At last: National Bass Day
After a two year pandemic delay it is National Bass Day on April 16 (details can be found on Facebook). I am unfortunately sceptical of being able to participate directly as cask Bass is hard to find outside of the Midlands and even cans in supermarkets and off licences now seem scarce.
It has a chequered history in recent times and is currently brewed by Marstons at Burton although unfortunately not using their union system, which under previous owners, helped to give the beer such a distinctive character.
My interest however was specifically piqued by a post by those veteran beer writers Boak and Bailey about the time in the mid-1970s that the O.G. of Bass was raised from 1039 to 1044. Ostensibly this was to compete with other cask beers then new to market, probably Allied’s Burton Ale which had an O.G. of 1048.
I drank a fair bit of draught Bass in the second half of the 1970s, firstly, sparkled(and is now it’s now known banked) at the Sun Inn in Stockton and then at the Railway Tavern in Crouch End, where it was neither sparkled or banked. It was a classic cask ale and preferable in North London to the then already rather dumbed down Charrington IPA.
I’m not sure how or quite when the increase in strength took place or, as particularly, when it decreased from 1044 which from memory (often faulty of course) was the consistent strength of the keg version, Worthington E.
My memory again perhaps faulty is that the increase back to 1044 O.G. was at least in part due to pressure by CAMRA members who were dismayed at the earlier reduction to 1039.
I wonder if anyone has some actual documentation as opposed to memories on this?
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