GREENE KING INSULTS AMERICA

There must be something about this time of year. Halloween is nearby, and there's something ghoulish coming out of the woodwork. Exactly a year to the day after I wrote this and three years after I wrote this, the rocket scientists at Greene King in their ultimate wisdom have launched a program to flood America with fake beer engines for dispensing filtered, kegged Old Speckled Hen. What a house of horrors!

Real cask-conditioned ale is doing very well here thank you very much, and people now recognise the beer engine, or handpump, as a universal symbol of beer as it was invented to be. Greene King are probably too busy counting their profits and plotting what brewery to gobble up next to notice that if it kicked them in the Abbot. Misleadingly putting artificially gassed, filtered keg beer on such a symbol is confusing, deceitful, and potentially hurtful to the growth of true cask ale. Does Greene King think American drinkers are dumb or something? We DON'T WANT and DON'T NEED misleading dispense. In the land of so many great brewers with innovative beers, what do we want with a mediocre British bitter on dispense that is trying to fool us?

These Greene King devices are different from what we've previously been battling. The handle and plinth are what appears to be stainless steel, and the swan neck spout is oversized and incorporates its own cooling unit.

      

Any bar owner putting in one of these is misguided, and is wasting the opportunity to install the real deal. To add to the confusion, Greene King does send over Old Speckled Hen in cask-conditioned form (for dispense on real beer engines) to beer distributors that request it.