Pulling a pint, or pouring a pint?

The humble hand-pull, adorning many a bar counter, in pubs up and down the land is viewed, universally as a guarantee that the pub will be serving a traditional, cask-conditioned beer of some description – "real ale" if you prefer. The tall, pillar-like handles work by pulling on a piston-like arrangement, normally hidden below the counter, to pull, or draw beer up from the cellar and into to the customer’s glass.

The hidden pump is known as a "beer engine;" a device which first came into being at the start of the 18^th Century and was then developed and refined further as 1700’s drew to a close. The man best associated with the beer engine, was Joseph Bramah, a locksmith (Bramah Locks are still manufactured), and hydraulic engineer.

Beer engines were manually operated by means of the hand-pull on the bar, with the beer being drawn up from the cellar through a flexible tube, to a spout, just below the bar, under which the glass is placed. Traditionally hand pumps were mounted on the bar, although some modern versions clamp onto the edge of the counter. You can see examples of both types in the photos used to illustrate this post.

Prior to the development of these labour-saving devices, beer had to be brought up from the cellar, by hand, usually by a group of labourers referred to as “pot boys.” It made sense storing beer underground, where the temperature was likely to be several degrees cooler than in the pub itself, and as well as providing a cool and refreshing drink - even then, no-one wanted a “warm one,” the beer also kept better and lasted longer.

Despite the almost universal acceptance of beer engines, gravity dispense, where the beer is dispensed direct from the cask, clung on particularly in smaller and more rural pubs. Sometimes the ground wasn’t suitable forth construction of cellar or, more usually, the expense of digging out an underground cellar just wasn’t worth it, especially in instances where the pub had started life as a simple house.

I can remember several pubs like this, including the Honest Miller at Brook – the Kent village where I spent my teenage years. The beer (Fremlin's Bitter), was stillaged on waist high racks, behind the bar, ready for dispense to the thirsty punters. The Black Bull at Newchurch, plus the Three Chimneys near Biddenden, are other examples of Kent pubs that kept and served their beer in this fashion.

The Three Chimneys has been enlarged over the years, and is no longer the simple country alehouse I knew in my early twenties, but it still maintains the tradition of gravity served beer.  The Old House at Ightham Common, does the same, but I’m hard pushed to think of any others locally.

What do seem to have vanished are those pubs where the licensee had to trudge down to the cellar to pour each pint of beer and then fetch it back up, by hand, to the waiting customer. The Woodman at Hassel Street, high on the North Downs and quite close to my home village, has long been closed, as has the Mounted Rifleman at Luddenham, near Faversham.

I’m digressing somewhat as this post is supposed to be about hand-pulls and beer engines, and as I was saying earlier, the sight of a hand-pull or even s set of hand-pulls on the bar, is practically a guarantee a guarantee of a pint of real ale. But there was a period during the late 1960s – early 1970’s when this wasn’t always the case.

The advent of keg beer during the 1960’s had, in many cases made hand pulls superfluous, and even in outlets where cask beer was still available, many brewers (particularly the larger ones), had switched over to “top pressure” dispense. The latter system used carbon-dioxide pressure as the means of bringing the beer up from the cellar.

In this case the beer wasn’t so much “drawn” from the cask, as “pushed” by the CO2 was applied to the spile hole, in the top of the cask, and then used to force the contents out from the tap and then all the way up to the bar. This took a considerable pressure of applied carbon-dioxide, so no wonder the beer was often gassy.

The same flexible pipes, although plastic by now, rather than metal and rubber, bring the beer up from below, but with virtually all keg beers, and many “top pressure” variants, dispense was by means of a small box and tap arrangement mounted on the serving side of the bar. The boxes were often illuminated in order to advertise the beer on sale – Courage Tavern Keg, Watney’s Red, Keg Worthington E, Whitbread Tankard etc, but this means of dispense rendered the humble hand-pull, and its associated beer engine, redundant.

Many licensees were reluctant to remove their hand pulls altogether, as this would have left holes on the top of the bar.  Some did, and covered the hole(s) with a circular brass plate, but the majority left the pump handles in situ, because they helped maintain the traditional feel of the pub.

I remember walking into many a strange pub during the mid-1970’s and falling foul of this.  Fully expecting a properly pulled pint of cask, I was instead presented with a gassy pint of fizz, poured from a tap just under the counter. Greene King, who were just a regional brewer back then, even used miniature ceramic hand-pulls to operate the “top-pressure” system, that predominated in most of their pubs. However, once seen in action, it was easy not to be caught out by such trickery!

Worse though, were pubs where the hand-pulls appeared still in use, but once pulled back, a valve was operated which dispensed keg beer into the glass of the unsuspecting customer. Fortunately, such pubs were few and far between and word soon got around, particularly amongst CAMRA members, that these were places to avoid.

The highlighting by CAMRA of such sharp practices, helped to establish the hand-pull as the dominant symbol of real ale, but it had an unfortunate side-effect. Away from the southern half of the country, in areas such as the Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire, many pubs served perfectly acceptable cask-conditioned ale by means of electric pumps.

These were virtually unknown in the south, and I remember being fascinated as a sixth-former, coming across my first electrically pumped beer when the coach taking a group of us to North Wales for a geology field trip, stopped for a break somewhere on the Staffordshire-Shropshire border. A group of us piled into the pub on the opposite side of the road, where we were served foaming pints of Bank’s Bitter from electrically operated pumps, with a metered glass cylinder mounted horizontally on the bar.

I watched fascinated as the piston moved back and forth within the cylinder, dispensing an exact half pint, each time. We came across further examples in Bangor, our destination and base for the field course. Most of us weren’t old enough to legally drink in pubs, but that didn’t stop us, and most evenings, apart from Sunday – when the sale of alcohol was prohibited, we hit the towns local hostelries, most of which belonged to Greenall Whitley.

Metered electric pumps of the type witnessed on the outward journey, were the order of the day, and just over six months later, when I went up as a student, to Salford University, this type of dispense was a common sight in local pubs. Most Boddington’s, Greenall’s, Hyde’s Robinson’s and Tetley’s pubs used metered electric pumps, as did quite a few Wilson’s (Watney’s northern subsidiary) outlets.

To confuse the issue some pubs used what were known as “free-flow” electric pumps. These were un-metered and were operated in the same way as a keg tap. To muddy the waters even further, many of these pumps had the same bar mountings for both cask and keg. As CAMRA said at the time, in one of its guides, "The only way to tell the difference is to taste the stuff in the glass!" Free flow electric pumps were prevalent in most Bass Charrington pubs, and quite a few Wilson’s outlets.

As the “real ale movement" gathered momentum electric pumps began disappearing. Slowly at first, and they were still quite prevalent in the Manchester area when I headed off, back down south. Ten year later, they had virtually disappeared.

It’s perhaps unfair to blame CAMRA for this, as all the group wanted was to remove the confusion surrounding hand-pulls, whilst establishing them as THE symbol of real ale. Nowadays electric pumps, metered or otherwise, are nowhere to be seen – not even on Google Images. It’s almost as if, they never existed in the first place!