As a brief follow up to the discussion of CAMRA's definition of real ale in this thread, I thought I'd post the reply I got when I asked CAMRA for clarification about the 'traditional ingredients' part of the definition. Here it is
[quote:3dewrih1]Thank you for the e-mail.
CAMRA does not say that real ale should as in the Reinheitsgebot i.e. made just from malted barley, hops water and yeast.
We have looked at the possibility of coming up with a definition for “pure beer” but have realised that there are many very traditional real ales around which do sue small proportions of other cereals in the mash and there are some breweries that use a small proportion of brewing sugar.
The porters stouts produced in the UK as real ales do use roasted malt, some may use chocolate malt.
Certain brewers use a small proportion of maize for head retention.
We do of course have a number of brewers now producing wheat beers.
The whole purpose of the term real ale is to indicate that the beer is still fermenting in the container – usually a cask but could be a bottle from which it is served with a gentle carbonation.
I trust that this answers your query.[/quote:3dewrih1]
That suggests that whether something counts as real ale or not is entirely down to whether it is cask- or bottle-conditioned or not. So, it wouldn't matter whether adjuncts are used, and therefore something like Dungarvin's Blackrock Stout would count as real ale.
" title="Wink" /><!-- s:wink: -->) was using maize or rice etc...?[/quote:19tn3ji3]
