March’s second day this year was a Sunday. My brother and I walked the Sussex South Downs. Almost three months since midwinter, the freshly peeled air drenched the leafless woods and hills with pale light. Yellow crocuses quietly exploded in the grass; the first larks unspooled their ribbon of song above. At lunchtime, we dipped down to the Ram in Firle. We sat at a bare table in its dark, womb-like dining room with our beloved hatchlings: two pints of Harvey’s.
I have lived in a thorny, stone-strewn Mediterranean biotope for 15 years, and visitors to my home in France sometimes ask what I miss about the UK and its latitudes. Broad-leafed woodland, birdsong and the British landscape, for sure: its endless seasonal costume changes; its soothing sweetness; the quiet nourishment of its rises, falls and folds. And with it, at the end of the path, cask-conditioned ale. Glorious and tragic.
Glory first: if fine wine (Bourgogne, Barolo, Bordeaux, Napa: wines that cost hundreds of pounds a bottle) has an equivalent in the beer world, this is it. A great pint of real ale, served close to its brewery of origin, in perfect condition – only this fragile, complex, living brew can rival fine wine in terms of aromatic finesse and nuance, flavoury resource, textural wealth, fermentative subtlety, digestibility and overall sensual satisfaction. All other rivals (including bottled and canned versions of the same beer) fall weakly aside. Fine wine and great real ale are true peers. The price differential is staggering.
Tragedy next. No one acclaims this parity. Yes, Camra (Campaign for Real Ale) members have known forever about the glory of real ale – but few have easy access to fine wine, while the minds of most fine-wine lovers are closed to beer. There’s little palate crossover: the wine palate looks for fruity acidity, and most beer seems to have none (though its pH, in fact, varies from around 4 to 5.5); the beer palate is looking for the wealth that comes from fermented grain and the fragrant bitterness of hops, neither of which exist in wine.
A bigger tragedy is that a great pint of cask-conditioned ale is a vulnerable cultural drink and not an industrial product, like other beers. It’s in mid-transformation in the cask – its yeast engine still working, its dry hops still disbursing fragrance, its conditioning gas still bringing texture and freshness. Perfection relies not just on the craft of the brewer but also that of the publican, too. Break the chain of care from brewery to pub and the beer collapses into mediocrity. You’ll only ever find such felicity in the British Isles; you’ll find it most securely close to the brewery. It’s the greenest of fine drinks: no glass packaging; the fewer delivery miles, the better. The distance from Firle to Lewes, where Harvey’s Best Bitter is brewed, is just five miles.
Harvey’s is relatively soft and rich in the pantheon of great cask-conditioned ales: it has darker crystal malt in the recipe, and the four varieties of local hops have classic English delicacy to them. Other great regional ales in the native idiom include Timothy Taylor’s Landlord from Keighley in Yorkshire and Batham’s Best Bitter from Brierley Hill in the West Midlands, as well as cask-conditioned ales from Adnams in Suffolk’s Southwold, Shepherd Neame in Faversham in Kent and Cornwall’s St Austell. Newer, smaller breweries have brought fresh life to the cask-conditioned tradition, notably through the embrace of often sensationally fragrant American hop varieties, especially Citra. There have also been terrible collapses and betrayals, too sad to recite – and nothing’s safe. Adnams has made a loss every year since 2019.
Lunch in the Ram got better still: crusted fresh cod atop samphire atop crushed potato, the Harvey’s Best Bitter a sublime partner. Might this experience go the way of Druid solstice rituals? The possibility is insane. Yes, it might.
[See also: The Hokusai of Sussex]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer