Keg with a positive spin

Intrepid Suffolk brewer Adnams has bucked a prevailing trend to create Spindrift, a keg beer that's actually worth drinking. Andrew Jefford reckons there is life after Watneys Red Barrel

"When we saw your piece in MA last October, we smiled at each other," said Adnams' head brewer Mike Powell-Evans, referring to his assistant Fergus Fitzgerald. "You were talking about the Magners model and asking why someone couldn't do something similar for ale" (MA, Jefford, 12 October 06).

We were sitting in the front bar of South-wold's Sole Bay Inn on a sunny winter's day in January. Outside, some of the poshest pensioners in the land hurried by in their hats and gloves; inside, on the table in front of us, was the fruit of Mike and Fergus's labours.

Keg ale: two words that normally evoke fear and loathing in the heart of everyone who loves the best of British beer tradition. It was cold, it was crowned with a snowy head, it had been sterile-filtered. I took a sip. And you know what? It was good. Maybe even very good.

It's called Spindrift - that's the stuff that comes spinning off the waves and blowing up the beach during a chill north-easterly.

The idea for the name came from the new chairman of Adnams, Jonathan Adnams - a man who knows a bit about the sea (his many lifeboat service distinctions are a well-kept secret). High treason on the part of a great ale brewer like Adnams? Apostasy? Prostitution? Not really: survival is closer to the mark.

Key to survival

Adnams is one regional brewer determined (unlike Eldridge Pope, Brakspear, Young's and all the rest) to keep brewing. There's only one problem. It doesn't have - nor, according to Adnams and his predecessor Simon Loftus, does it want - a large tied estate that will slurp up all the beer it can't sell elsewhere.

Adnams needs to sell beer to the pub world at large if it is to survive. Yet only 40% of Britain's licensed on-trade outlets are actually capable of serving and selling cask ale, still less of doing it justice. So if this brewer wants to have anything at all to offer most pubs and bars, it needs a keg ale.

The heresy, if heresy there is, lies in the assumption that keg ale has to be rubbish. Admittedly most of them (from Red Barrel onwards) have been rubbish, but that is because the ingredients and methods haven't been good enough, while the customer has been viewed, patronisingly, as a moron whose taste buds don't deserve anything better.

Anyone who's done the American micro-brew tour, however, will know that things don't have to be like that. Cask-conditioned ale is indeed the pinnacle of the British brewer's art, but it's not the only way. A keg is not a cage.

Mike Powell-Evans and Fergus Fitzgerald have started from first principles, crafting the kind of beer they thought quality-conscious drinkers would enjoy. The kind of people, in other words, who might have a Becks one day, a Hoegaarden or a Leffe Blonde the next, and perhaps a pint of Guinness or a glass or wine on another occasion.

"No British ale brewer is meeting their needs at the moment," Jonathan Adnams pointed out. The malt, 40% each of Maris Otter and Optic, is mixed with 20% of malted wheat, "to give it a smoother, rounder flavour with some spiciness and a wonderful lacing in the head," Powell-Evans claims. I half-expected to find a hit of grapefruity American hops, but it's classically English in this respect - or at least classically modern English, since both the hops used (Boadicea and First Gold) are modern dwarf varieties bred by the energetic Dr Peter Darby at Wye College. (If you want to taste Adnams' efforts with Chinook and Columbus hops, try its perfumed Explorer cask ale.)

Spindrift has a respectable 28 bitterness units, but doesn't come across as bitter. Its 5% abv makes it competitive with premium lagers, though the colour is a little darker. The yeast is an ale yeast, and at the end of the production process, the beer is sterile-filtered, although not pasteurised. It's given relatively low carbonation (1.8 volumes as opposed to the 2.5 to 2.8 more typical of keg lagers), and served well chilled at 5°C in branded glasses.

Taste of the summer

I like it because it has purity, flavour and depth, which few keg competitors have. I don't mind the carbonation or the low temperature; indeed, as summer draws nearer, I can imagine liking them very much.

It was initially available exclusively to a small circle of Punch pubs in and around the city of London, but it is now moving into the free trade more generally. It's been priced deliberately ambitiously at £3.50 a pint on the "reassuringly expensive" principle.

Admittedly, my Magners analogy only goes so far. Powell-Evans and Fitzgerald don't really want to see ice cubes bobbing about in Spindrift, and there is no multi-million pound ad spend waiting in the wings.

Slow progress is more the order of the day. But I wish Spindrift a fair wind, and I'm looking forward to sinking a few pints of it myself over the next few months. I never thought I'd ever hear myself say that about a keg ale.