Look how much I love this bottle-conditioned beer!

When I set out to write about the issues with bottled beer last month, I had a point to make. You wouldn’t necessarily know it from what turned out to be the world’s longest blog post, but I did start out with a point. You see, there was so much to say that I kind of got a bit lost and ended up going off on somewhat of a rant about bottle conditioning.

I started research on Beer Safari last week and it quickly came to my attention that everyone in the industry now thinks I hate bottle-conditioned beers or consider them inferior to their force-carbonated cousins. This wasn’t the point I was intending to make at all so I just wanted to set the record straight (plus I need to write a blog post of some sort and this one is blissfully – for all concerned – short!)

So here was my point: there are lots of beers in South Africa that I can trust on tap, but not in bottles. Some are bottled conditioned, some are not. At best, they’re flat, At worst, they’re infected. It’s by no means all bottled beers but it’s a sizable enough portion that makes me think twice about invested my R25 in a bottle. And yes, in my experience,  it is the bottle-conditioned beers that are more likely to be untrustworthy.

There are also some great bottle-conditioned beers and it’s not to say that I dislike the process – when done properly, it’s a fine way to get bubbles into your beer, On the first leg of my Beer Safari (KZN and the southern bit of the Free State in case you haven’t been following along on Twitter) I have had some very good examples of bottle-conditioned beers.

There. I can make a point in less than a thousand words…