Speeding up the ‘dispense’ in bars here and there

When I was a young man in Britain, I was already well connected to the brewing industry. The university department that housed my major also housed the British School of Malting and Brewing.

As a result, I shared many first-year classes with brewing students who were on a one-year study at the brewing school. Many of those students were scions of families whose names were the who-is-who of the British brewing industry of those day. Their days were numbered, but we did not know that then.

We spent a lot of time in pubs, many owned by our classmates’ families, because we liked drinking beer at a discount, and we liked learning about owning a pub from those who owned a lot of them.

Turns out a major problem for some pubs at some times was something called “dispense.”

This is the crucial art of putting beer into a glass and exchanging it for money across the bar; there is no table service at pubs. That problem arose when the pubs were crowded, and a lot of glasses needed filling in a short time.

The practical problem was that the barrels of beer were in the cellar below the bar and had to be drawn some distance through tubing up into the glass.

This required a good deal of energy to be applied to a large lever (handpump) on the bartop that activated a suction pump (beer engine). The process (dispense) was often much too slow for the demand of thirsty customers.

Those, of course, were the days of cask ales, aka cask-conditioned beers, in which the final preparation of the beer for sale happened in the cellar of the pub. This clumsy arrangement could not last, and such beers are now hard to find.

They have been replaced by chilled and filtered and carbonated beer in kegs that leaves the brew ready to be sold through modern dispense systems that contain electric or gas-powered pumps designed to dispense a specific volume of beer quickly.

The legal age for buying beer in Britain is 18 years old. Youths who are 16 or 17 may legally drink beer or wine in a pub if they are with an adult and have a meal, but they may not buy alcohol.

However, busy British pubs often contain such a mixed bag of people of all ages, especially on weekends, that it is literally impossible to know exactly who is eating, buying or drinking what at any given time, and there is no mechanism for knowing that information.

In all my years of going to pubs I have never known any person, including my underage grandsons, asked for age verification by a barmaid. I suppose that is because nobody is really interested and is willing to let the customer make sensible decisions.

Nothing could be further from the truth in the USA, of course, where we have a ridiculously high age bar (21 years of course) for pur-