liquid cause a secondary fermentation; a gentle fermentation that creates very fine natural carbonation that should never reach “fizziness” but which when combined with a not-so-cold serving temperature of around 10/15 degrees, delivers a unique and irresistible foam in the mouth. This texture permits optimum delivery of whatever flavours are present. One of the joys of remaining British is easy access to high-quality cask-conditioned ale - one of the best drinks on the planet. It causes me physical pain when I consider the juxtaposition on the same bar of some the world’s best ales with some of the world’s shittest “lagers”. We don’t have the facility in our shops to offer cask-conditioned ale. It’s a whole world of commitment and skill that we just can’t deliver well so we don’t try, relying instead mainly on bottles. Those bottles come in two forms; brewery-conditioned and bottle-conditioned. They generally look the same but really could not be more different. Brewery-conditioned means brewing starts and finishes at the brewery with the end product being filtered, carbonated with CO2 and packaged for sale. You get a reasonable shelf life and very consistent quality of drink. These are generally served chilled and are quite fizzy in the mouth. Bottle-conditioned on the other hand emulates cask-conditioned more closely, being bottled unfiltered with some unspent yeast remaining present. Some divergence of definition may occur here in that Crouch Vale also do NOT carbonate at all at this point while lesser breweries sometimes do. Allegedly.The optimal serving of bottle-conditioned calls for storage upright for a day or two before consumption, 10/15 degrees (give or take) and careful pouring as sediment remains. So a bit of a faff then. Our regular stock of Crouch Vale beers are in brewery-conditioned form and are good, really good even. I take them home regularly for me and my guests and they are popular with our customers. Choosing words carefully here, being brewery-conditioned, our Amarillo bottles do NOT contain the same drink as that which won the award. All the same ingredients in the same order (looking at you Eric) but crucially, they are packaged differently. And drink differently. There’s no passing off here; they are legally the same beer and we are not misleading anyone when we sell them. Same beer, different experience. So could we do better? As well as the regulars of Brewer’s Gold, Essex Boys and Amarillo, brewer Colin Bocking who creates these nectars almost always offers a bottle-conditioned beer for sale in varying styles and they are invariably excellent and SO close to pub cask as to be almost interchangeable. He has the facility albeit not in-house - he has to send casks to a partner business for bottling and even the bottles themselves are different. Everything is different and more work, but Colin persists. Because it is the right thing to do. But Colin is old. Tired even. And having spent almost an entire career futilely explaining the difference between bottle and brewery-conditioned, can even get a bit grumpy sometimes. I can see him now in my mind’s eye sighing quietly and with dropped shoulders as a bottle-conditioned ale is chilled to buggery before being poured non-stop into a stackable Nonik glass for a customer who has ordered “Craft Ale”. To Colin, this is fine old Champagne being squirted up a footballer’s nose. All that work, all that effort…. Around Christmas time I visited Colin at the South Woodham Ferrers brewery (check out his Taproom 19 if you are in the area in the evening) and asked him if he would make a bottle-conditioned Amarillo for me. They had already discussed the possibility at Crouch Towers and decided on balance not to, on the grounds that it would mean having two side-by-side Amarillo bottles in stock branded similarly but requiring very different handling; a disaster in other words. But I sensed he was persuadable, that perhaps a tiny part of him was still clinging gamely to that so-damaged dream of someone somewhere, one day, grasping the idea of bottle-conditioned beer. Perhaps he wasn’t too far gone. And he was persuaded. Terms were agreed and a label designed which includes the Wine-Boutique branding - while a few will sell through the brewery shop and Tap Room 19, it will be otherwise exclusive to Wine-Boutique. Just promise to be gentle with it.
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