Pic(k) of the Week: Zat you, Santa Claus?

It was an early Christmas gift from Santa Claus.

With eleven hand-pulls (!) of a beer engine, publican Adrian poured a delicious pint of cask-conditioned Celebration Ale (brewed by Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, in Chico, California).

The Brick Store Pub (in Decatur, Georgia) was one of only a few pubs nationwide given a cask of this classic American winter-season ale. 3 December 2024.

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About Celebration Ale

Hop harvest happens once a year, sending brewers to the Pacific Northwest to choose the hops they’ll use for months to come. We certainly do that—'hop selection' for all our beers—but Celebration Fresh Hop IPA gets its own 800-mile road trip through Washington and Oregon to hand-pick the ultimate fresh hops for citrus, pine, and floral flavors at their most intense.Once the hops come down, we race the harvest home [to Chico, California] to brew Celebration IPA within a few weeks. That’s the core of fresh hop beers: brew right away for maximum hop aroma and flavor. For more than four decades, it has been the holiday beer to start the celebration.

Specifications

• Alcohol by volume: 6.8%
• Bitterness Units: 65
• Malts: Caramelized, Two-row Pale
• Hops: Cascade, Centennial, Chinook
• Yeast: American Ale

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Shut-Down Maintenance for Cask Ale.

If your pub serves cask ale via a draught dispense system (e.g, beer engine, dedicated cellar, cask lines, etc.), there are specific procedures you should follow when shutting down the system for an extended period of time (such as now, during the time of coronavirus).

Cask Marque, based in the U.K., offers these guidelines, more applicable to cask-predominant pubs, but useful for all.

Related

• How to close down beer dispense systems for 1 week+
  — Avani Solutions
• Draught quality recommendations during extended bar/restaurant shutdown (pdf)
  — [U.S.] Brewers Association
• Hibernating your draught beer system
  — Micromatic

What is Cask Marque

Since 1997 Cask Marque has been ensuring that the cask ale you drink in pubs in the UK is in perfect condition. Our 50 qualified assessors make over 20,000 visits to pubs each year in England, Scotland, Wales, Europe, and even America to check the temperature, appearance, aroma, and taste of Britain’s favourite drink. Visit a Cask Marque accredited pub and you are guaranteed to receive a great pint of cask ale.

— Cask Marque.

• Cask Marque accreditation (and training) has been available in the U.S. for a few years (Link: here.) That's something to consider for the coming time when COVID19 will be reined under control and pubs return to their perch as the good third place.

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May he drive out the virus.

Not Guinness, but a stout. Not artificially nitrogenated but cask-conditioned (as Guinness once was).

Happy St. Patrick's Day. May he drive out the virus.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Cask ale in light and shadow

Merriam-Webster defines the word eventide as "the time of evening." The first recorded use of the word was nine centuries ago, in the 1100s. These days, eventide is in the lower 40% percentile of words looked up. That's a shame. It adds an ineffable character to mere evening.

And, it seems a good word for this scene.

In evening eventide, a pour of a fresh, cask-conditioned ale sat on a bartop. In light and shadow, people were gathered around. Did the beer belong to the woman or to the owner of the hands grasping the bar edge or to the person whose jacket is seen to the right?

And what was that beer which was holding their interest?

No answer as to ownership but as to brewery-ship, it was "Winter Storm Category 5 Ale," a brewery-styled 'Imperial ESB' of 7.5% alcohol-by-volume (abv), brewed and conditioned by Heavy Seas Beer, a large 'craft, brewery in Halethorpe, Maryland. More than that, the ale was served cask-conditioned, fresh from a firkin (10.8-US gallon cask).

Why the 'eventide' reference?

With a capital 'E," that is the name of the Arlington, Virginia restaurant and wine bar that was serving this real ale, rather than offering an afterthought beer, say, Miller Lite or such.

A wintry beer blast-from-the-past, the photograph was taken in 2010. Alas, the restaurant is no more (not, I believe, from serving good beer). The brewery, Heavy Seas, remains in operation today.

Other than hops, the brewery had added nothing else to the fermenting beer in the firkin, no willy-nilly frou-frou, not gratuitously flavored but beer-flavored. It was brewery-fresh ale, as if the brewery had brought a beer-full fermenter —albeit on magnitude tens of times smaller than in the brewery— to this restaurant.

Real ale.

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Inked and Real

Ah, the beauty of cask-conditioned 'real ale.'

Real ale is a natural product brewed using traditional ingredients and left to mature in the cask (container) from which it is served [without extraneous gas pressure] through a process called secondary fermentation [and served at what is called 'cellar' temperature —in the low to mid 50 degrees Fahrenheit.] It is this process which makes real ale unique amongst beers, and develops the wonderful tastes and aromas which processed beers can never provide.

— CAMRA [with edits].

A bartender pours real ale directly from a firkin (10.8-US gallon cask). At Spacebar in Falls Church, Virginia, USA, on 8 September 2012.

Think of real ale as uber-fresh, as if it were being poured directly from a brewery fermenter. It is a deliberate process, involving both a brewery and pub.

What cask-conditioning is NOT is tossing beer into a cask; that's just tossing a beer into a cask. In fact, cask-conditioning does not imply or require the infusion of artificial or extraneous ingredients. That's just —as a friend describes it— tossing in "cocoa-puffs and dingleberries."

What real ale IS —as Jeff Alworth described it on p.84 of The Beer Bible— is "living beer."

A bartender pulls real ale from a firkin via a beer engine (hand-pump). At Metropolitan, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, on 13 November 2008.

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Cask Marque USA

If your U.S. pub, brewpub, or brewery taproom serves cask ale on a regular basis, you can receive accreditation from Cask Marque, now also available in the United States. Consultation is also offered. Information: here.

Cask Marque, begun in the U.K. in 1997, is a voluntary accreditation scheme that allows publicans to display a special symbol indicating that their cask ale is of good quality, as judged by a series of surprise inspections.

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Pic(k) of the Week: The spigot is closed.

Commercial cask ale in America is dead.

After a resurgence —beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the late 20-aughts— American 'real ale' now appears moribund, relegated (with rare exceptions) to one-offs, terrible technique, and Frankensteinian experiments in extranea.

The photo above is a redo of a shot I took in 2012, at a cask ale festival at Mad Fox Brewing, a brewpub in Falls Church, Virginia. Mad Fox is not a cask offender but a fierce advocate for real real ale. Alas, it closed on 21 July 2019, after a nine year run.

The timing feels congruent. I'm sad (and thirsty). The spigot is closed.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Cask ale pourer

On 20 January 2018, the East Coast cold snap snapped; it was a glorious winter's day for real ales.

Fifty-three cask beers would be poured for a full house of festival go-ers during the Atlanta Cask Ale Tasting, held at 5 Seasons Brewpub in the westside Midtown district of Atlanta, Georgia. Above, a volunteer pours one of those beers from a firkin (a 10.8 U.S.-gallon cask).

Of the scheduled fifty-six beers:

• Thirty-four were adulterated with some manner of gallimaufry, including, but not limited to Tang, bacon, and eggnog, all of which demean the very raison d'etre of cask-conditioning.
• Six were sour or saison-ish beers, which misses the point.
• One cask had gone completely off, which was unfortunate.
• Another was a lager, which, of course, is not cask-conditioned ALE at all. Ditto a mead and a cider, neither beer.
• Three British cask ales, unadulterated, failed to appear because of inclement weather over the importer's warehouse, which was aggravating.
• But ten were, indeed, *just* cask-conditioned real ales, showcasing themselves in fresh form, which is the point.

Of those, some were delights; and one delightfully so.

In my estimation, Fourteen Twenty Dark Mild was the star of the show, a balanced beauty of a beer at 4.5% alcohol-by-volume (abv) and 20 International Bittering Units (IBU), brewed and conditioned by Mitch Steele, brewmaster and co-owner of New Realm Brewing, his recently-opened Atlanta production brewery and restaurant. There could be a touch of irony in that. After all, it was Steele —who wrote the book, literally, on IPA when he was brewmaster for Stone Brewing —who brought that gently hopped 'session' beer to the festival. The judges —whoever they were— agreed, awarding his Dark Mild first place.

In addition to the hospitality of 5 Seasons, kudos and thanks should be given to Owen Ogletree, the festival's organizer, who arranged things ably, as he has done for fourteen years.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Good to the last drip!

A thirsty bartender found the cask ale to be ... good to the last drop. But, hey, dude! That's ... the drip pan.

It's a blast from the past, a throwback Pic(k) of the Week. On 29 June 2007, Clipper City Brewing tapped a firkin of Loose Cannon Hop3 IPA, at Barleys Taproom & Pizzeria, in Greenville, South Carolina. It was, in fact, the first cask the pub had ever served.

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Is your AMERICAN pub a Cask-Ale hero?

Since 1997, Cask Marque has been ensuring that the cask ale you drink in pubs in the U.K. has been in perfect condition. Qualified assessors make over 20,000 visits to pubs each year in England, Scotland, Wales, and Europe to check the temperature, appearance, aroma, and taste of Britain’s favourite drink.

—Cask Marque

Does your American pub (or brewery taproom or brewpub) serve a "great pint" of cask-ale? If so, you should know that Cask Marque accreditation IS now available for pubs and breweries in the United States.

In fact, Cask Marque has been assessing American pubs for several years, initially led by Paul Pendyck, a purveyor of cask-ale equipment in the U.S. and assisted by Alex Hall, a cask-ale partisan in New York. Both, by the way, are British expats.

Now, Steve Hamburg, one of the premier cellarmen in the U.S., has taken the reins as Cask Marque's USA Director and Chief Assessor.

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Criteria

What does it take for a pub (or brewery taproom or brewpub) to gain accreditation in the U.S.?

First and foremost, as self-evident as this may sound, your pub must serve cask-ale every day, or close to it. Simply tossing a cask up on the bar once a week for Firkin Friday doesn't cut it.

After that, it's the big five criteria: temperature, aroma, taste, appearance, and cleanliness.

• Temperature of beer.
  Real ale ¹ should be served, in the customer's glass, at between 11 and 13 °C. That's 51-55 °F. (And here in the U.S., we could lower that to 10 °C / 50 °F.) That's not warm, it's cellar cool: neither too cold to mask a beer's flavor nor too warm to rob a beer of refreshment. (Unfiltered beer that is served too cold can could also develop a 'chill haze' as proteins come out of solution, which speaks to 'clarity,' discussed below.)
• Aroma of beer.
  No evidence of staling, contamination, or otherwise off-aromas that don't belong in the beer as brewed.
• Clarity of beer.
  This one gets tricky. As classically presented in the U.K., cask-ales should be bright as a filtered beer without filtration. But American brewers often eschew clarity (and some UK brewers do as well). So, as with aroma, the clarity should be as the beer was brewed. No extraneous yeast or proteinaceous sludge.
• Flavor (& conditioning) of beer.
  Not gassy or foamy; not flat. No evidence of staling or age. The flavor should be representative of the beer as brewed; conditioning (carbonation) should be as the brewery intended.
• Cleanliness.
  A clean beer-cellar, clean beer-lines, clean beer-engine and/or tap, and beer-clean glassware. Of course.
• NO extraneous gas pressure
  NO gas pressure can be used to dispense from the cask, whether CO2, nitrogen, or whatever. That being stipulated, a cask breather ² does not add pressure to a cask and, thus, a pub may employ one if it wishes. Using a cask breather is not a demerit: only badly served cask-ale is.

When your pub passes its inspection, it receives a Cask Marque metal plaque, with an attached expiration date tag. This works as does a car license plate. A pub must renew each year (and pass its subsequent assessments) to get a new valid sticker.

l-r: Paul Nunny —Director, Cask Marque (UK);
Steve Hamburg —USA Director, Chief US Assessor Cask Marque (US);
Paul Pendyck —Owner, UK Brewing Supplies (US).
At Craft Brewers Conference in Washington, D.C., 2017.

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Value to pub

Most pub owners are very money conscious, as, of course, they should be. And, yes, there is a nominal annual fee for Cask Marque accreditation, which helps defray the cost of the U.S. licensing fee and materials. Thus pub owners should view Cask Marque as a valuable value-added business-augmenter.

It's a consultation: how to do things right so that customers return for repeat pours. It's an advertisement of achievement, just as a victory at the Great American Beer Festival would show brewing skill or a Cicerone accreditation highlight serving acumen. It's a public acknowledgment of a pub's (or brewery's or brewpub's) cask excellence and, thus, of the value to a customer. And it's not (yet) a common thing in the U.S.: again a mark of distinction for your pub or taproom.

For further details, and to arrange an assessment, contact Mr. Hamburg directly, via email: shamburg@cask-marque-americas.com.

Serving a great pint of cask-ale is not rocket science. But it does require care and attention to detail.

So, do it. Be that cask-ale hero. Get your pub its Cask Marque accreditation. That Cask Marque plaque is a damned nice thing to display.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Wooden cask, deconstructed.

A wooden cask, deconstructed...

1) TOP HEAD (purple arrow)

The entire front disc. Even though it's referred to as "top", it faces forward, not up. It's circumferenced by a wooden ridge called a chimb (white arrow), or chime. The head consists of four planks: two crescent-moon shaped pieces called cants (bright green arrows). Between them are the two middles (blue arrows). The lower cant is where the keystone bung sits.

2) BACK HEAD (not pictured)

The back of the cask.

3) PITCH (forest green arrow)

The BELLY of the cask, made up of several wooden planks called staves (aquamarine arrows). The shive bung (fuscia arrow) sits at the top of the pitch.

4) QUARTERs (forest green arrows)

The two sections of the belly between the pitch and the front and rear chimes, respectively.

5) HOOPS (red arrows)

Metal bands keep the heads and staves securely in place.

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BITS & PIECES

1) SOFT SPILE (pale green arrow)

Porous bamboo peg inserted into the tut in the shive bung. The tut (not pictured) is an indentation in the center of the shive bung. When venting a cask, the tut is hammered through, and the spile inserted.

2) STILLAGE (dark blue arrow)

Stand on which the cask sits, angled slightly forward toward the top face, the bottom of the back chimb no higher than the level of the top of the keystone.

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MORE

1) WOOD OR METAL

A beer cask can be made of wood or metal although stainless steel is much more the common choice these days. Although metal casks are welded together and don't have staves as do wooden ones, one can still refer to a cask's heads, chimbs, keystone, shive bung, spiles, stillage, etc. Ditto for plastic casks.

2) FIRKINS

• Casks come in many sizes. A firkin is one size of cask, equal to 10.8 U.S. gallons.
• The cask above is NOT a firkin, but a 10 U.S. gallon wooden cask. It did, however, contain cask-conditioned ale. *.
• Volume sizes here are given in U.S. measure. Thus, a 10.8 U.S.-gallon firkin (U.S.) is identical in volume to a 9 U.K.-gallon firkin (U.K.)

3) FIRKIN DIMENSIONS

Here.

4) WEIGHT OF STAINLESS STEEL FIRKIN:

• Empty: 24 pounds (11.24 kilograms).
• Full: 114 pounds (51.71 kilograms).
• One gallon (of water) = 8.34 pounds (3.78 kilograms)
• The weight of one gallon of beer will be a bit more than that of water, due to its specific gravity (weight of unfermented starch, sugar, etc.)

5) WEIGHT OF WOODEN FIRKIN

?? ... but more than 90.072 pounds, the weight of 10.8-gallons of water.

6) More CASK VOLUMES

Here.

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NOTA BENE

A barrel and a cask, while superficially similar, serve two distinct purposes.
☞ A barrel is for aging.
☞ A cask is for cask-conditioning.
☞ A barrel-aged beer is well-aged; a cask-conditioned beer is, well, fresh. It's the package and the intent.

Fobbing at the Tut:
A series of occasional posts on good cask cellarmanship.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Priming casks (cellarman couture)

Brewer's Alley is a brewpub in Frederick, Maryland, USA. In February 2004, Tom Flores, brewmaster there invited YFGF's Thomas Cizauskas to the brewery to add priming gyle* to freshly-racked firkins.

Four observations:

• Now, that's a blast from the past.
• Now, that's some high hair.
• Now, that's some cellarman couture.
• That's a photo of me, from back in the day. I'm Thomas Cizauskas.

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More "drinkers' beer," please.

In the latter aughts, the glory days of beer blogs, Jeffrey John Bell was a much-admired British beer blogger and publican, pseudonomically known as Stonch. He took a sabbatical from blogging, but now he's returned, if somewhat stealthily (or, at least, relatively concealed by the noise of the manic social media world).

To the point, he calls his blog, Stonch's Beer Blog. In his most recent update, he quotes the tweet of a small brewery's brewer, who asks for the return of "drinkers' beer."

I'm a brewer, but I struggle to find the appetite for more than half a can of DIPA. Can we all get back to making drinkers beer please?

Drinkers' beer! What a poetic and logical construction where the unfortunate 'drinkable' is neither. Or the pedestrian 'session beer' and its unseemly companion, 'sessionable.'

Of course, the brewer in question could merely have been dissing DIPAs as 'not beer' and, thus, I've altered his meaning, leaving my previous paragraph for naught. But, you know what? I'll go with the first, less snarky interpretation (and, in fact, I've added an apostrophe to indicate possession). And, then, let's have more drinkers' beer, please.

Stonch, himself, is no slouch as a wordsmith, a 'craft' that was in his kit a decade ago and remains so now. Here, from the same blog post:

In case you aren't up with the lingo, a 'DIPA' is a 'Double IPA', and invariably refers to a madly strong beer that's supposed to be really hoppy but ends up tasting like a sweet, sticky mess. Before all this nonsense took hold we'd probably have called most of them barley wines.

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The small brewery, lauded above, is the Summer Wine Brewing Company *, of Yorkshire, in the U.K. According to its website, SWB produces cask ales, but hopped 'New World'-style —as well as in bottles and kegs— and all, as it appears from the descriptions, being drinkers' beer in alcohol levels and construction.

Another recent tweet from the brewery encapsulates its cask 'process' (and art). American 'weekend' cask brewers: look!

No centrifuge, no filter, no finings. #process pic.twitter.com/R6yttrucSb

— Summer Wine Brew Co. (@SWBrewery) September 28, 2017

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In the real ale world, regular order is restored.

The Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) is Britain’s largest beer festival, with over 50,000 attendees. On the festival tasting floor, there are over 900 (cask-conditioned) real ales ranging from

microbreweries to the most well known British brands, and hundreds of bottled and foreign beers, and a selection of real ciders and perries.

It's also a competition among British brewers for national bragging-rights. Last year, Binghams Brewery's Vanilla Stout won the judging with a cask-ale pickled American-style with vanilla beans, cocoa, chocolate 'essence,' and 'natural' plum flavoring.

Upon hearing that, I bemoaned, "Oh the humanity." The beer reporter for the Washington Post took me to task for that, accusing me of demeaning the skills of the brewers and judges.

You praise the competition's "even playing field," then dismiss the winner (and by extension CAMRA judges) w/o ever tasting it?

— Fritz Hahn (@fritzhahn) August 10, 2016

Stuff and nonsense, as if holding an opinion would be prima facie wrong, and expressing one, insulting. I don't much like extraneous nonsense tossed in a beer I drink. I do much enjoy the uber-freshness of an unadulterated cask ale. And I freely stipulate to that.

This year —despite the eschatological presence of "fine English wines," for the first time in the London beer festival's forty years— regular order has been restored. A 3.8% (!) alcohol-by-volume bitter (cask-conditioned, of course) has been crowned Champion Beer of Britain.

A bitter beer first brewed as a one-off for a pub in Lincolnshire has walked away with the prestigious Champion Beer of Britain award at the Great British Beer Festival at London Olympia. Goats Milk was produced by the Church End Brewery in Warwickshire for the Goat Pub in Market Deeping in Lincolnshire but proved so popular that it’s become a regular beer in the brewery’s range.

Head brewer Carl Graves says the 3.8% beer has a simple recipe of Maris Otter pale malt with a touch of crystal malt and malted wheat and is hopped with American Cascade and Chinook hops.

The judges on the final panel said the beer was the stand-out one among the six finalists and praised its fine balance of malt and hops and refreshing palate.

This year, like last, I was not fortunate to be there to taste the winner. But (risking re-opprobrium from the 'mainstream media') I'll still exult that an unpolluted bitter —a moreish session beer— has bested stronger zymur-sisters and brothers, resting victorious atop its stillage.

All is right with the world, at least for a moment.

Even so, a long line stood for a stand of
AMERICAN cask ales (exhibited but not judged).

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Mark Dorber on Real Ale, Cask-Conditioned Ale, & Cellarmanship

If he had lived five hundred years later than he did, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus might have translated that ancient Greek proverb as a reference to cask-conditioned ale.

Indeed five centuries later, a gentleman named Mark Dorber has been working to prevent cask "casualties." From 1981 to 2007, Mr. Dorber was the manager at the renowned White Horse pub on Parson’s Green, in London. Many traveled (and commuted) there to learn about 'proper' cask-conditioned ales, and to drink them.

Now, in the 21st century, Mr. Dorber is the landlord of The Anchor, "an award-winning inn and restaurant-with-rooms [...] in the charming village of Walberswick across the footbridge from the market town of Southwold" on the English North Sea coast, about 100 miles north-east of London.

Still serving 'real ales' and still imparting knowledge, Mr. Dorber has kindly posted a concise tutorial on cask ale service at the inn's website. I've reprinted it below.

Cellarmanship & Real Ale

"Real ale" as an expression was adopted by CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) in 1973. First known as the Campaign for the Revitalization of Ale, its name change was an attempt to simplify and shorten what was an uncomfortable mouthful of letters at the most sober of times. The appellation is a convenient campaigning device that has attracted a lot of crass comments about the "realness" of filtered beers.

Cask-Conditioned Ale

I prefer the simplicity and nondidactic expressions "cask-conditioned" or "bottle-conditioned" to describe beer with live yeast. The qualitative difference between cask-conditioned beers and filtered beers lies in the presence of live yeast, which is able to feed on any fermentable sugars remaining in the beer from the time it is racked into cask at the brewery and to impart its own individual imprint of aromas and flavours as well as life-enhancing carbonation.

Oxygen and beer

However, what might be termed CAMRA's "clause celebre" has inspired the fundamentalists of the campaign to insist that even a non-invasive blanket of carbon dioxide at atmospheric pressure * to protect slow-selling beers from the ravages of oxidation must be construed as an unnatural interference with the aroma, flavour and mouthfeel of cask ale, thereby rendering it non-real.

Their strongest claim is that the air drawn into a cask on dispense somehow softens the palate of the beer resulting in beneficial flavour changes analogous to the effect of oxygen on a young red wine. The fact that not a smidgen of evidence can be produced to support their thesis appears not to deter them in their dogmatic determination to be wrong and to penalize those who wish to get it right by excluding from the listings of beers in Good Beer Guide pubs those beers that use blanket pressure as part of their dispense and preservation regime.

The Art of Cellarmanship - Cask Conditioned Ales

Cellarmanship in the broadest sense covers the gamut of drinks sold by retail outlets and requires a detailed technical manual. The purpose of this short piece, though, is to set out the general principles for the successful management of cask- conditioned ales.

An avaricious brewer may define cellarmanship as the art of serving a continuous supply of saleable beer with the least financial loss. Here, compromises will be made on quality in order to fulfil the primary requirement of profit maximization.

My view on the primary goal of cellarmanship, which, incidentally has not changed since August 1981, is the following:

"To promote the most beauty in each cask of beer by developing the most interesting range of sound aromas and flavours; by nurturing wherever possible high levels of natural carbonation consistent with each beer style and, moreover, by serving each beer in a manner and at a temperature that enhances its aroma and flavour profile and creates an appropriate mouthfeel."

The above must follow the disciplines of good husbandry continuity of supply and speedy turnover in order to keep the beer in each broached cask as fresh as possible.

The Techniques of Cellarmanship

• 1. Setting a Stillage
  
  Securing a cask of beer: A stillage is the name given to any solid object that enables a cask of beer to be laid down and prevented from moving by means of the insertion of wooden wedges (also known as scotches or chocks). It is important that casks be set horizontally with the shive pointing straight at the ceiling. If a cask is stillaged with a forward tilt, sediment will fall to the front of the cask and be concentrated at the tap, leading to fouling of the tap and the need to draw off three or four pints of beer before the clarity and quality of the cask's contents can be judged accurately. If the cask is tilted backward, problems of unstable yeast and finings slurry slipping forward may arise when the cask is tilted in order to decant the final few gallons.


• 2. Conditioning
  
  The purpose of conditioning is to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the cask to enable a good finings action to occur and then to build up the level of carbonation appropriate to the style of beer.
  
  Venting excess CO2 is achieved by inserting/hammering a porous peg ("soft peg" made of soft wood, usually bamboo cane) into the sealed shive tut causing a sudden escape of gas and the immediate emergence of fobbing beer. This procedure should be carried out in a controlled way; i.e., the contents of each cask should be chilled to 52 to 55 degrees F in order that a relatively calm and nonexplosive purging of excess CO2 can take place.
  
  It is also important that upon soft spiling, the cask should have an even distribution of finings and yeast. It is sensible to roll each cask vigorously before stillaging, securing and venting. The time taken for the beer to "work" through the soft peg will vary according to each yeast strain, the concentration of yeast cells per millilitre, and the yeast's general friskiness, along with the amount of residual sugar/primings in the cask and the temperature/state of agitation of the cask. In the case of exceptionally lively beers, it may be necessary to replace the soft peg every hour for a day or more. The pegs sometimes become blocked with yeast and, occasionally a plug of dry hops may form underneath the soft peg, preventing the release of gas.
  
  The rule on the amount of time to soft peg beer is that there is no rule. It is entirely dependent upon the yeast fining regime adopted. The object of soft pegging is to reduce the amount of CO2 to the point at which the finings will prove effective.
  
  But do not over vent. You are preparing the yeast for a marathon journey not a short sprint, hence the need to vent at low temperatures and avoid exhausting the supply of sugars. The tension to be observed is the need to produce clear beer and the imperative to stimulate good to high levels of CO2 in solution. Flat, clear beer is the norm in Britain. We drink with our eyes and then jazz up flat beer by forcing it through a tight sparkler. We cannot put our well-conditioned pale ales through a sparkler at the White Horse without substantial wastage due to the relatively high level of CO2 in solution.
  
  Hard pegging should occur when a cask has "worked" to the point where it takes 3 to 10 seconds for the fob to re-form on top of the soft spile after being wiped clean, again depending upon the style and strength of the beer, the yeast/finings regime, and when the beer is required for dispense. The soft peg should be replaced with a nonporous hard spile to prevent the escape of any more CO2 and to slow down yeast activity.
  
  Dropping bright will now occur and is, in my experience, greatly assisted by a rising temperature. Again, it is a matter of trial and error with the yeast strains used, but I have found that taking the ambient cellar temperature from 52 to 54 degrees F up to 58 to 60 degrees F for about 8 to 12 hours produces consistently bright, polished results across the range of ale yeasts used in Britain today. Dropping bright times from hard pegging vary from four hours to four to five days.
  
  Carbonating should now take place after a spell of warm conditioning at 58 to 60 degrees F. It is important to chill back down to 52 to 55 degrees depending upon the temperature that your yeast is happy with. The lower the temperature tolerated by the yeast, the greater the level of carbonation possible.
  
  Bass yeast remains one of the liveliest and most tolerant of yeast strains in Britain and will work happily at 50 degrees. After a four-week maturation period in the cellar at 50 to 52 degrees F our pale ale has the most glorious, mouth caressing effervescence that one could wish for.


• 3. Maturation
  
  This part of the process of cellaring beers, sadly, is seldom given much attention in practice. However, aging beers not only allows the appropriate level of carbonation to be generated but also allows the beer to dry out the effects of krausen or priming additions, thus taking away any insipid qualities from the palate of the beer. The fresh kiss of yeast, the hallmark of cask-conditioned ale or unfiltered lager, develops further impact and complexity during the process of maturation, be it in a lagering tank or in a cask. Aging also enables the effects of dry hopping to achieve maximum impact after two weeks or so in cask, developing its own particular grace and delicacy of aroma.
  
  For beers such as low-gravity dark milds, we would expect to put the beer on dispense in the shortest time possible, perhaps only four or five days after racking, in order to promote the slightly sweet, fresh malt character of this supremely quaffable style. We cellar ordinary 1040 original gravity pale ales, such as Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter, for two weeks in order to extract the succulent malt characteristics and earthy Sussex hop flavours, but stop before the dual strain, spicy, clove-like yeast imprint becomes dominant. A period of two weeks also enables us to build up good levels of carbonation to provide the complementary mouthfeel so sought after.
  
  Draught Bass we keep for three to four weeks as described above. Old ales have been cellared successfully by us for months; two months for Highgate Old (1050 og.) this past winter to a year in the case of Traquair House Ale and Adnam's Tally-Ho (1075 og.).


• 4. Dispense
  
  The key areas to get right here are:
  • Temperature, ideally 50 to 55 degrees F depending upon the style of beer and the ambient temperature. Please don't excessively chill a rich, biscuity, malty Scotch ale or an ester-laden, vinous barley wine. Therefore, pay attention to insulated beer lines (and beer engines) carrying beer from your cellar or chill cabinet behind the bar to the customers' glass.
  
  
  • Use either tap-fed gravity dispense or beer engines. If you use beer engines, decide which beers benefit from the use of sparkler attachments in order to produce a tight, creamy head. Stouts and dark milds can be enhanced by the use of sparklers, but think carefully and experiment before you connect a carefully crafted IPA to an 'Angram Pip'.
  
  
  • Each cask broached and put on dispense should be consumed as quickly as possible; ideally within 24 to 48 hours unless a cask breather is used. It is not just a question of oxidation and acetification setting in, but the loss of CO2. In all but the most carefully prepared casks, such loss will result in a notable loss of freshness and vitality, which matter a great deal to me.

For those of you who are preparing pale ales for cask-conditioned dispense, the following quote from the head brewer of Marston's in 1899 provides a rare insight into his perception of quality and indicates just how far brewing techniques had advanced from the 16th century:

Dorber concludes in high fashion by paraphrasing the "late, great Bill Shankly, pioneering manager of Liverpool Football Club":

A true fact, that.

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Fobbing at the Tut:
A series of occasional posts on good cask cellarmanship.

• * Some American pubs apply CO2 to a cask at 1 or 2 psi to forestall oxidation. The goal is noble; the suggestion is very wrong. Any additional pressure will add carbonation to the cask —more so the longer beer is served from it— defeating the purpose of the naturally-derived carbonation of cask beer. Dorber, on the other hand, is recommending blanket pressure of CO2 —net zero CO2 pressure— to forestall oxidation.
  • The atmosphere exerts pressure on us, which, at sea level, is 14.7 pounds-per-square-inch (PSI), depending upon weather conditions. A standard CO2 gauge measures only any additional pressure greater than atmospheric. Thus a gauge showing 1 pound-per-square-inch-gauge (PSIG) is actually releasing CO2 at one pound PLUS atmospheric pressure.
  • A cask breather does not really pressurize a cask. It's an aspirator valve that responds to the slight vacuum created when beer is pulled from a cask, by releasing CO2 at atmospheric pressure (or maybe a wee, wee, wee bit more) —thus, effectively, zero PSIG— completely filling the space vacated by the beer pulled out with CO2. This CO2 rests atop the beer like a blanket, accomplishing two things. It prevents ingress of air —and the oxygen in it— into the cask, which would oxidize, that is, stale, the beer. And, it slows the flow of CO2 —dissolved in the beer— into the headspace, that is, it slows the beer from going flat.
  • With a standard CO2 regulator, a setting of '1' would permit enough CO2 to flow into a cask to actually carbonate it, thus making it kegged beer rather than cask-conditioned beer, albeit at lower pressure additional beer carbonation. And a setting of zero would prevent any CO2 at all from flowing into the cask, and thus prevent little beer, if any, from being pulled out.
  • By the way, using nitrogen instead of CO2, or even mixed gas —so called Guinness gas (a blend of nitrogen and carbon dioxide)— would also protect the beer from oxidation, but it would NOT protect the beer from going flat, that is, losing CO2 into the headspace. (Why? Look up Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures!)


• Yvan Seth, an expat Australian who runs a beer distribution company in England, has written two myth-busting cask-ale-service posts based on his in-the-trade experiences: Three Cask Ale (semi)Fallacies (12 May 2014) and Followup: Cask Ale Fallacies (18 May 2014).
• Justin Hawke, an expat Californian in Britain, owns and operates Moor's, a small brewery in Bristol. Here are his Cellar Management Tips.
• From YFGF: America is doing cask ale wrong. (16 September 2015).
• Mr. Dorber's original essay at The Anchor: Cellarmanship & Real Ale.


• For more from YFGF:
  • Follow on Twitter: @Cizauskas.
  • Like on Facebook: YoursForGoodFermentables.
  • Follow on Flickr: Cizauskas.
  • Follow on Instagram: @tcizauskas.

Pic(k) of the Week: Three for cask.

After three hundred and eighty-eight or so Pic(k) of the Weeks, it's a first. A selfie.

That's I, there, in the middle.

The occasion was the 13th annual Atlanta Cask Ale Tasting, on 21 January 2017, at 5 Seasons Brewing and Taco Mac Pub, in Sandy Springs, Georgia. These three (left to right) were discussing matters cask ale —in the United States and Britain:

• Des de Moor—
  British beer educator, beer writer, accredited beer sommelier.
• Thomas Cizauskas (me)—
  cask ale partisan; American beer blogger.
• Steve Hamburg—
  American cellarmaster; USA Director: Cask Marque.

Georgia beer impressario Owen Ogletree (not pictured) had invited Hamburg and de Moor to help him judge fifty-one cask ales. Of those,

• 32 (62%) were flavored in some way;
• Of the 19 (38%) that were not filled with extraneous flavorings:
  • 8 were unflavored IPAs;
  • 7 were sours (8 if you include one British beer that had gone off);
  • 3 (only!!?!) were bitters (or Scottish export style);
  • 1 was an unflavored stout;
  • 0 were milds

Hamburg and de Moor had strong opinions on all that. I recorded those (with permission). There will be a transcript. Stay tuned.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter

“Ordinary bitter is perhaps the single greatest achievement of British brewing, combining a huge amount of character, flavour and variety into something that, by international standards, is untypically low in strength.”
—The Pub Curmudgeon.

By definition, [ordinary bitter is] intended as an everyday quaffing beer for having a couple of pints at lunchtime without writing off the rest of the day, or an evening session in the pub that still leaves you reasonably clear-headed the following morning. It’s not meant to be an exotic show pony for sniffing, sipping and holding up to the light.

While its market share has been eroded in recent years by the rise of widely-distributed premium best bitters such as London Pride, Bombardier and Wainwright, ordinary bitter

—defined broadly as any beers between 3.4% and 4.0% ABV in the gold-amber-copper colour spectrum [emphasis mine]—

probably still accounts for half of all cask beer drunk in the UK, and undoubtedly more if you extend the definition to include keg ales too. But it still tends to be regarded as something of a poor relation against more fashionable, stronger and more heavily-promoted beers.

Which ordinary bitters stand out amongst those currently available? The one that immediately springs to mind is Harvey’s of Lewes, which many see as a perfect balance of malt and hops.

Whether Sussex is an ordinary (but not so ordinary) bitter or a best bitter, I'll not debate dinging nits. I'll simply stipulate to its goodness.

In 2005 and 2006, it won the Best Bitter category at the Great British Beer Festival. Last year, I was happy to taste it, not there, but over here, at the 12th annual Atlanta Cask Ale Tasting. It had survived its trans-Atlantic voyage well. I hope it will again be so fortunate, later today, at the 13th annual.



The Pub Curmudgeon concludes his encomium as a devils' advocate: “So can any beers in this category truly be regarded as great, or are they all well, just a bit "ordinary"?”

To which, I answer, “Yes —a hearty quaff and repeat— yes.” Bravo, session beer.

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Why it's time to ‘just say no’ to cask ale.

Pete Brown is a British beer writer. He was, until 2015, the author of The Cask Report, a yearly analysis of the state of the business of cask ale in the U.K., sponsored by the British brewing community. Which is why it was so surprising to read his essay today in the Morning Advertiser, entitled, “Why it’s time to say no to cask ale”*:

I have a terrible confession to make — terrible for someone with my CV anyway. I've mostly stopped drinking cask ale. [...] I've had enough of :

• Bar staff saying 'it seems all right to me,' or 'well, no one else has complained,' when I take a pint back to the bar and patiently explain that it's laced with diacetyl.
• Being told that the beer is supposed to be flat and dead because that's what real ale is like.
• Taking back hazy pints and being told it's supposed to be like that because it's craft beer.
• Pints that are not off, or infected, or hazy, but just dull and sub-par, whether because the beer is tired or because it's not finished its cellar conditioning and shouldn't be on sale.

We're always saying cask ale is special, unique, a cut above other beer, that it requires more care and attention. If you're not prepared to treat it like that, you're not supporting cask ale - you're wrecking it. [...] Do yourself, your customers, and cask ale brewers a favour and stop selling it.

For Pete Brown, of all people, a partisan of cask ale, to confess, “I’ve mostly stopped drinking cask ale,” is a disconsolate and surprising thing indeed. Commentators have noted that the article's title is click-bait: Mr. Brown is referring to 'bad' cask ale not to cask ale per se. But, in fact, Mr. Brown states that he has "mostly stopped drinking cask ale" because he finds too much in poor condition. It's this confession, his finding, not the editor's title, that is inflammatory.

How NOT to tap a cask (of cask-conditioned ale)

And, I’m afraid that I’m 90% there with Mr. Brown when it comes to cask ale in the U.S.

Here's my bill of particulars. When, instead of producing cask-conditioned ale as the freshest and most vibrant it can be,

• American breweries, too often, toss 'shit' into their casks, not because they should, but because they can;
• American breweries, too often, rack unfinished beer into a cask and call it cask-conditioned;
• American ‘craft’ beer bars, too often, toss casks onto a bar and serve them unattended for days;
• When American cask ale, too often, is warm, flat, infected, crud-speckled, amateurishly prepared, and horribly served...

Why should I waste my dollars on that? Why, indeed, when I can enjoy a well-crafted beer ... on draft?

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