TOPIC:

"Blacckhawk":shg8texw wrote: Irish Red - very young..just kegged last night..[/quote:shg8texw]

You could have added some antifreeze to "age" it, them wine fella's are all into that <!-- s:lol: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_lol.gif" alt="" title="Laughing" /><!-- s:lol: -->

&amp;quot;silenus&amp;quot;:2imgifya wrote: Here's one of the questions;
Whats the difference between Irish Ale & English Ale ?[/quote:2imgifya]I've been giving this one some thought, and I reckon that up until the early 1960s there wasn't one. Irish red ale (a term, like so many others we use, invented in the late '70s by Michael Jackson) is a product of the consolidation and modernisation of Irish breweries. Iorwerth writes that when Guinness took over Smithwick's the Kilkenny brewery was producing a pale ale called Smithwick's No. 1. When Guinness decided, in 1965, that kegged draught beer was the way to go they reformulated it to make it less bitter and more appealling to the mass market. This, I suspect, was the point where the Irish red departed from English bitter.

I think there is basically no difference between the mass-produced Irish and English nitro reds. I doubt I could tell Kilkenny from John Smith's on draught.

Had the English market been as consolidated as the Irish one, the same thing might have happened. But by the time blandifying and kegging was becoming prevalent the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale was making noises about it.

In a parallel England where CAMRA never existed, I don't think there'd be any difference between English and Irish ale.