CORRECT TEMPERATURE

At what temp should Draught be stored, and poured?
This may not seem like a controversial subject, but for some reason, it is.  The issue is that the best temperature for tasting your beer often differs from the best temperature for pouring your beer. The bottom line is, beer that is properly carbonated needs to be below 40° f/4° c, to pour correctly. Some beers will even begin to act up at 39° f/3.5° c. Most literature on the subject says 38 degrees Fahrenheit or 3° c is your desired keg temperature. This is not false, nor is it entirely true.
     Let me tell you what I think, and then defend it. Target your keg storage temperature for 2° c/ 36° f. 
    "That's too cold." drones Morgyn, who is my fictitious, archetype, Know-it-all.  This is mostly true, especially when you're talking about craft ales. Most experts will agree that the optimal flavor profile is found between 4° c/40° f and 7° c/48° f.. "But, what about light lagers, Morgyn?"  I retort. Most will agree that this style is best enjoyed at a temperature below 4° c / 40° f. Often, if light lagers are served too warm, they come across a bit sulfury, even when they are not skunky. It would be a disservice to serve these beers at ale temperatures.
     Our other archetype friend, Gui, would say, "Dat's not cold enough, bro!". What he fails to understand is that if you store beer any colder, it absorbs too much CO2. The excess gas it absorbs has no trouble staying in solution, thanks to this low temperature. That is, until it hits your customer's stomach. Now this customer is bloated, doesn't want another beer, doesn't want any dessert or appetizers, and may end up with a mild champagne headache. This results in a double whammy, of the customer spending less money, and leaving with an overall, poor impression of your restaurant.
   And regardless of where you fall on the taste versus temperature argument, the fact remains that beer that is warmer than 3° c/38° f will not cooperate, once In motion. CO2 is simply too large, and too active at these temperatures to remain in solution.
   We target 2° c/36° f because, this is as cold as we can store beer without over carbonating, but is usually cold enough to allow for fluctuations in cooler and glycol temperature. Anyone who has spent any time in a restaurant understands that cooler doors get left open, warm food is often put inside coolers, and that borderline is much more likely to fail than it is to succeed. If you tent Murphy to shit on your birthday cake, he will oblige you with a grin. 
     For those who absolutely insist on offering warmer, or colder serving temperatures, which are tailored to the Beer style, this is best managed at the bar. The easiest way to manage this is with your glassware. For your ale drinkers, purchase thick walled, heavy glassware. Store it in warmer areas. This way, the beer will pour clearly, and the head will be manageable. But with the heat sink factor provided by thicker, warmer glass, by the time the serving reaches the patron, it should be in a more optimal temperature range. 
   For that light lager drinker, you can simply chill the same glassware to a point just above freezing, or at freezing. Provided you rinse away any Frost on the inside of the glassware, it will work. 
   This my friends, is an example of maximum return, for minimal effort. Plus, when you buy heavy glassware , you have fewer breakages.
   The bottom line is, there is no perfect beer system. I could design and build a beer system with endless adjustments, gimmicks, and assorted bells and whistles. Of course, when I showed you the quote, you would have laughed me out of the room. As is, it is rare that a bar, or even a brewery, budgets enough money for the beer system, who is going to be willing to spend $500 per faucet, or more, for the perfect, adjustable, flexible beer system? The best we can do is design a system that will pour 95% of a given keg as a sellable product. If this is achieved, all the other little annoyances seem quite small and manageable.  Once you have perfected putting a drinkable product into the glass, rather than down the drain, you have already won. So relax, and enjoy a beer.
 
Thanks for your time.
Dan Broaddus.
     

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dear Fellow Technicians, Don't be Dicks!

This will be  a brief one. I just had to write a $344 bill to my best client because the previous service provider was an ass. Here in Canada, everything works in celcius, except, for some reason, Glycol Chiller settings.  It isn't that we CANT use Celcius, we just dont.  Why? Cant say. Maybe because all the beer knowledge manuals work with Feregnheit. Regardless, fine.  I  ame up in the business in The Greater Los Angeles Area, so I work comfortably in both scales.   However, what we need to remember, especially because most of the temp control units are made in Italy and China, is that when we switch to Feregnheit from Celcius,  we also need to change the differential to 4° instead of the factory fefault of 2°. A 2°F Differential causes compressors to cycle too often and for too short a time.  Secondly, if you set a password on a temp control, use the industry standard password of 22, or something pertinent to the business, or the manufactu...
Read more

IF YOU THINK YOU HAVE BEEN POURING BEER CORRECTLY, LET'S FIND OUT IF YOU'RE RIGHT.

Image
This may end up being controversial. But this is not a discussion of Art and style, this is a discussion about putting beer in a glass, rather than in a drain. Something I was taught to do, fairly early on, in this business, was to watch bartenders pour beer. I have done this thousands of times. How many do you think actually do it correctly?      Fewer than 30%, for the most part. The most common mistakes are as follows 1. Touching the faucet to the glass and/or the beer. The faucet and the glass should never make physical contact. Nor should the tip of your faucet ever be submersed in beer or foam. The main reason for this is because after you pour your beer, the residual from that core is exposed to the air . Bacteria and yeast begin to Blue. Flies like to land on that residual beer. Then after an hour you dip that into somebody else's beverage.   2. Opening the faucet and then without a glass underneath it. You've all seen this. Someone opens the faucet and the...
Read more

Horror Story: The Tale of the 5-keg Series

Image
This is a True story.  You will notice that I do not name the business, nor the town in which it is located. I do this to protect innocent parties. Crappy businesses often have employees, that either have nowhere else to go, or who are bullied into keeping their mouths shut. Furthermore, one or more of the businesses involved may have changed hands by the time I write this story. It would be completely unfair to disparage the new operator, without first seeing if they have made any changes. Usually they have.      In today's tale, I shall tell  of the Horror of the Five Keg Series.       I believe it was late Spring, when I was dispatched to a "Hotel", in a mid-sized city in Southern Ontario, on behalf of a local Craft Brewery. Like many cities of this size, in Ontario, it is fairly isolated. It has one or two smaller satellite cities, but for the most part, is surrounded by farmland or wilderness.  The city is an older one, founded as a...
Read more