It doesn’t travel well. Bars have to install new equipment to dispense it and then wait for it to ripen like some rare fruit. And in the end, some customers are likely to think they’ve been sold warm, flat beer.
So why would anyone in America bother with cask-conditioned ale?
Most bars and breweries, even most brew pubs, don’t. For the hardy souls devoted to cask ale, though, the taste is worth the trouble of adhering to British beermaking tradition. (Or maybe the satisfaction of continuing a tradition is worth the repeated explanations to customers.) An annual festival devoted to it has sprung up in Chicago (see accompanying article), and the allure is such that even Boston Brewing Co., the not-so-micro maker of Samuel Adams beers, has experimented with cask ale, also known as “real ale.”
The term describes an ale that undergoes a second fermentation in the container from which it is served, be it a bottle or a cask called a firkin. That puts it at odds with most commercial beer, which has all its yeast filtered out before pasteurization and bottling.
“I like the idea of it, that someone takes it this seriously,” said John Culter of Libertyville. He was attending a real-ale seminar at the Midwest International Beer Expo in May, where area brewers Goose Island and Mickey Finn’s joined such British stalwarts as Fuller’s, London’s oldest brewery. “A lot of (commercial beer) is so filtered, because Americans like things so clean; you lose some aroma and flavor.”
“It has more of the natural components” that contribute flavor, said Katherine Kelly of Big Rapids, Mich. “I love it.”
At one time, pretty much all beer in the British Isles was cask-conditioned. The method wasn’t chic or arcane; it was how you got beer from brewery to imbiber. After the first fermentation, unfiltered beer went into barrels (wooden then, steel today), usually with some additional hops for aroma and some finings to help the beer clear once it reached its destination. (Finings, usually powdered gelatin or isinglass, attract yeast particles and proteins that would otherwise cloud the beer.) At the pub, the cask sat in the cellar until the owner judged it had completed its second fermentation (courtesy of the residual yeast) and had settled. He then tapped it and pumped its contents into thirsty customers upstairs via a “beer engine” and pint glasses.
What they drank had only a prickle of carbonation and a temperature of 50 to 55 degrees, according to Michael Jackson’s “Pocket Guide to Beer”: not cold enough to numb taste buds, not so warm as to be icky. The flavor and aroma, and the skill of brewery and bar owner, were best appreciated at that temperature.
“It’s quite different from the keg beer we get in the United States,” moderator Ray Daniels, president of the Craft Beer Institute in Chicago, said at the May seminar. About the only things the two have in common nowadays are their basic ingredients and alcohol. Keg beer is filtered at the brewery and squirted into glasses via carbon dioxide; it doesn’t “evolve” while at the bar as cask ale does.
That evolution is part of the appeal, and a big part of the problem. The makers of Samuel Adams experimented with a cask ale that would be shipped to bars at 35 degrees, then allowed to warm up for a second fermentation before tapping and serving. It was not a success.
“We thought it would be like eating bread fresh out of the oven,” said Derek Schulze, plant manager at the Boston Beer Co.’s pilot brewery. But once the casks left the brewery, things began to go awry: Bars, not used to babysitting their beer, served it as-is, unfermented at 35 degrees, the beer equivalent of eating raw bread dough. Bartenders didn’t taste it for development, Schulze said, didn’t clean their lines well enough and dispensed under high pressure, giving a glass of foam. Low demand (no surprise there) meant the beer spoiled with half of it still in the cask, “and that was under ideal conditions,” Schulze said.
As long as so many variables remain outside the brewery’s control, Schulze said, Sam Adams real ale won’t be a reality.
Pike Brewing Co. in Seattle solved that problem by only giving cask ale to bars trained in its care and feeding, said Fal Allen, head brewer. That limited it to fewer than a half-dozen outlets in its hometown. The most far-flung outlet is 80 miles north in Bellingham, Wash.
“Two years ago I would have said cask-conditioned ale was a dead thing in America,” Allen said last week, but he has since seen interest increase, if not explode. “It’s always going to be a little something extra” microbreweries do to attract beer aficionados.
A 1970s revival of interest in England is credited with the survival of cask-conditioned ale. Members of the Campaign for Real Ale, “assertive if at times shrill,” as Daniels put it, persuaded big breweries to preserve the British Isles’ traditional tipple through boycotts, demonstrations and assorted stunts, according to the group’s Web page (www.camra.org.uk). (CAMRA also publishes a “Good Beer Guide” annually to steer travelers toward pubs with character and real ale.)
For cask ale to catch on nationwide, America will need a dense network of brew pubs, it seems, each with a full complement of firkins, spiles, shives, bungs and keystones (the vocabulary is as distinctive as the beers). None of the brewery representatives on hand for the May seminar was happy with the way his offspring had traveled, and the cask of Fuller’s flagship ESB wasn’t even drinkable, having been released from Customs only hours before.
“It’s not really happy being moved around,” Ryan Ashley, brewer at Mickey Finn’s in Libertyville, said recently. His pale ale and oatmeal stout have become mainstays in their cask-conditioned forms, and he is bringing them to the Real Ale Festival next week. “If cask beer is done right, it’s best at the source.”
THINK GLOBALLY, DRINK LOCALLY
Cask ale may be a pain to transport, but that isn’t keeping brewers from all over the U.S. and England from tapping about 100 examples at this year’s Real Ale Festival, Nov. 7 and 8. The festival is run by Chicago’s Craft Beer Institute.
In addition to public tastings, the festival at River West Brewing Co., 925 W. Chicago Ave., plans professional and homebrew competitions as well as seminars (learn the best way to spile your firkin!).
Admission prices range from $29 for one tasting session (which includes tickets for 15 five-ounce samples) to $125 for the entire weekend. Call 773-665-1300 or visit the festival Web site at www.mcs.com/ rdan/RAF.html. Tickets also are available at River West, 312-226-3200.
