Breaking News: Old Speckled Hen Sucks

Have you ever been in a bar and thought, "I can't decide whether I want a nice, smooth Guinness or some malt liquor"?  Well, Old Speckled Hen makes that question irrelevant.  Why not have both?  OSH places the creamy head of a Guinness on top of the desperation and bathtub residue of, say,  Phatboy(please click this), and they've been doing it that way for 30 years.  How have they survived?  Apparently, British people drink this.  I spent five months in England and I can honestly say I learned nothing about their national psyche that would explain their enjoyment of this.  In fact, many people like Old Speckled Hen.  Why, I cannot say.

"But Beermaster," you say (don't lie, you call me that).  "If it has been gross for 30 years, why is this news?"

Well, that part isn't.  What is news is the particular way in which they currently suck.  According to Gotham Imbiber, Greene King, the awful, awful people who own OSH are sending FAKE cask hand pumps to bars.  These fake pumps actually hook up to regular kegs and make it appear as though you are getting a cask ale, when in fact you are getting regular-ass Old Speckled Hen.  This might require some explanation.

My personal experience with cask ales is somewhat limited.  Though they fell away for a while with all the brand consolidation and Metal Machine Breweries, the craft beer renaissance is bringing them back.  In England, they are quite important and their being in jeopardy led a group of intrepid souls to start the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), a wonderful and passionate group devoted to the preservation of real cask ales.  Cask/real ale is a beer that is fermented, then aged in a wooden cask, relying only on natural carbonation: no added nitrogen, no CO2.  Then they are poured with a gravity tap or hand pump, NOT a pressurized gas line.  They are rare, labor-intensive, and deliciously complex if you can find them.

Above, ingredients being delivered to the Old Speckled Hen Brewery.

The other key part of this is that Greene King has quite the reputation as . . . um, well a bunch of assholes.  They like to buy local breweries, then dissolve the brands associated with them.  Or, even better, they buy PUBS and shut out local beers, instead selling "guest beers" which is code for "their beers".  So, in essence what Greene King is doing is pretending to uphold the very tradition they have helped destroy over the past couple decades.  It is pretty sad.  So, if you are in a bar and you see this fake hand pump, don't drink it.  Don't drink Old Speckled Hen at all in fact.  It's terrible.  Besides, I bet Tilt Green is half the price.