All I Taste Is Cold

How cold should a keg beer be if it be coming from a cold beer keg?

The temperature of my drink has never been much of an issue for me.  I seldom drink tea or coffee (I guess 3 cups per year), they aren’t products I keep in my home.

Yep, not even in emergencies do I “put the kettle on.”

You come to my house you have a choice of milk, water or ale; possibly a cordial, fizzy pop or orange juice if I happened to have impulse bought that week.

The temperature of my drink has only ever bothered me when, as seems to be tradition when I was a child, the nights started closing in and the thermometer was dropping.  That is when my grandma used to make up Vimto or Ribena with boiling water.  Which I then had to let equilibrate to something nearer room temperature in order to actually drink it.

Soup is the only hot thing I really consider drinking, soup and maybe the dregs of a Pot Noodle (the impulse shop purchase strikes again).

Hot chocolate is OK, but as a child it was again something I let go cold and then refuse to drink until I’d managed to fish out the ‘skin’ that had formed.

Oh, maybe custard.

And gravy.

But likewise I’m not one for wanting freezing cold drinks.

The idea of ice in a drink strikes me as just meaning there is less room in the glass for actual drink.

Apart from the sugary fakeness, I don’t want a modern bottle of cider because I wish to have one hand free to gesticulate and use on a pub quiz machine, not holding a bottle because it all won’t fit in a glass filled to the brim with ice.

Beer is the one drink I buy where I’m conditioned to the temperature, I expect the wheat beer, bottled import brew, or even the occasional lager, to be colder than if I were to get a bitter, mild, porter or stout.

But at the Leeds Beer Festival, as great as that was, my overall lasting impression was that much of the keg ales I consumed (the booklet given out stated if they were cask or keg) were close to giving me an ice-cream headache.

This isn’t a rant against Keg Beer, this was actually just supposed to be a small comment about how being too cold can ruin the enjoyment of any cask, keg, “real” or “craft” beer I buy.

I don’t know if there is any way around it. But I still wish to have one hand free when I’m drinking a beer, not both of them clasped around my glass trying to get the contents to some sort of temperature which allows me to properly enjoy what someone has put their heart into brewing and making taste nice.

Or maybe its just me, my personal taste and my next impulse buy should be some Sensodyne toothpaste.