In Britain: Cask Ale v. Craft

Last night, I was at Boulder Beer for a book event, and I had an interesting chat with brewmaster David Zuckerman. He'd recently been to England and was startled by the amount of American-style ale he found. (Quick and dirty definition: stronger, many more hops.) Like me, he loves a 3.8% bitter, and was concerned that these beers are slowly being put out to pasture in favor of what the English call "craft beer." These are makers of what looks a lot like the standard American taplist, including non-English styles (which Americans love) like saisons, strong stouts, wild ales, and full-flavor lagers. They sell these, controversially, in bottles and kegs, like Americans do; there's even a term of art called the "craft keg" which has been the subject of heated debate.  All of this has injected a huge amount of excitement into the British beer market, and beer geeks in the cities regard old-school cask like something grandpa drank. So, if you're like David and me and enjoy grandpa's old cask bitter, is this cause for worry?

By happy coincidence, London writer Pete Brown just announced the release of the latest Cask Ale Report. The story it tells is more complex than you might imagine, but it leaves me feeling hopeful. The most important piece of context in understanding British beer is recognizing that the vast, vast majority of it is mass market lager. Ales were supplanted a generation ago in their native country, and most Brits drink the same crap the rest of us do. So instead of thinking of things in terms of craft versus cask, it's worth considering ales versus lagers. Craft and cask have a lot more in common with each other than either has in common with Stella Artois and Carlsberg. According to the report, cask accounts for just 17% of sales in pubs, and if you add keg ale into the mix, it goes up to between 25-30%.

The fascinating part of the report illustrates that the lines between craft and cask aren't actually as clean as we imagine. Pete Brown:

Cask ale and craft beer are not the same - and neither are they totally separate. There's a significant overlap between the two.

Avoiding the torture of trying to DEFINE craft beer, it's possible to look at beers on a beer by beer, style by style basis and say 'that one is definitely craft' and 'that one definitely isn't'. Among everyone obsessed with trying to define craft, it;s hard to imagine anyone arguing that, say, Magic Rock High Wire is not a craft beer, or that John Smith's Smoothflow is craft beer. So by looking at the market one brand at a time, analysts CGA Strategy have compiled (an admittedly subjective) list based on ingredients, beer styles and brewers so that craft can be measured even if it can't be defined. With me? Good. On that basis, we can show that:

• Craft beer has grown by 533% in five years and now accounts for 8% of total on-trade ale
• Cask ale is by far the biggest format of craft beer

Much as in the US, this nebulous category of "craft brewing" has been great for the beer industry. It's appealed to young people, brought a new population to beer, and helped create all those downstream positives like fests, good beer pubs, and interest among chefs and good restaurants. If you look at a company like Fuller's, you see how craft has help transform their line of beers, giving them a chance to dabble in styles the old cask fans would never have appreciated. And that in turn has helped goose sales for traditional cask breweries willing to expand their horizon.

The other thing you're seeing is cask, the dispense-system, being appropriated by craft breweries as a platform for other types of beer. Until a decade ago, "cask ale" wasn't a term that pointed only to a method of brewing and dispense, but styles. Cask meant the same five styles of beer that have been brewed for generations. Pete didn't make predictions about the future, but his report hints at evolving trends. Here in the US, we've already seen that the term "craft" is rapidly losing any meaning. If ales continue to claw back market share from mass market lagers in Britain, I suspect the distinction between craft and keg will also lose any meaning. You'll have good beer, sometimes served on keg and sometimes served on cask. And then you'll have generic mass market lagers.

Beer has been evolving since the Sumarians first made it 8,000 years ago, and it is in a moment of rapid change. Sometimes that means beloved beer styles fall by the wayside. (RIP jopenbier!) Maybe mild ale will be a casualty as British palates look for stronger, more flavor-forward ales. But I suspect there will always be a market for sessionable cask ales in English pubs.

One of My Periodic Posts in Praise of Cask Ale

A few months back, Laurelwood made the bold decision to scrap a big part of their regular line and offer more one-offs, including a rotating pale ale.  They also added a cask engine.  Unfortunately for me, it seems like some hop titan is always on cask, so I have mostly skipped it.  Yesterday everything came together, however, and they had the current pale ale, a 4.5% charmer weirdly called "Nail Pale," on both keg and cask.  Perfecto! 


If you want to understand the mysteries of packaging chemistry, I recommend conducting the following experiment.  Go to Laurelwood and get a pint of this beer in both forms.  They look the same, except that the sparklered cask pour has a tighter, more mousse-like head.  It might have been a touch cloudier.  But put your nose over the beer and the differences present themselves.  The icy keg pour has little to offer in scent, whereas the cask offers a vivid resinous pine perfume.  Warmth encourages volatile aroma compounds to lift off the beer.

When the beers enter the mouth, the differences get even more obvious.  At 30 BUs, Nail Pale is probably about five too many for a 10 Plato beer.  On cask, it's okay, though.  The architecture of the malt, mildly sweet, bready, and soft, cotton the hop zing.  And the hops, for their part, are full of juicy flavor.  The brewers must have added some salts, because it has a London-like minerality that stiffens the finish.  On keg, all the flavors are present, but it's as if they beer has been pulled taut so that they're in very sharp focus.  The carbonation both diminishes the malt's flavors and soft mouthfeel and sharpens hop bitterness.  On cask the beer teeters on the edge of balance but on keg it falls into hoppy imbalance.  What feels full and lush on cask seems thin on keg. 

Last week we talked a lot about balance and hoppiness.  In my comments, I should probably have admitted that the crime of overhopping is far more common than underhopping--at least on the West Coast.  That gateway misdemeanor leads to certain felonies, like misusing cask engines.  A cask isn't ideal for every beer, and they rarely work with big, hoppy ones.  Cask ale is different, but you have to be willing to appreciate the benefits it offers.  Souping up hops is not among them.  It's only with a beer like Nail Pale that you can begin to see what casks can do for a beer.

Get Ye to the Firkin Fest

"Yea, I say to you, blessed are the cask-makers, for they build the houses in which dwells the ale."
--anon.

Beer, as God (or Mother Nature) intended it, comes in casks--fresh, alive, and unadulterated. Ensconced in a firkin (kilderkin, hogshead, or even pin), ale that is lively with yeast and not quite fully attenuated is allowed to rest. Perhaps it serves as a tea for additional sachets of hops. Once the yeasts have generated a bit of carbonation, the ale, through no help of man, is ready. Pour, drink, repeat.

Sadly, there's WAY too damn little cask beer in Portland--Beervana's one verifiable fault. Except in April, when the annual Firkin Fest comes to town. There you will find dozens of firkins, enough at least for one afternoon. (Hogsheads, sadly, will be in short supply.) This Saturday, in two sessions at the Green Dragon. You can either pick up tickets in advance, or buy online. I wouldn't advise showing up without a ticket, but I think you can buy them at the door--unless this post generates the kind of interest I hope it does. It's thirty bucks, but you get eight 6-ounce tasters and two food vouchers, which is by any measure a good deal.

Firkin Fest
Green Dragon, 928 SE 9th
Session 1 (11am - 2pm) or Session 2 (3-6pm)
503.517-0660

Ted Sobel, Oregon's Johnny Appleseed of real ale, plans plant some mild ale at Belmont Station on Friday night--for those of you who can't wait til Saturday.

But If CAMRA Didn't Exist, What Would They Fight About?

The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) is a venerable old organization that defends the very British institution of cask ale. It was (choose one): a) the salvation of cask ale or b) an officious movement mainly successful at getting a lot of attention. It now (choose one): a) keeps alive an ancient tradition in the face of multinational fizzy lager, or b) does more harm to the cause of craft beer than good.

I haven't any opinion, though the always-convincing Martyn Cornell offers a strong case today. What I do know is that the arguments about cask ale seem to mark British drinking culture almost as much as cask ale does, and every time I see a flare up like this, it amuses and heartens me. I'm too distant to have a dog in the fight; I just like knowing people are still fighting about good beer. I'll worry when the debates stop.

Ted's Excellent, Oddball Adventure

There are a lot of ways to sell beer in this state, but the easiest is to make them big and hoppy. It helps if you're conveniently located in East Portland--though Eugene seems like a pretty good location, too. A sure-fire business model includes a pub/taproom and capacity to distribute 22-ounce bottles and/or kegs to alehouses around the Northwest. Do that and your road is lined with rose petals.

Ted Sobel, master of the all-cask Brewers Union Local 180, has not chosen the easy way. He makes small beers with low levels of hops. His pub is three hours from Portland, in Oakridge. He brews real ale, sold exclusively by firkin, and only really trusts one other pub to handle his beer. To reach the Portland market, he must load the casks into the back of his station wagon and drive them up himself. For his trouble, he earns less per firkin than he would if he sold the beer in his own pub. In the term of art, Ted has not yet figured out how to "monetize" his vision in the way other pubs have. His road is thorny, cold, and lonely.

(As a writer who has failed to adequately monetize my efforts--did I mention there's ad space available?!--I can appreciate this. Sometimes you gotta follow your bliss, even when it's a meager bliss.)

Last night, Ted brought two classic cask offerings to the Green Dragon--Cwrw Welsh Mild and a classic English porter. Or, as he describes them, "plain, ordinary, mundane session beer." Actually, the porter was of a kind that is directly in most Portlanders' wheelhouse. It was smooth, roasty, and lively. Cask ale isn't innately a better form of beer, and there is honest disagreement over the method. But even non-cask drinkers would have gobbled this one down--maybe without even realizing it was casked.

The mild, not so much. Ted used a tiny amount of peated malt, but a tiny amount's enough--it imparted a smoky, slightly sour note. Cwrw was creamy and soft--Sally called it "milky" and wondered if there was lactose ("no," said Ted)--and clearly low-alcohol. This is where I think Ted has his biggest hurdle. Craft beer drinkers have become accustomed to that sharp, anesthetizing tingle on their tongue. The difference between a mild and a stronger beer is the difference between apple juice and hard cider. To absent that quality from a beer is, I'm afraid, to move into a radical philosophical space that questions the nature of the drink. At least for most people. The mild had all kinds of flavors going on--but no amount of appreciating can will the flavor of alcohol into being. Can people put aside their expectations and appreciate the flavors that are in a beer rather than focusing on the ones that aren't? That's the big question.

As for "Cwrw" (pronounced kuru, with a roll of the "r"), I think you'll find adequate clarification here.

If you missed these beers, stop by Belmont Station this afternoon to try a special bitter called "Quid Hoc Sibi Vult?" Pours start at three and run until the firkin's gone. My high school Latin's a bit rough, but the Google tells me this idiomatic expression is generally translated as "what does this mean?" I suppose we could read this as a question Ted ponders, elbow on knee, about the difficulty of the path he's chosen. (Or which has now chosen him.) A less idiomatic translation, apparently, is "what does this want for itself?" I like this one better. What does Oregon real ale want for itself? Appreciation, clearly. Ted told me last night that he expects there to be ten cask houses in Portland in ten years. This is what the real ale wants.

I hope you're right, Ted.

The Cask Underground

So this is the scene. Last night, MacTarnahan's had a release part for Lip Stinger, their peppered saison, which is making a surprising return in 2010. (With exotic beers it's usually one and done, so kudos to Mac's for sticking with it.) But what really interested me was a far less ballyhooed feature of the party--a cask of MacTarnahan's. Very quietly, brewer Vasilios Gletsos has been experimenting with the notion of cask ales, tapping one on special occasions. Mainly, it happens, when I'm not around. Last night was typical; I already had plans and couldn't make the event. (Though I think the ubiquitous Angelo De Ieso, whom I've started to think of as the beer gypsy, did make it--so maybe you'll hear more.) Amazingly, Mac's Mark Carver poured out a growler and dropped it off at the house last night.

The whole thing had a kind of metaphoric quality. Over the past year, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about cask ales. My love of them blinded me to certain realities which have only recently become obvious: even in beer-crazy Portland, real ale commands the devotion of only a tiny group of fans. I have no idea why. To me, nothing draws the flavor of hops out like cask conditioning. I'm always frustrated by the near-freezing temperatures at which pubs have to serve regular draft; a 55-degree cask ale allows flavors and aromas to blossom. Even the "flat" quality is far silkier than the more-carbonated regular drafts. All of this makes me think more people should like cask. But no.

Those of us who do seem more like an underground society--dissidents who must secretly pass along critical data via oblique signal. I imagine developing a code--tap of the left temple with an index finger--and then whispering obscure messages: "The crow caws at Bailey's--Caldera pale." Last night had the feel of subterfuge. Mark and I were communicating via cell phone; he made the drop literally in the dark of night. Carver's last missive: "Delivered." I touch my temple in response, "Da, comrade."

Mac's is, of course, the perfect cask ale. Vasili was right to identify it as such and hatch this scheme. I expected it would be, but you never know--cask is a fickle mistress. Sometimes beers that should billow with flavor fall flat. Others that seem clearly unfit somehow become transmuted to rare elixirs. Mac's though, delivers. I've been drinking beers from the brewery for 20 years, and one consistent feature is that they are highly filtered, very clean beers. So seeing Mac's in its unfiltered, hazy glory was a little shocking (that picture above was taken last night at about ten). It has every bit of the silky texture a cask ale should have, but the hops are the big attraction. It's made solely with Cascades, and they express a lot more character than one is used to. I found a peppery pine note that is usually concealed, and overall they were greener, less citrusy. Mac's is dry-hopped, so the nose is wonderfully fragrant. If this beer were available on cask regularly, it would be one of my go-to tipples.

Sadly, the cask is probably already gone. Vasili is spooked by the idea that they'll start to turn, so he won't leave one on much more than an evening. This is the other problem with real ale--it doesn't last. Most pubs around town rotate their cask beers, so you can never find a one that's on all the time; this is both good and bad, but it does tend to accentuate the whole secret society thing. Last night I tweeted about Mac's--the 21st Century version of a dissident's whisper--and those who saw it had their chance. Now we wait for the next missive. The few, the secretive, lying in wait for a good pint of real ale.
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A Sprawling Post About Cask Ale

The Green Dragon hosted the third annual Firkin Fest over the weekend, and it was the first I was able to attend. A very nice event, and some nice beers, but I have to say, I walked away thinking that I was witnessing one of the very few thin spots in the dense culture of beer that otherwise pervades the Northwest.

Cask conditioning is a process, of course. We seem to do well enough as far as this goes--for as long as I've been drinking beer in Portland, cask ale has been available. It's a traditional process, a fussy one, and arguably a more "natural" one. I could imagine cask ale existing for these reasons alone--traditionalists always like to promote the old ways. (Reinheitsgebot is just silly, but it has its ardent defenders.) If you stop at the process, you're really missing the point. Because, while cask ale does require a different process of packaging and handling to reach your glass, the real reason to drink cask ale is because it tastes different.

Beer that has been cask-conditioned, with its warmer serving temperature and--critically--lower levels of carbonation, will express different flavors than regular draft ale. Carbonation interferes with some of the flavor and aroma compounds, but on cask, these are revealed in what I think of as their naked, raw state. As a consequence, beers that are uninspired on regular draft may reveal levels of depth and complexity when they're served on cask. In particular, smaller beers with nuanced hop and malt complexity really shine.

Now, here comes the problem. Northwest drinkers are rarely looking for smaller beers. If a brewery offers a luscious bitter, redolent of nuts, toast, and pine, alongside an average IPA, people will uniformly go for the IPA. I don't have a huge problem with this, because local preferences are what guide the emergence of local beer culture. (They don't drink oud bruins in Germany not because oud bruins aren't good, but because people like lagers.) C'est la vie.

However! On cask, everything changes. That same bitter--subdued, subtle, and just too staid for hopheads--will be a totally different beer on cask. The hops will sing, the malts will be rich and balanced, and even hopheads would find it satisfying. And interestingly, many huge beers don't fare so well on cask. Often even exceptional big beers seem muddy and average when you switch them to cask. Where cask allows a smaller beer the room to swing its elbows and open up, these bigger beers are already at the maximum flavor--opening these up makes them lose focus and seem muddy and indistinct. (That's not uniformly true. Cask ales are a witchy business, and I think breweries just have to put their beers on cask and see whether they work.)

All of which brings us--at long last!--to the Firkin Fest. Nearly all the beers there were huge and/or hop monsters. I congratulate Hopworks for sending a mild ale, the perfect choice for a cask fest, and also the host Green Dragon, which brewed up a minerally bitter specially for the event. The mild was murky and smelled of swamp (later, I saw Ben Love, who conceded that they may have overdone the finings), but was a lovely beer once it reached the tongue. Full of flavor, nicely balanced, springy hop character. The bitter was sadly heavy on the tannin side. And Deschutes, which has long been great about producing wonderful cask ales, including Bachelor Bitter, sent Twilight, which was delightful. Far more richly flavored than the (also tasty) version you get in the bottle.

But beyond that, there were few beers I could see that had been designed to really pop on cask. I think there were 17 firkins, and I bet there were at least a half dozen IPAs. Lots of breweries, in fact, just sent cask versions of regular beers. Beer Valley, which actually produces a mild ale, sent a blended cask of their imperial pale and imperial stout. (Even Ted Sobel of all-cask Brewers Union brought a strange duck--his Ardennes-yeasted Cascadian dark ale. Fortunately, I got a pint of 5.2% pale at Belmont Station the night before--and it was fantastic.)

I hope next year breweries take the opportunity to brew up a firkin or two of beer specifically for the event and take advantage of the opportunity to brew a beer that will shine on cask. This event could help spark at least a robust niche of cask fiends if the beers expressed their innate cask-i-tude.

It's always important to include caveats, and so here's mine. The best beer I tried at the fest, and it was the best by a long shot, was an IPA. A dry-hopped version of Double Mountain's IRA. Holy crap, was that a fantastic beer. The malts were toasty and honeyed, and the hops ... words fail. What a beer.

So there you go: cask ale is great with smaller beers because it allows the subtle nuances to come out, except when a beer like dry-hopped IRA comes along, and then it's the best. That's my final word.
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Firkin Fest

For the last two years, I have had commitments that kept me away from the Firkin Fest, but as we near the third edition, I have my ticket in hand. Which means now it's safe to encourage you all to get yours.

3rd Annual Firkin Fest
Saturday April 17
Green Dragon, 928 SE 9th
Tickets limited, sold by three-hour session: 11-2pm, and 3-6pm
$30 gets you a glass, eight six-ounce pours, and two food tokens
Tickets available here

For those of us from the Portland area, there are some nice, down-valley names on the list: Block 15, Brewer's Union, Calapooia, Hop Valley, Oakshire.

The only downside to this event is that it's limited to six hours a year. For cask fans, that's WAY too short. Get your tix while the gettin's good--
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Asimov on Cask

I have taken the New York Times' Eric Asimov to task for crude, confused articles on beer. Today, he gets nothing but praise for his wonderful description of cask-conditioned ales. Like those luscious pints, he hits nary a wrong note.

She pulled down on the tap, then pushed back, pulled down and pushed up, in rhythmic repetition like a farmhand at a well. The ale poured slowly into a mug, at first all foam, then turning translucent before suddenly clarifying into a brilliant suds-topped amber.

I touched the faceted glass, cool, but not cold. A floral-citrus aroma rose up, and as I took my first sip I marveled at how soft and delicate the carbonation was, the bubbles giving the flavors lift and energy without aggression.

This was beer the really old-fashioned way. Today most draft beers are injected with carbon dioxide, filtered and often pasteurized, stored in pressurized kegs and served through gas-powered taps.

But the beer I was served was unpasteurized and unfiltered. Like the earliest bubbly brews, it was naturally carbonated, or conditioned, in its cask by yeast transforming sugar into alcohol with a side of fizzy carbon dioxide trapped in the cask. And it was served by muscle power pumping the ale up from its cask into the mug.

His prose isn't as elegant as Michael Jackson's, but for once his article has the same effect--opening a new world to people that is accurate, inviting, and rich with history and detail. It's exactly what good beer writing should be. Cheers!