Let us look back to the start of this century, when one of the most recent and relevant pieces of writing was available. True bottling i.e. the putting of beer into a bottle after a lengthy period of conditioning in cask, then leaving it gently to mature with the tiny amount of viable yeast remaining, and, of course, no pasteurisation. Forced bottling which is closer to the majority of methods used today for bottled conditioned beers. This is the addition of a priming and yeast to a beer that has had only a short conditioning period, so that a quick and relatively vigorous fermentation can occur.
T here are a small number of brewers who practise the True Bottling method.
C ertainly we have managed to get oxygen contents down, and hence shelf lives up, but that is almost irrelevant as far as bottle conditioned beers are concerned, and would have been at the beginning of this century when long distribution chains and the requirement for long shelf lives were as rare as supermarket buyers. B ut survival of the tunnel pasteuriser, usually justified as covering a host of evils, seems to deny other steps forward made by nearly all breweries in the cleaning of their plant. Hence, the microblological purity of their cask beers is also denied. I cannot however claim to be an expert in any form of bottling and will therefore talk of our experiences and those of others who have been kind enough to help in my researches. The Process of Development Yeasts W e tried a number of different yeasts, choosing those that were most likely to give the desired effects.