Courage Light Ale (3.2 percent) 10 fl oz bottles often used to make "light and bitter" with Courage Best Bitter. Strong Ales and strong Pale Ales were probably the bottled types doing best in the 1980's. Again, my division of them into Strong Ale, Old Ale and Barley Wine is pretty arbitrary. I could just as easily have classified them all simply as Strong Ale. Immigrant communities were bringing their local beers with them. Red Stripe, a lager brewed in Jamaica and sampled Brown and mild, also known as a Boilermaker, is a half pint of draught mild bitter topped up with half a pint of bottled brown ale. Old And Bitter

Unfortunately, there weren't any Light Ales listed, which is a bit annoying. It's a style I'd like to trace through to its current virtual extinction. I can't think of many that are still brewed. Courage Light Ale is and maybe Harvey's still make one. How many others are there still? These hops were all that fresh but weren't that old either. Half being over a year and the other being over 2 years. Kaltenberg was a genuine Barvarian lager. It was originally brewed by Prince Luitpold van Bayern in his castle. Because with cask beers, there's no problem. They've been documented by the Good Beer Guide since the 1970's. But only cask and bottle-conditioned beers. Which leaves all other forms of bottled beer and keg beer pretty much undocumented. Bit of a bummer for someone like me who's interested in every form of beer. At least from an academic point of view.

Can you buy it today?

Ask for a light ale in any drinking establishment today and they would probably serve you a pale ale. Light ale was like a lighter version of pale ale, especially by today’s pale ales. So you are not going to get a light ale in any bar nowadays. Having said that, you never know there may be some die hard old school publicans that still serve it. If that is the case, they would probably serve you a light and bitter without any questions. So I was delighted when Bailey (of Boak & Bailey) passed on some scans of a 1986 What's Brewing article about bottled beer. One that had lots of lovely gravities included. Today you are in for a treat...nah, not really. However you are in for a beer that a lot of you older gents have tried. Courage's light ale. This one beer has a lot of stuff in it that I haven't seen before in a beer which we'll get to. My wondering is how close this recipe, 1965, is true to the one that's brewed today.

I'm starting to make a habit of this. Giving recipes for beers that still exist. Though I must admit to being a little surprised that Courage Light Ale was still around. Light Ale - the one beer that gives Mild a good run for its money in the cloth cap/old man stakes. It's likely that the emergence of keg beer paid a part in its decline. After WW I, bottled beer was very much on the rise. Mostly in reaction to poor quality draught beer. There was no room for the publican to bugger up beer which had been stabilised in the brewery. Mixing draught and bottled beer became common. Drinkers might well have preferred to drink just bottled beer, but it was too expensive. A half of Bitter topped up with a bottle of Light Ale was the answer. The example here wasn't, as you might expect, brewed at Courage's Horsleydown brewery by Tower Bridge. No, this one was brewed at the former Beasley brewery at Plumstead in London. Courage had bought it in 1963 and seemed to have run it as a bottled beer brewery. In addition to Courage Light Ale it also produced Brown Ale, IPA and 3 Star. Not that Courage kept it open long. Beasley's final brew was on Wednesday 3rd March 1965. I knew you would ask that question, so I am going to list the ones I know of. This doesn’t mean these are the only ones that were mixed, there could be many more. Also these are old style beer mixes from yesteryear. Whilst they went about their campaign for quality cask real ale, they are said to have ignored bottled beer. The poor little bottle of light ale may have suffered as a result. The thing is that beer in Britain has got better and better over the years. CAMRA deserve some of the credit for that, as well as the breweries too.Hodges, Chas (October 2009). "Chapter 24: No Pleasin' You". Chas and Dave: All About Us. ISBN 9781857828269.

So comes the good part, the half pint of bitter was almost always more than a half pint measure. So you end up with more than a pint of beer when you add the light ale. This was definitely the reason my friends and I would drink this mix. You get more beer for your money. Where Did Light Ale Go? Whitbread added two more lagers to their range in 1979; Heldenbrau and Kaltenberg. Heldenbrau was an in-house brand.There are two main reasons for mixing a light ale with a bitter. First, in times gone by, lets say the 50’s and 60’s, ale on tap was not the best quality. Not that I know first hand, I am not that old, I’ve just been told this by an older generation.