"Do you believe force carbonation gives a different kind of fizziness as opposed to bottle conditioning?"

In the comments on my previous blog post, Dom of Thornbridge brewery asked: "Do you believe force carbonation gives a different kind of fizziness as opposed to bottle conditioning?". This is the sort of question that is so innocently placed that it must be a trap, but nevertheless, I'm going to have a stab at answering it.

I'll preface this by saying that I'm going to talk in broad-brush terms, employing generalities to which there may be exceptions. However, what I say is what I think, and it's born of experience and education, although perhaps someone more expert than may might chime in with an opinion. It's also appallingly geeky, for which I don't apologise, but I do warn you that unless you find the title of the post interesting, the next 400 words will be a tad dry.

My gut feeling is that force-carbonating and bottle-conditioning do produce different types of fizziness. There may be some overlap between them – bottle-conditioned beer can be overcarbonated, and a filtered beer that is undercarbonated is particularly lifeless, and vice-versa - but in the main, they are different.

My drinking experience tells me that bottle-conditioned beers generally have a finer, softer carbonation than force carbonated beers. That's not to say that it's always preferable – I find the supersaturation of CO2 in many Belgian beers a bit hard to deal with, but again, this is a fine, small-bubble type of carbonation, whereas I find force carbonated beers tend to have larger, rougher bubbles. This is my experience, but there's also a bit of science behind it.

When sparkling wine is made, it can gain carbonation either from being fermented in a large closed container (tank, cuve close, or Charmat method), or it may be refermented in bottle (the so-called methode Champenoise). While both of these processes make fizzy wine, the methode Champenoise is generally accepted to produce smaller, more persistent bubble than the tank method. That's the science – I don't know exactly why, but I'd guess it's something to do with ratios of gas to liquid, and overall pressures producing a certain style of saturation, but that's only a guess.

One other thing I've learnt from homebrewing: the way a beer carbonates has a definite gradient to it. When you bottle a beer with a bit of sugar and live yeast, the yeast eats the sugar and produces CO2 in the the tightly capped bottle. What I've found is that the yeast produces CO2 faster than the beer can absorb it. So after two days, the beer is a riot of barely-dissolved CO2. In fact, I'd guess that the CO2 to conditioned the beer is produced within three days of capping the bottle – the rest of the conditioning process is about the CO2 dissolving into the beer.

Of course, what is actually happening in the bottle is just one thing. How the beer arrives in the glass is another. You can always pour a non-BC beer a bit more roughly, knocking the gas out of it. This does two things (for me) – it makes it less gassy (duh), and it makes it more tasty. It's more tasty because when the beer hits the tongue, if you've knocked a lot of the gas out of it, it doesn't erupt in a riot of bubbles, more beer stays on your tongue, and the flavour is more apparent.

So yes, I do think that force carbonation gives a different sort of fizziness than bottle-conditioning, and that's why.

Geek-out over.

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Thornbridge: Bottle-Conditioning for the 21st Century

There's no question that Thornbridge are one of the most exciting breweries in the UK today. While they stop short of actually using hummingbird's tears as an ingredient, they push the envelope both with what they can get out of conventional ingredients, and what they can do with more unconventional ones. They rarely miss the mark.

Thornbridge recently moved over to putting live beer in half-litre bottles. On bottles of Jaipur, it uses the phrase "bottle-conditioned", although this has caused a bit of confusion among consumers - if it's bottle-conditioned, why isn't there any sediment? Being an inquisitive sort, I called Kelly Ryan at Thornbridge. The short answer is that there isn't any visible sediment because they don't re-prime the bottles. The long answer is a bit, well, longer.

When Thornbridge moved over to their new brewery, they had a new level of control available to them. The closed cylindro-conical fermenters meant that they could allow the beer to carbonate naturally under the pressure of its own fermentation. The same fermenters allowed them to take dead yeast out of contact with their still-fermenting beer. Centrifuges meant that they could control how much yeast was left in the finished beer, removing the need for filtration. The conclusion to the long answer is that they don't reprime their bottles because they don't need to. Not only is there enough natural carbonation in the beer, there is also enough yeast left in suspension to keep things ticking over nicely when they bottle it. The fermentation continues slowly, maintaining carbonation and scavenging oxygen.

For my part, I've often thought that bottle-fermentation can actually substantially reduce the character of a beer - it's as though that vigorous secondary fermentation actually scavenges some of the flavour compounds from the beer. Or maybe if the brewery filters the beer before repriming (a very common practice), a lot of the character of the beer is removed, and never gets put back in the second time around.

So what do we make of all this? Is this live beer? Bottle- or brewery-conditioned? Does it even matter to the ordinary drinker? My take on it is that if 21st century brewing and hygiene technology allow this to happen, and the beer tastes better for it, then great.

Either way, what I find really impressive is that Thornbridge have decided to ditch 40,000 Jaipur back labels that say "bottle-conditioned” and replace them with ones that say “May contain sediment”. Not only do they care passionately about the beer, they also care passionately about getting the right message on the label. The devil, as ever, is in the details.

Jamie's Italian, Leeds.

Look, I know it's not a fashionable opinion, but I like Jamie Oliver's media persona. I think he's a good cook, genuinely curious about food, and has his heart in the right place. So bear with me, there is a beery theme to this post, but it comes a bit further on.

We went out for lunch today, to Jamie's Italian in Leeds, and with a 20 month old nipper in tow, you get used to eating a bit early - say, midday. He likes to have a nap early afternoon, and so we can either (a) eat while he's asleep or (b) lounge around reading the papers while he's asleep. Needless to say, (b) usually wins, and being of Spanish descent, I'm quite militant about taking well-behaved kids to restaurants. We got there just after midday, and we were about the fifth young-childed family into the place. Hey, they have high chairs, so that means they welcome families. Just for the record, a few weeks ago, we went to North Bar while he was asleep in his pushchair. As parents, we know what's appropriate.

Overall, the food was pretty good. There were a few minor blips, and service was a tad slow, but I'd happily go back. The main surprise came when the starters were cleared and we were asked if we wanted more drinks with our main course. I asked what beers they had, and was told "We have Stella and mwahmwahmwah". Not recognising the second, I asked the waitress to repeat what they had. "We have Stella and mwahmwahmwah. Oh, and we also have a bottled real ale". Ignoring what mwahmwahmwah might actually be (I saw it being carried around, but didn't recognise it), I said "Great, I'll have a real ale". I didn't even ask what it was - I was just so delighted that they had some real ale in a bottle that I plumped for it. Well, you have to send the right message, don't you?

I had plenty of time to speculate about what it might be - there was a slightly-too-long fifteen minute gap between starter and main, which with a toddler may as well have been a week. Might it be a celebrity beer brand? A local classic? A modern icon? Surely it wouldn't actually be, like, proper bottle-conditioned beer? But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is our waitress, and our beer is.... Cropton Yorkshire Warrior.

I hadn't tried this previously, and to be honest, I don't mind it. It's an ordinary brown beer par excellence. In fact, an OBB deluxe - it had a lovely full-bodied nutty character that I really enjoyed. But crucially, it didn't do anything for the food we were eating. And I'm not sure it would have done anything for any of the dishes on the menu. And I'm not sure which part of the restaurant's demographic it was aimed at. In short, it was a great gesture at putting a locally-sourced quality product on the menu, but one that fell a bit short of actually delivering. For my money, a better bet might have been one of the low %abv golden ales from Ilkley Brewery - beers that are both accessible to the real ale fans, and would also compliment almost any food you care to name.

But still, it was great to find someone in a chain restaurant saying the words "bottled real ale". File under: "the revolution continues"

Now Drinking: Fuller's Bengal Lancer

At the start of February, I spent an action-packed couple of days in London. In the space of 24 hours, I attended a committee meeting for the British Guild of Beer Writers, went to the Drinks Retailing Awards at The Dorchester, slept, met friends for breakfast, and visited Fuller's of Chiswick. The Fuller's visit was great fun, and I'm going to write in more detail about it over the next few days. But I'm going to start by talking about what I didn't get to do at Fuller's.

The tour and tasting that John Keeling and Derek Prentice laid on was so enjoyable that time flew by unnoticed, and by the time we got to the end of it, I had to literally run to the tube to make my train back to Leeds. So what I didn't have time to do was (a) visit the Fuller's shop to buy Vintage Ale for my birthday (I ended up getting it couriered to Leeds), and (b) stop in at the Mawson Arms for a pint of the newly released Bengal Lancer IPA. However, being a decent bunch, Fuller's forwarded a couple of bottles to me.

The beer is a copper-gold colour, and pin-bright in the manner that Fuller's beers tend to be, despite being bottle conditioned. The aroma is classic Fuller's - so classic that having visited the brewery, I can say that it smells like a cross between their brewhouse and hop store. If you haven't visited Fuller's, that's not very descriptive, so I'll try a bit harder. Bengal Lancer smells of spicy whole leaf hops (although they use pellets), toffee, ginger cake and ozone. On the tongue, there's an initial burst of medium-bodied malty toffee, which is slowly reeled in by a dry, spicy bitterness, finishing with bitter flourish and a faint puff of geraniums.

I like this beer a lot - it's got a lot of understated hop character which might fool people into thinking that it's lacking in hops, but when you actually pay attention to what is going on, there's a huge wallop of spicy dryness in the finish. It's a worthy addition to Fuller's roster, rooted in history, but produced with an eye for the quality and consistency that are Fuller's bywords. It's got that classic Fuller's character that reminds me of gingerbread and, most importantly, I've got another bottle of it that I'm going to eat with this burger and onion rings that has materialised miraculously next to me.