Cambridge Scientific Solutions Ltd.

One of the most important factors in helping to serve top quality beer is your beer cellar temperature. If your beer cellar temperature is either too warm or too cold, you are going to have problems. The ideal beer cellar temperature is 12°C. You can go a degree either way, but anything more than that and you are in trouble. With cask beer, if the temperature goes over 13°C it will spoil the beer because the yeast needed for the secondary fermentation will metabolise the sugars far too quickly, and that will result in a sour pint that tastes like vinegar and is very bitter. In addition, it will also reduce the shelf life in the same way that would happen if you left a plate of liver unrefrigerated in the kitchen. With keg beers, too much heat causes fobbing, which is going to increase your beer wastage and, therefore, loss of profit. You can’t win the other way, either. If the beer cellar temperature is too low, it will cause a chill haze to form in bo...

One of the biggest questions that many pub landlords and bar owners have is how to make beer usage savings . All of us know that we lose beer when we clean the beer lines, and that it can’t be helped. Pouring two or three pints of perfectly good beer down the drain is against all logic, but it can’t be helped. Or can it? There is a system available that actually reduces the cycle of beer line cleaning and that will result in huge beer usage savings. Imagine if you only had to clean your beer lines once a month? Or even as infrequently as every seven weeks? Just think how much time that would save, and even more importantly how much beer you would save. There is actually a product that you can rent that will do exactly that. Another way of making beer usage savings is to install FOB detectors. These are designed to keep your beer lines filled with beer, and nothing but beer – not foam. When you get to the bottom of a keg or cask your tap starts to spit foam...

Beer line cleaning is one of those jobs that everybody who runs a pub, bar, club, or restaurant that serves draught beer, has to do, but we have yet to meet anyone who enjoys it. What’s more, it is a job that has o be done on a regular basis – every week in most instances - if you want to serve the perfect pint – and you do want to do that because that’s what keeps customers coming back for more. Beer line cleaning procedures can be very tedious and time-consuming, because you have to run up and down from cellar to bar, and then you have gaps where you have to wait while the beer line cleaner goes to work, and there is nothing you can really do except sit and wait. Beer line cleaning procedures are used to remove the contaminants which can build up in the beer lines and these can be yeast, moulds, beer stone, limescale, and bacteria. Yeasts can be left over from the brewing process or they can be wild yeasts that float around in the air. You will usually...

Keeping your pub cellar temperature at the right level is critical to the dispense of your beers. Your beer should be stored at 12°C (53.6°F). It is OK to go a degree or so either way, but above 13°C your cask beer will spoil. This is because the yeast required to cause secondary fermentation in the conditioning process will metabolise the sugars far too quickly causing a sour taste like vinegar, and very bitter flavour. It will also reduce the shelf life of the beer in much the same way as it would if you left a bottle of milk outside the fridge in the kitchen. As far as keg beers are concerned, it will increase the risk of fobbing which makes it harder to pour and is very wasteful. Your pub cellar temperature must not be too cold either. Too cold a temperature can cause the yeast to slow down or become inactive, slowing down the secondary fermentation and taking longer to develop the right flavours, if you get there at all. In both cask and keg beers it can...

Shipyard Brewery USA is based in Portland, Maine, and is a family-owned brewery producing award-winning beers with their team of craftsmen who learned their trade from Alan Pugsley, the world-renowned master brewer. They continually experiment with new brews at their pilot system in Portland and their 7-barrel system at Federal Jack’s Brew Pub which is in Kennebunk Harbor 20 miles away. One innovative feature on the Shipyard Brewery USA website is their beer finder. You simply select a city, select how many miles from that city you wish to cover, and the website then instantly shows you all their retail outlets in that area that have recently purchased their beers. To give you an idea of the popularity of Shipyard Brewery USA beers, we entered the city of Bangor, which is the third largest in Maine and 130 miles from Portland, entered “10 miles from Bangor” and up came exactly 50 retail outlets within that area that stock Shipyard Brewery beers. It also showed whi...

Cleaning beer lines is a chore, no doubt about it, but is something that every pub landlord must undertake on a regular basis. The brewery may take up to several months to brew and finish a keg of beer and yet it can be ruined in few seconds it takes to travel from the keg to the tap if the beer lines are not cleaned and have become infected with yeasts or mould. A number of things can affect the quality of beer, and one of those is yeasts. This may be small amount of yeast that is left over from the brewing process, or it could be wild yeasts that float in the air around us. Yeasts are usually found on parts of the system which are exposed to the air such as taps, keg couplers, and drains. Moulds are also found on the parts of the system exposed to air, and they may also grow on cellar walls. These are usually brown or black in colour and produce an off-taste in the beer. Bacteria can be another problem and may grow on the inside of the beer lines. They...