The Real Ale Festival, 1996-2003

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).

Ray Daniels sent along this recollection.

In 1996, I led colleagues from the Chicago Beer Society in setting up the Real Ale Festival which we ran seven times through 2003. Each time, it was the largest gathering of cask ales ever assembled in the US--and most likely the largest ever gathered outside Britain. It still holds the record as the largest competition of cask ales ever conducted on this side of the Atlantic. I met Tom Cizauskas during those days and he asked me for some memories from those days. Here are some brief recollections from the festival.

1996: 32 entries in a rag-tag array of “casks”: Sankey kegs, Hoff-Stevens kegs (still pretty common in those days), 5-gallon corny kegs (a rare size in commercial brewing then) and even some really old “Golden Gate” style kegs. We put the American beers up against the imported entries and Fuller’s London Pride won. In addition to the fest, we had London publican Mark Dorber over to judge and talk about the preparation and keeping of cask ale.



l-r: Ray Daniels, organizer, festival director;
Mark Dorber, master cellarman;
Tomme Arthur, brewer; Steve Hamburg, co-organizer, festival cellarmaster.
Photo courtesy of Steve Hamburg.

1997: We mandated use of “firkins” for every entry allowing easier handling and gravity dispense so that we didn’t need scores of beer engines. (Sales of firkins took off as a result.) As I recall, 98 beers in total were served. Judging was done by US brewers in multiple categories. We had a homebrewed real ale competition too! Educational sessions from Alan Pugsley and others took an entire morning covering how to prepare and manage firkins. One woman who attended came and asked for her money back after being there for 10 minutes because she couldn’t find any cask-conditioned Miller Lite.


Judging at the RAF, 1997.
1998: We moved to a convention center in the suburbs and nearly went broke between the costs and horrible weather. But, we had Michael Jackson in to speak and judge and our firkin count was into the mid-100s. We also offered bottle-conditioned beers for the first time. At this point the festival limited the number of cask entries breweries could send as we simply would not have been able to accommodate all the casks otherwise.We took an interval of 16 months between this fest and the next, moving the event from the fall to late winter.

2000-2002: We moved to the recently opened Goose Island brewpub in Wrigleyville where the fest would be held for three years. Here the festival prospered and took on an international reputation. Despite the close quarters we had people coming from all over the country and from several countries outside the US to attend. Signs of the fest still remain on the ceiling in one room where an over-conditioned keg spewed its contents in a geyser more than 15 feet high.

2003: The last year of the Real Ale Festival as such, was held in a vintage warehouse building at an inner city steel mill. Smokers found still-hot steel forms in the parking lot to huddle around for warmth and festival goers had two floors of cask stillaging to explore. We tapped 232 casks that year, including 32 imported from England that were served at their own special bar. It was a glorious year and we looked forward to returning to the same venue for additional years of the fest. Sadly, that was not to be. Due to licensing issues, we were denied further use of that space. We had looked for years for places where we might do the event as it grew, but there simply wasn’t anyplace suitable. Proper presentation of cask ales requires several days of stillaging before serving and we simply couldn’t find a space in Chicago that would surrender their facility for a full week at a price that we could afford on the revenues from a two-day festival.

The remnants of this festival live on in an annual cask ale event put on by the Chicago Beer Society called “Night of the Living Ales.” The event sells out so quickly that non-members rarely have a chance a tickets.

Among his many accomplishments, Ray Daniels is the author of Designing Great Beers, the past director of the Brewers Association Craft Beer Marketing Program, and the creator and director of the beer sommelier school- Cicerone Certification Program.

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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.

Pic(k) of the Week: Snowmageddon

Snowmageddon!

This weekend's blizzard marked only the third time in a hundred years that the Washington, D.C. area has been hit with two double-digit snowfalls in one winter season. The official Washington D.C. total as recorded at Washington National Airport was 17.8", the 4th largest storm in recorded history for D.C., and the 3rd highest winter total on record.

Baltimore-Washington International set a new all time record for a two-day event. Dulles International Airport reported 32.4 inches.

The snow began falling at 10am on Friday, 5 February. Here, on my deck in northern Virginia, the tally was 22 inches by 1pm, and the total backyard accumulation by 5pm, when the snow stopped falling, was 22.5 inches.

The season's first snowstorm in December —dubbed 'Snowpocalypse'— dumped 16.4 inches at Washington National Airport, with much higher totals elsewhere in the area. Another snowstorm is  predicted for the following mid-week.

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• Snow accumulation data from the Washington Post's Capital Weather Guys.
• More snowmageddon photos: here.
• Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of personal photos.

A Field Guide to Cellarmanship

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).

The following Field Guide to Cellarmanship was submitted by its author, Ron Fischer, the Division Manager of the Cask Ale Collection for B. United International, an importer and US distributor of beer, cider, and saké.

Once our firkins arrive to our warehouse, coming out of a refrigerated container, we guarantee 7 weeks shelflife (unbroached) when kept at 42-50 degrees Fahrenheit. Within 72 hours after I have finished adding the finings (stateside as rather then at the brewery in the UK; this markedly adds to the shelflife), orders go out to our wholesalers, combined with case and keg product.

After taking the firkin out of “cold storage” (should never be colder then 45 degrees F if for any appreciable length of time), you then want to bring the cask up to cellar/serving temperature of 51 – 56 degrees F. At this rising temperature, the finings are most effective in attracting yeast and together they SLOWLY sink to the bottom forming a bed of sediment.

It is best to stillage the cask (position firmly on it’s side on wooden chocks like a wine barrel so that the small opening where the tap is inserted at “6 o’clock” and the large opening is pointing up) a full 48 hours before intended serving time. Anywhere from 12 to 24 hours later, release the extraneous CO2 by knocking a sterile soft spile (porous, balsam wood peg) through the recess in the center of the shive (larger of the two closures which is pointing up while the firkin is on its side). This recessed area (called the tut), as well as the keystone (plug of small opening) must be sterilized. Beer may foam (also called fob) through this peg. If the peg becomes saturated, replace with a dry one until fobbing has stopped.

Then, as soon as possible, hammer a sterile (or “beer clean’) cask tap through the keystone (thereby puncturing it) and hammer tightly into the opening, be careful not to drive too far as the keystone may crack. After tapping, it’s best to draw off at least one pint for sampling to test for product failure and to allow some headspace for the beneficial oxidation (“conditioning’) to take place. The soft peg may now be replaced with a hard peg to maintain the CO2 in solution until it is time to serve and also to prevent any additional air to touch the surface area of the beer inside the cask.

About 48 hours after putting the cask on stillage, following the above steps, you will be ready to serve. Very complex or high gravity ales will need longer then 24 hours to “condition out” (allow the brewer intended flavors to develop and let some of the wacky esters blow off). The general rule states to use:

Soft pegs - while the cask is being served
Hard pegs - for overnight storage

(Air replaces the beer that is drawn off by gravity or pulled with a beer engine. Otherwise a vacuum would occur).

Cask ale needs to be tasted every day before being put on sale, especially as you get to Day 3,4,… after putting it on. The surface area to volume ratio increases and therefore the depreciation of the remaining beer increases exponentially.

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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.

Still crazy about cask ale after all these years

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).

The following is an essay from Steve Hamburg, one of the foremost cask cellarmen in the United States.

Chicago was once home to America’s premier cask ale event, The Real Ale Festival, now sadly fading into history. Starting from humble beginnings in October 1996, RAF gradually grew to become one of the most anticipated festivals on the calendar of any serious beer geek. As a co-founder and head cellarman of that event, I have a unique perspective on cask ale in America and its growth in popularity.

Hard to believe, but the first Real Ale Festival featured just 32 beers, and over half of them were served from Golden Gate, Sanke, and Hoff Stevens kegs. Only 4 of the 16 American breweries managed to provide actual casks (Bridgeport, Middle Ages, Highlander, Shipyard)! But surely the highlight of the event was the shipment of firkins flown in from England: Marston's Pedigree, Oyster Stout, and Owd Roger; Young's Special Bitter and Fuller's ESB.

We would never have been able to get any of those English beers without the incredible assistance of Mark Dorber, then the famed landlord of the White Horse on Parsons Green in London and a widely recognized expert on real ale. English brewers initially balked when Ray Daniels and I approached them about getting beers, but when we mentioned that Mark would be arranging the critical equipment and directing the cellaring, they yielded. The USA was a cask ale desert, and no self-respecting English brewer was going to trust a Yank to look after his beers.

We must have done something right, because we never had a problem getting beers after that. The Fuller’s brewery proudly displayed their Best of Show medal in their Hock Cellar and the CAMRA newsletter What’s Brewing said "It looks like a CAMRA beer festival, it tastes like a CAMRA beer festival..."

Beginning in 1997 we required that all beers submitted for the festival come in actual firkins to facilitate uniform handling and serving of every entry. Despite this new requirement, our second festival drew three times as many entries as the first and established this event as the largest gathering of cask-conditioned ales anywhere outside of Britain (only the Great British Beer Festival and the Peterborough Beer Festival offered more at the time). At our last RAF in 2003 we served 220 casks of real ale from 21 states and the District of Columbia, including 16 beers from 6 UK breweries.

Life as a cellarman was always entertaining in those early years. Certain breweries (which shall remain un-named) were renowned for priming their beers so vigorously that soft spiling often risked the loss of an eye and inevitably included a beer shower. That’s when I learned to always wear glasses when spiling. I also learned to keep a box of towels handy, as the fountain that shot forth from the soft spile could splatter the cross beams on a 12-foot ceiling and spray everything within a 15-foot radius.

Luckily only a handful of beers were this dangerous, as beers this lively were almost impossible to serve properly once the festival was underway. RAF always had a professional judging, which meant we always aimed to get all of the beers properly conditioned and bright when judging began. Unfortunately, some beers were still “working” in the cask when judge samples were poured.

After a while, most breweries worked out their kinks and managed to ship us beers that were well-conditioned but not explosive. It became more boring, perhaps, but better for all concerned, on both sides of the bar.

One of my required activities that always drew a crowd was the quality walk-through, where beers were sampled and assessed grades in condition, clarity, and overall quality. The system I used was borrowed (stolen) from Mark Dorber and proved extremely helpful in anticipating problems and providing suitable feedback to judges and consumers.

The process is actually quite quick: you pour off the first pint, then draw a sample and visually assess condition and clarity; take a short sniff to check for off aromas; sample a sip for off flavors; and yes, usually you spit it out. This always seemed to piss off other volunteers, who looked at spitting as something you did at a wine tasting. But the fact is, you simply can’t drink every beer at a festival (by 2003, these duties were split between 3 of us, but that still meant we would each check ~70 beers!). Eventually I learned to plan these walkthroughs when fewer people were around, as too many volunteers wanted to “help” out with the tasting.

Of course, when you’re working in a pub environment with a maximum of 5-6 casks on, taste away!

Sadly, RAF faded away after years of various venue issues. Most of the original equipment we used - the cooling jackets, glycol chillers, handpumps, taps – were sold off. But the success we achieved over 7 years was still impressive. We know that we never wavered when it came to the quality and presentation of the beers. I was especially proud when Mark Dorber came back in 2002 and said we were really doing things right. And we’re still doing a nice real ale event in Chicago – it’s just smaller (around 40 or so casks), but the beer quality is still something we’re proud of.

Slowly, surely, real ale has been catching on in America. At the very least, brewers have better access to casks, cellaring supplies, taps, and handpumps (Paul Pendyck’s UK Brewing Supplies has been a great resource). But to my mind, too many brewpubs and beer bars still lack the cellaring training and experience or worse, the desire to serve cask ale at its most elegant best. Many breweries continue to struggle to find the right balance of yeast and/or primings in the cask. A lot of places didn’t bother with finings at all, or even if they did, they didn’t give them a chance to work their magic.

l-r: Ray Daniels, organizer; Mark Dorber; Tomme Arthur, brewer; Steve Hamburg.

The most common problem I see today is that beers haven’t been given enough time to develop conditioning and drop bright in the cask. I understand the need to turn over beer quickly in a bar or brewpub, but come on – what’s your rush? Let the beer finish. As I often heard Mark Dorber say, “cask-conditioning is a marathon, not a sprint.” Most beers, even the most intensely dry-hopped “tea-bagged” IPA can be served bright if given enough time. If you’re not allowing proper time for conditioning and brightness, why bother with cask-conditioning at all?

The job of the cellarman is to use his/her tools and experience to bring out the greatest beauty of every beer on offer. If you’re willing to drink unfinished cloudy pints, you don’t need a cellarman at all – just throw the cask on the bar, tap it, and be done with it. But whatever it is, it’s beer from a cask, not cask-conditioned beer.

Unfortunately, too many American beer drinkers have only been exposed to a more false representation of real ale, where the “show” takes precedence over the beauty and elegance of the beer in the glass. Casks are rolled and sloshed around right before tapping, as if they were the stainless steel (or plastic) equivalent of a bottle of Bavarian hefeweizen. Patrons are too often told that real ale is “supposed to be cloudy” because it’s unfiltered. Sometimes beer that’s been overspiled and flat is pumped through a tight sparkler to give it the head it should have had without such “special treatment.” We can all do without this sort of thing.

Cask ale done right is a remarkable drink. Let’s not settle for style over substance. 

Steve Hamburg is an award-winning homebrewer, an author of articles on brewing, and a long-time member of the renowned Chicago Beer Society. As he has written above, he had been the Cellarmaster for the former US Real Ale Festival. Now, he is an organizer of another annual real ale event, Day & Night of the Living Ales (now in its 6th year), scheduled this year for March 6 at Goose Island Wrigleyville.

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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.

Homebrewed Real Ale

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).

The following is a contribution from Wendell Ose.

Writing this as the first inch of an expected 20 inch snowfall begins to accumulate here in the DC burbs of northern Virginia and borrowing the melody from 'Frosty The Snowman', I author a new lyric, "There must have been some magic in that firkin cask we found 'cause when we drank the ale inside we began to dance around."

But wait, there's another song to screw with, "I've never been to England but I kinda like the Real Ales. Up here In NoVa, not Arizona, what does it matter?"

I'm ashamed to admit it but I've never been to England although I've had the pleasure of drinking plenty of imported cask ale that has made the trip here to enlightened DC bars as well as 100s of homebrewed real ales and a few local pub-brewed commercial examples over the last decade. I've been homebrewing for 17 years and many of my creations have been brewed in the cask ale tradition.

Wendell Ose (l); Nick Funnell (r)

I've had the good fortune to win homebrew club Brewers United for Real Potables BJCP sanctioned Real Ale Championship in 2000 and 2007. The 2007 winning beer, an English Mild Ale, made me eligible to enter the 2008 GABF Pro-Am Competition in Denver. English ex-pat Nick Funnell, head brewer for local Great American Restaurants' Sweetwater Tavern, allowed me to brew a 15 barrel batch with him that advanced to the final 6 beers of 58 GABF entries from around the US. I based my recipe on one Nick had contributed to a Brewing Techniques Magazine Beer Styles article back in the 90s.

My homebrew club, The Wort Hogs, has its 4th Annual Real Ale Party scheduled later this month so I brewed two ales for that event this week, a Best Bitter and a Northern English Brown Ale, a sweet version that's a close cousin to my Mild Ale. (Btw, recipes and process info available on request.)

I love to brew real ale as much as drink it, probably because of my short attention span. You can brew one today and be drinking it at its peak in 7 to 10 days. Now that's fresh beer and freshness and liveliness are what cask ale is all about. A well made, Ordinary Bitter at about 3.5% ABV, naturally and lightly carbonated can be magic in a glass, magic in a bottomless glass for that matter since it seems like you can drink them one after another and still walk/drive away safe, sound and feeling good all around. If you're drinking a lovely English-style ale and it seems like you simply can't enjoy enough of it, chances are you're drinking a cask ale at its best.

Find one or brew one, and as The Great One [the late Michael Jackson, the beer writer] suggested, "do it a favor and drink it."

Wendell Ose is an award-winning homebrewer, and an avid supporter of local breweries.

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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.