Bottles


About Real Ale in a bottle


Beer drinking at home is on the increase. Although CAMRA encourages the use of your local, we cannot ignore this fact and therefore are promoting bottle conditioned beers, or ‘Real Ale in a Bottle’.

This is the next best thing, and the bottled equivalent, of the draught real ales you can enjoy at the pub. The beer is unpasteurised and is not artificially carbonated. It is a natural live product which contains yeast for a slow secondary fermentation in the bottle, providing wonderful fresh flavours and a pleasant, natural effervescence. However, not all ale brands are bottled in this manner.

To check whether a product is a ‘real ale in a bottle’, you can look for the term bottle-conditioned on the label.
Another term you might see is ‘conditioned in the bottle’.

Real Ale in a Bottle logo
To remove confusion CAMRA has launched a hallmark ‘CAMRA says this is real ale’ to clearly identify for you products that are the real thing: natural, living beers. Over the coming months you will start to see this logo appearing on the bottle labels of eligible beers.