QUOTE (paul @ Feb 23 2008, 07:52 AM)
A bottle or can of beer doesnt go off if its warm so beer in a tap shouldnt.
Pour a beer from your tap & leave it in a bottle for a week in the heat....
Typically, homebrewed bottled beer is naturally carbonated & is "alive", whereas a force carbed kegged beer is basically "dead". On the commercial front, force carbed beers that are pasterurised will last well (years) & the unpasterurised micro beers just months (if kept well).
+++
Go to a pub that doesn't regulary clean its lines/taps & you'll taste the difference...
Cheers Ross
Ross
I am going to disagree with nearly everything you said!
Pour a beer from your tap & leave it in a bottle for a week in the heat..
Let's come back to this one.
Typically, homebrewed bottled beer is naturally carbonated & is "alive", whereas a force carbed kegged beer is basically "dead".
Up to the second comma, no problem, but why would creating the conditions that the yeast creates kill it?
To test this if anyone out there wants to shake up a keg to mobilise the fine sediment and run some cloudy beer out the tap and into a starter - see if it fires up over the next week.
On the commercial front, force carbed beers that are pasterurised will last well (years)
The Holey Grail of commercial packaging is to have beer fit to sell after about 1 year - not years.
The main reason being that it is impossible to remove all the oxygen; free oxygen acts like a free radical basically going around demolishing flavour molecules, this tied to the damage caused by any surviving micro-organisms, severely limits the life of "Pasteurised beer".
& the unpasterurised micro beers just months (if kept well).
Generally this is because of poor infection control; the difficulty that small breweries have packaging beer with low enough levels of micro-organisms to insure long package life are daunting, but not insurmountable.
The better ones have this well in hand and I think most of the good ones are moving to better packaging practices - and that we will see more stable long life beers as these breweries get control of their processes.
Last tasting night we had:-
Murray's Anniversary 1 & 2 (06-07)
Potters Hop Monster (from this time last year)
Not Micro brew but: - bottle conditioned ales
Coopers 04 & 06 Vintage
Hahn Millennium Ale (2000, well past its best but not infected)
All (except the Hahn) were wonderful beers; well crafted micro brew beers have exceptional shelf lives - not months.
Pour a beer from your tap & leave it in a bottle for a week in the heat..
Back this one.
Well isnt that the same as opening a bottle pouring some out and leaving it in a glass for a couple of days, then returning it to the bottle - naturally it would be infected.
There will always be some beer residue in the tap that is exposed to the air, this will be infected, and if transferred to a bottle will contaminate the rest of the bottle.
The argument isn't relevant to the question.
Go to a pub that doesn't regulary clean its lines/taps & you'll taste the difference
Well yes, if you treat beer/dispensing equipment poorly the beer suffers. Same applies to you, to me and to the pub down the street.
It doesn't it address the question that started the thread.
The answer was given in the first reply.
MHB
