Brews & Eats
To fine or not to fine? Brewery Bird presents both sides of the fining argument when it comes to her favourite brews

Ask the average ale drinker if she or he knows what finings are and you’re likely to receive one of two responses: “It’s the stuff they put in beer to make it clear”, and “it’s made from fish bladders”.

Correct. Next question: Would you prefer to drink beer of sparkling clarity or that’s hazy, sometimes murky? Traditionally, the answer would have been a firm ‘no’ to the latter; with most if not all drinkers presuming unclear beer to have something wrong with it, possibly past its best.

However, the past few years have seen a different trend emerging, along with the uprising of several new breweries concentrating on offering unfined, naturally hazy beers, brewed more in accordance with the strict German Purity Law Reinheitsgebot - which decrees that beers can only contain water, hops, yeast, malted barley or wheat – than chemically altered, filtered beer which pubs and drinkers have traditionally opted for.

Beer drinkers have begun to lose their initial fear of ‘cloudy’ beer’, thanks primarily to clearer information from an upsurge in publicans who just want to serve a well-conditioned and tasty beer, regardless of how it looks – and easier access to breweries who willingly open their doors and invite drinkers on site to better understand the brewing process and their reason for choosing unfined over fined. In addition, unfined beers are more attractive to vegetarians and vegans or those who wish to steer clear of anything fishy.

So is unfined beer better for you?

Allergens aside, beer which has been fined either through the use of extracted swim bladder or Irish Moss (a more V friendly approach to fining, but a bit more fiddly to use in large batch brewing), is perfectly safe and whilst the fishy aspect might not be too appealing, you’re not actually drinking the finings as they act like a sort of magnet, attracting the yeast cells so they sink to the very bottom of the cask, which means you’d have to tip the ruddy thing on its end to end up with it in your glass!

The technique has been around since the Romans noticed that their wine was much less opaque stored in dried animal skins or containers made from the stomachs of fish and swim bladders - before the advent of earthenware.

It’s all about taste

At the end of the day, before it gets dark,(insert other overused clichés here), it really is all about personal choice.

I for one, prefer to drink bottle conditioned beer, over filtered but choose to ditch the murkier end-of-the-bottle-bits down the sink (call me picky), but when it comes to cask, I don’t care either way provided it tastes good and is in good nick.

There is no ‘right or wrong’ when it comes to fined or unfined, and I predict we will see more breweries opting for the more natural approach to cask and keg beer.

And if this in turn enables more venues to stock real beer, that can only be a good thing. Right?!