When I was 18 I left my mom's house in southern California and started wandering. After about a year I ended up in Plymouth, England, and found work in a pub called the China House. My time there served as my introduction to real ale--the bulk of the beer I'd drank up to that point was the stuff that came in 40 oz bottles--and with that introduction began my love of good beer.
On last year's trip we passed through England, and I took the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the beers that first inspired my love. English and Irish styles remain my favorite types of beer, and there are many wonderful American interpretations of those beers, but the beer in England is a different sort of thing. Here are some of the things I noticed:
English Ales are generally very low in alcohol. In the States you'd be hard pressed to find many ales below 4% abv, but in England they're common. In fact, the typical pub probably carries more ales that are below 4% abv than above it--I even tried a few ales that were below 3%! I asked a brewer about it, and he told me that it relates to the cultural role of the pub in English society. The pub (which is short for "public house") exists as a sort of communal "living room" for the English people, and it's not unusual to stop by for a few beers on a daily basis. The goal is to have a drink, chat with some friends, read a paper or a book, and relax. It's not just an end-of-the-week-let's-party sort of place, like American bars are apt to be.
English Ales are generally served from the cask. In America, most beer that doesn't come from a bottle or can comes from a keg, and kegs are served on draft. That means the beer vessel (the keg) is air-tight, and some sort of pressurized gas (usually carbon dioxide) is used to force the beer out. In England they serve lagers that way, but not ales. English ale typically gets out of the cask and into your glass through the use of a hand-pump, or plain old gravity, and that's significant for several reasons. Firstly, any carbonation in the beer comes from the efforts of the yeast, which normally means the beer is pretty still compared to what we're used to in America. (You'll still have a nice foamy head, but there won't be bubbles racing up the side of the glass, and the beer won't have the same bite.) Secondly, casks aren't air-tight--air has to be able to enter the cask to replace the beer that exits (otherwise you'd have a vacuum, and the beer wouldn't flow). And since the beer in the cask comes into contact with air, it will eventually go stale (oxidize). So casks are smaller than kegs, and if there's ale left in a cask after a week or so, it might get poured down a drain instead of into a glass. (I think this adds a whole new level of interest to the experience of beer-drinking--on top of all the other factors you also get variability relating to freshness.)
English Ales are generally served at "cellar" temperature. Cellar temperature is often just a little cooler than the temperature in the pub, which means your ale will be cool but not ice-cold. And frankly, it makes sense. With a lager, as compared to an ale, the beer usually aims to be crisp, clean, and delicate in flavor. Serving a lager cold helps to emphasize those features. But ales are more about being round, flavorful, even fruity. You want to be aware of the yeast's presence for more than just the alcohol it produces--you want to be able to taste it. If you serve an ale ultra-chilled, you rob it of the chance to let its flavors really shine forth.
English Ales are influenced by tradition more than innovation. This is more of a "personal opinion" sort of note, but I think it merits mention. England is an old country, with a sense of self that stretches back well beyond America's approximate two and a half centuries of existence. And, as far as I know, England never went through any sort of alcohol-free era that could be compared with the U.S. prohibition period of 1920-1933. In Britain, beer isn't some newly rediscovered craft, it's a longstanding part of life. (Also, England's economy isn't as oriented toward no-holds-barred capitalism as our American economy is, so they aren't as affected by business investors clamoring for the next big thing.) The result is a culture that, compared to the U.S., skews more toward respecting-what-has-been than fantasizing-over-what-could-be. My girlfriend and I visited a brewery during our recent trip (York Brewery, in... York), and it was decidedly free of "cutting edge" equipment. In fact, it was even surprisingly free of today's standards of sanitation. In England they don't seem as interested in the possibility of using new technology to control the beer-making, or serving, process. They don't want to artificially cool the beer to a specific temperature--whatever the temperature in the cellar is is good enough. They don't want to hold exact mash or fermentation temperatures either, or maintain a controlled environment that prevents any chance of contamination (the York Brewery used open-topped fermentation vessels, and relied on the foam krausen as the beer's only protection; maybe they're relying on dominant yeast colonies, built up in the brewery walls over decades, to prevent anything else from being able to gain a foothold). In fact, while we dream of what's next in America, in England they've got groups like CAMRA, which are actively working toward protecting traditions, and which wield surprising influence in the British beer industry.
The end result of the four above-mentioned things is a unique beverage, often quite distinct from what we think of as beer in the U.S. English Ale strikes me as rather wholesome and gentle in its nature. Sometimes it's kind of like a glass of bread, sometimes it's more like a glass of punch. In most cases, it's a beautiful thing.
