Here at the Merchant's Inn, we regularly have at least 9 real ales on our beer pumps. Obviously, our two house beers are on consistently whilst the other pumps constantly rotate with guest beers from all over the country.

We try and offer a broad range from draught milds and fuller bodied ales like porters and stouts to lighter ales. There should always be a good range on and hopefully nine different breweries for you to experience.

Although aesthetically this is all very well and good, in a practical sense it is incredibly difficult to perfect simply because of the very nature of real ale. It is live beer. To give you some idea of just how it ends up in your glass, from our fantastically small cellar (this makes life even more difficult), please see below.

Live beer calls for good judgment. Stock management matters in conditioning the ale. Casks must be rotated and stocked in portions that will be consumed within their short life spans. Cask-conditioned ale isn't exported because it's hard to keep. It requires a fast turnover to clear the cask out. In five to seven days, it gets an oxidized, vinegary aftertaste.

Basically, real ale is "on the clock" from the time it is ordered. It needs good judgment to get casks ready for draught because brands and gravities mature at different rates and even from cask to cask. Some take a matter of 12 hours, some can take nearly a week. It's getting the rotation of stock right that is the difficult part.

Although running a cellar is fairly simple it takes a long time to get it right. The basic thing is temperature control and keeping the cellar clean. Just like home-brewed beer, bacteria can attack casks of real ale. Pump lines are cleaned every time we change a beer. Spiling heads are disinfected regularly, and cellar walls are kept clean and dry.
As live beer, the ales continue to change. The cask changes while it's on. As fermentation continues, it gets stronger. You can come in and have a pint one day and have one from the same cask the next day, and you could say that it's not the same beer, as it has changed overnight.

Knocking a spile (porous softwood peg) into the spiling head (bung on the top of the cask) allows air in and carbon dioxide out. A little bit of the beer often foams out, too. The gravity increases a bit as the beer keeps fermenting. Every once in a while, you sweep the foam off the softwood peg. When the foam stops, the beer isn't breathing anymore. Fermentation is complete and the beer is ready to go on draught. How long the beer lasts depends on its strength - stronger beers are more robust, and may last for weeks, weaker beers are normally drunk within a few days. This is why turnover is so important for quality - ideally the pub sells enough beer that you always drink it at its best.

To put a cask on draught, we drive a tap through the softwood feeder peg in the cask's front using a rubber mallet, then the cellar person will check that the beer is clear, has the right level of carbonation, and has lost the unpleasant flavours associated with beer that is too young. When the beer is ready to serve, the tap is connected to the dispense system. then connect it to a plastic hose. The hardwood spile is replaced with a softwood spile, and a final sample is drawn off. The plastic hose leads to the "beer engine," a piston valve assembly at the bar with a lever attached. One pull dispenses a half pint. Pump clips attached to the handle indicate which beer is on which engine.

There is one final point about the beer's journey to the glass - and one particularly relevant to us at the Merchants. Serving beer through any handpump agitates the beer to some extent and aerates it. Some dispense systems deliberately maximise this agitation. A sparkler is a tight nozzle, normally at the end of a long 'swan-neck' tube. Beer must be forced through the tight holes, often requiring several strokes of the handpump. This agitation produces a thick creamy head; it also removes much of the natural carbonation from the body of the beer, and drives much of the hop bitterness into the head of the pint.

Such dispense is traditional in some parts of the North, and beers are brewed there with this in mind. Used on other beers it leads to a different flavour balance to that intended by the brewer - the beer may become blander than the brewer wanted. Here, at the Merchants, you can chose if you want your beer 'sparkled' or not.

And there you have it. We hope you enjoy your beer - if you don't, for any reason, just let us know. It's hard to perfect real ale, but having featured over 1600 in under four years of business, we hope that we are getting somewhere near it.