This is the bottled beer shelving in Booths supermarket in Keswick in January 2026.

Out of that vast array of beers only 3 products are real ale in a bottle, otherwise known as bottled conditioned beer.

Yet just a few years ago, Booths stocked a much bigger range of this premium genre of beer which is unfiltered and contains live yeast, just like real ale in a pub cellar.

All of the other beers on offer are processed beers that have been either filtered and/or centrifuged and/or pasteurised, but they do not contain any live yeast, which gives a bottled beer a superior flavour. These beers, with their attractive labels are effectively keg beer in a bottle.

In the last year two superb bottled conditioned beers are now only available as processed beer, these being St. Austell Brewery’s Proper Job and Marstons Pedigree and they are not a patch on what they were when they were bottle conditioned.

The Thornbridge Brewery from Bakewell produces several superb bottle conditioned beers, their flagship beer being Jaipur, which Booths stock. This award winning brewery is also the last in Britain to brew beer using the Burton Union System, which they bought from Carlsberg, who had no further use for this plant when they acquired Marstons Brewery - which at the time was the last brewery in Britain to use this unique and unequalled method of brewing real ale.

And Booths also sell the two excellent bottle conditioned ales from Coniston Brewery.

Bottle conditioned beer undergoes secondary fermentation because a small amount of of yeast is added just before the bottle is sealed. After a few weeks the yeast goes dormant, having dropped to the bottom as sediment. And as the beer matures in the bottle, complex flavours develop.

Lovers of real ale are strongly advised to insist on bottle conditioned beer and not what could be described as ‘dead beers’ when buying takeouts.