There weren't quite as many questionable historical facts as you might imagine from such a programme (apart from the myth about IPA needing to be stronger than other beers to survive the sea voyage to British India), but a few things that he was told while going round the brewery with one of the workers had me scratching my head.
They use hop pellets he was told because most of the actual hop flower is "waste". I'm pretty sure that pellets are used in large-scale commercial brewing for economic reasons, because they're easier to store and use, rather than any intrinsic value compared to whole hops.
He was also surprised, when weighing it out on a old-fashioned mechanical scales, at the amount of hops used: 21 kilograms for 190,000 pints, which I make to be 0.06 lbs per 288 pint barrel. I know British beer isn't as hoppy as it was in the nineteenth century, when a hopping rate of 2 to 3 lbs per barrel was the norm, or even in the second half of the twentieth century, when it was around a pound a barrel, but I think cask beer still contains about half a pound a barrel. Maybe modern hop varities have more bittering agents in them, or perhaps Carling hasn't got much of a hop profile...
The final scene saw the filtered, force-carbonated and pasteurised end product dispatched in palleted cans onto lorries for distribution, with a comment from a brewery worker that it has to go straight out after its short fermentation period because there are no storage facilities at the plant (the German word "lager" means "storage") and a reply from the presenter that, at twelve days from the malt arriving at the brewery to the finished beer leaving it, it just goes to show that some industrial processes still can't be rushed (German and Czech beers brewed using traditional contintental methods are lagered for between two and six months).
I've probably drunk Carling at some time in my adult life, but I've no recollection of doing so. Nowadays I'd rather drink red wine than British lager.
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