"Taste beer in its true form."

The topic of this month's The Session: Beer Blogging Friday is Cask-Conditioned Ale. In addition to inviting beer bloggers to contribute, I reached out to non-blogging beer folk (and, yes, they are many).

This personal reminiscence is from Casey Hard.

Cask ale is a wonderful way to taste beer in its true form.
I had my first taste of cask ale in Syracuse NY at the Blue Tusk over 10 years ago, first wondering why it was so flat and thin. As my knowledge grew and my palate, I have come to enjoy and even seek out this wonderful form of beer.

Tom Cizauskas was the one who came to me with the idea of doing cask ale at Max’s. We had done a firkin on the bar from time to time but not on an everyday basis. He even let us use his personal hand pump. Since that day [in 2001] we have been serving cask ale and are about to expand our range from three to five handpumps.

About a month ago we started doing a cask night on Thursdays. Not sure how that would go, I could not be happier. We have even gone as far as buying our own casks and sending them across the country to bring in a wider range of breweries producing cask ale.

Winter time is the best time for cask ale, in my opinion. This is when we get in most of our English and Scottish casks - at the forefront of this campaign to keep this form of beer alive. This year we have even seen casks coming in from places like Switzerland, Belgium and Denmark.

Cask Ale is an art form that seems to be spreading world wide and I hope that it will continue to.

Casey Hard is the General Manager and cellarman for Maxs Tap House —in Baltimore, Maryland. Currently sporting 70 draft lines, Max's is increasing that number to 100 and the cask lines to five. Casey is the founder and organizer of the 72 Hours of Belgium, a three day Belgian beer festival in Baltimore.

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The Session: Beer Blogging Friday is a monthly event for the beer blogging community begun by Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer, and co-moderated with Jay Brooks at the Brookston Beer Bulletin.
On the first Friday of each month, a predetermined blogger hosts The Session, chooses a specific, beer-related, topic, invites all bloggers to write on it, and posts a roundup of all the responses received.

More here.

His favorite cask ale memory

The topic of this month's The Session: Beer Blogging Friday is Cask-Conditioned Ale. In addition to inviting beer bloggers to contribute, I reached out to non-blogging beer folk (yes there are many!). This personal reminiscence is from Joe Gold.

Just after I graduated from college I was hired by the English Sports Council to help promote lacrosse in Britain. At that stage I had not discovered cask conditioned real ale. But that was soon to change.

Over the course of the next 3½ years I discovered the wonder and diversity of cask ales all over the British Isles. I learned the cask ale process, how important a cellarman is and how to discern a fine pint of real ale. I also ran across the SPBW crowd and I became a life member of CAMRA. One of my favorite cask ale remembrances however is from the Young’s Brewing Company (before I was hired by them to represent Young’s in the USA).

One of my duties with the Sports Council was to travel to London for one week every month. On one of my first trips to London I discovered Young’s Ales and found out that they actually owned and/or operated (at the time) 135 Young’s pubs in every borough of London. The brewery was based in Wandsworth SW 18. [That facility was closed in 2006.] I also discovered that the brewery produced a printed list of all of their pubs – and if one were to visit every Young’s pub on the list they were entitled to the following; a VIP tour of the brewery, membership in the 135 Club, a commemorative 135 tie and, best of all, a pin of Young’s Ale for home consumption.

You didn’t have to twist my arm very far to get me to take up that challenge – and I knew I would see much more of London – including its less famous parts - along the way. I would also get the chance to see and meet the “real” people of the wonderful city of London.

The look on my face at the brewery, when I had completed my VIP tour and was picking up my pin of Young’s Special ale, was priceless. The tour of every Young’s pub had given me a unique and special opportunity to learn by osmosis what cask conditioned real ale was all about – and how intertwined real ale is into the fabric of British culture.

I haven’t described just one pint of ale here – but many. And I have sampled countless pints of real ale since my days living in England. But picking up the pin of ale at Young’s Brewery is still to this day one of my fondest cask ale memories

Joe Gold is a founding member of the Chesapeake Branch of the Society for the Preservation of Beer from the Wood (SPBW), one of the few branches outside of the UK. As the General Manager in the mid 1990s for Maxs on Broadway —a taphouse in Baltimore, Maryland— he instituted a weekly beer tasting session, called The Beer Social, which continues today. In 2009, he and others organized that city's very successful Baltimore Beer Week.


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The Session: Beer Blogging Friday is a monthly event for the beer blogging community begun by Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer, and co-moderated with Jay Brooks at the Brookston Beer Bulletin.
On the first Friday of each month, a predetermined blogger hosts The Session, chooses a specific, beer-related, topic, invites all bloggers to write on it, and posts a roundup of all the responses received.

More here.

Session #36: Cask-Conditioned Beer

Today being the first Friday of the month, it's time for The Session: Beer Blogging Friday ...

... a monthly event for the beer blogging community begun by Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer, and co-moderated with Jay Brooks at the Brookston Beer Bulletin.

On the first Friday of each month, a predetermined blogger hosts The Session, chooses a specific, beer-related, topic, invites all bloggers to write on it, and posts a roundup of all the responses received.

For more information and to host a Session, go to the archive page at the Brookston Beer Bulletin

This month's topic is Cask-conditioned ale:

beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.

as defined by CAMRA (the Campaign For Real Ale)
beer consumer advocacy group in the UK

To participate, write a blog piece (500 to 1,000 words would be fine), then link to it here, today, as a comment.  After all submissions are in, I'll collate, analyze, comment, summarize, and link back. Some non-bloggers have responded and sent comments.  If you have some, include photos of casks, of imbibing their contents, of filling them.

My thanks go to Stan Hieronymus and Jay Brooks. They have organized, encouraged, and gently cajoled to get this resource —The Session: Beer Blogging Friday— on the web, each month since March of 2007.

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• UPDATE. The summary post: here.
• How I announced The Session, way back on 5 January: here.

"We are all friends in fermentation."

Fritz Maytag is quoted, wonderfully, over at BeerBasics.com.

Beer author Peter LaFrance was attending a beer tasting, in 1991, at Windows on the World, its first ever. He recounts:

There were only five or six brewers in attendance and about three times as many journalists.

One of the brewers there was Fritz Maytag, owner of Anchor Brewing Co., San Francisco, CA. The topic of conversation came around to their "Our Special Ale" brewed once a year just in time for Thanksgiving.

I asked Fritz Maytag if that years beer was going to be more of a Burgundy or a Bordeaux. He began to answer me when one of the journalists listening to us said "We are here to discuss beer not wine aren't we?"... Fritz Maytag took a moment, and answered, "We're all friends in fermentation."

BEER BASICS.COM
Peter LaFrance
Vol.011 No.001
31 January 2010

Mr. Maytag's axiom could be a reminder to all of us in the alcoholic beverage business —be we makers, wholesalers, retailers, bartenders, writers, drinkers. We are in the business of fun.

Ten years later after that event, Windows on the World would be destroyed during the attack on the World Trade Center towers.

• I believe that Maytag says this again (originally?) on Michael Jackson's The Beer Hunter video series in 1991 (highly recommended, if you can find a copy), during a scene in which Maytag and the Anchor staff are on a bus driving north to a malt harvest. 
• Another quotable quote from Maytag, in the comments section below.

Clamps & Gaskets: Roundup for Week 4

Week 4
24 January 2010 - 30 January 2010

• 2010.01.30
  California global wine shipments dropped for the 1st time in 16 years in 2009 (down 1.6%). http://bit.ly/cqOlKM
• 2010.01.30
  The 10 hottest women in the food biz. Via Slashfood: The 10 hottest women in the food biz. http://bit.ly/9hBg5X (Ah, poor Rachel) (Ah, poor Rachel)
• 2010.01.29
  An era ends in Washington DC. Donnie Simpson leaves his Morning Show, WPGC 95.5 http://bit.ly/9lxmZO
• 2010.01.29
  CAMRA launches Facebook page.for real ale news, pics from events, promotions, competitions, etc. http://bit.ly/dj290M
• 2010.01.29
  #FollowFriday. For social media, tech, AND beer: @deirdrereid, @karpo.
• 2010.01.29
  A mid-Atlantic analysis of RateBeer.com's 2009 list of the best breweries and beer pubs. http://bit.ly/c34ULn
• 2010.01.29
  Six breweries that blog in DC/MD/VA: http://bit.ly/5QqhO
• 2010.01.28
  For Washington DC/Baltimore good beer fans: web discussion group DC-Beer which began as a listserve 15 years ago now has a Facebook page and a Twitter address: @dc_beer.
• 2010.01.28
  Marin Institute berates Anheuser-Busch for donating A-B branded cans of drinking water to Haiti. http://cli.gs/JrWZJ
• 2010.01.27
  Howard Zinn, author of a People's History of the United States, died today. http://twurl.nl/u68rgv
• 2010.01.27
  Maxim Magazine picks Brooklyn Brewery's Local One as THE beer to have instead of wine. Issue: 25 best 'new' American beers. http://bit.ly/12YBGM

• 2010.01.27
  Better access to distilled spirits coming to Virginia? Renewed push to privatize ABC stores: http://bit.ly/9D0xzg
• 2010.01.27
  Beór, bier, beere. The etymology of beer, the word. http://bit.ly/aQCKEv
• 2010.01.27
  “Good beer makes everything more special." From the NYTimes story on growlers: refillable beer-to-go. http://bit.ly/aQCKEv
• 2010.01.27
  Update on health recovery of craft beer pioneer Jack McAuliffe. Living in Texas. http://bit.ly/dfinXf
• 2010.01.27
  Appeals Court ruling on Massachusetts winery direct sales might impact small brewer tax breaks elsewhere. http://bit.ly/a3kDgc

• 2010.01.24
  Today in 1935: the beer can is officially born. Krueger's Finest Beer and Cream Ale sold in cans in Richmond, VA. http://bit.ly/4VIuLO
• 2010.01.24
  A 2nd 100 tap beer bar to open in Baltimore, Maryland? http://bit.ly/5B4ARz

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• Clamps and Gaskets is a weekly wrap-up of stories not posted at Yours For Good Fermentables.com. Most deal with beer (or wine, or whisky); some do not. But all are brief, and many are re-posts from my Twitter account: twitter.com/cizauskas.
• The Clamps and Gaskets graphic was created by Mike Licht at NotionsCapital.