Mine's a Pint Issue 42

Key Keg - W hat is it?
Roger Hart and Cambridge CAMRA / Beer Festival explain their thoughts on KeyKegs
Lots of brewers are producing more and
more interesting beers in kegs as well as
casks. KeyKegs in particular are a newer
form of keg that opens up options for delivering
real ale with interesting characteristics.
KEEPING IT REAL
A KeyKeg is, at its simplest, a plastic bottle
containing a bag full of beer. Unlike a conventional
keg, the gas you pump in to force
the beer out and into your glass doesn’t
touch the liquid. It flows around the outside
of the bag, pushing the beer out of the keg
without it becoming too fizzy.
As the KeyKeg isn’t open to the atmosphere,
you get all the natural, live-yeast carbonation
of real ale, but without the risk of the
beer gradually going flat. It cuts down on
the chance of off-flavours developing from
oxidation, too. Of course, some air space
improves cask ale as its flavour develops
over time. So there’s a trade-off. Different
serving mechanisms suit different styles of
beer, and having KeyKeg gives us more
options.
HELPING BEER TO SHINE
For example, most bitters, and quite a lot of
porters and stouts, will work best in a cask.
They’ll condition lightly, change gently over
time, and the initial air exposure when the
cask is tapped and vented will dissipate any
of those odd flavours and aromas you can
sometimes get with cask conditioning.
But the highly-hopped IPAs, saisons, and
really dry stouts we’re seeing a lot of now
are a different story. They’ll often serve
better at a much higher carbonation, and
want to avoid losing any hop aroma to the
air before they hit your glass. Some of them
are better colder, too. This is where KeyKeg
can shine. It lets a brewer put those delicate,
intricate aromatics front and centre, or keep
a slightly-sour saison fizzy and zingy.
There are other ways of brewing like that,
of course, and we’d love it if people compared.
Thank you to Roger Hart and Cambridge
CAMRA/Beer Festival for allowing us to
reproduce this article.
CAMRA’S VIEW
ON KEY KEGS
Not all beer served in keykegs is real ale,
but some is. It depends on what the beer
is to start with. In simple terms,
CAMRA’s position on keykegs is that if
it's real ale when it goes in, then it's real
ale when it comes out. Two years ago a
motion was passed at the CAMRA
national AGM to look into setting up a
labelling system for keykegs at point of
sale, to allow customers to distinguish
what they were drinking, but there
appears to have been little or no progress
since then.
Mine’s a Pint
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