Pour Favor

Tapping Into the Cask Pipeline

By Kris King

Fer Gregory/Shutterstock.com

According to Neighborhood Restaurant Group beermolier Greg Engert, the mere presence of a cask means nothing if the bar is pumping mud from its firkins. But he does admit that a bar that’s willing to put the patience and care into keeping a cask tasting great is a good indicator in the bar’s quality.

“Having a cask and maintaining it and pouring it and really treating it right is a pretty damn good indication that you’re going to get yourself into a great craft beer experience,” Engert suggested.

As for cask ales popularity, Mad Fox Brewing Company founder Bill Madden postulates that many people come across the beverage while travelling to places like the United Kingdom, where publicans still sling the stuff on the regular. More often than not, however, cask ale fans simply prefer the taste of beer from a cask. “It’s a little bit more of a delicate beer than most,” he said, “it’s not heavily carbonated, so you can enjoy it, and it’s served at an elevated temperature so you can really sense all the flavors in it too, much better than a beer served at 36, 38 degrees.”

Casks can be rewarding for those behind the bar as well.

While Madden and his crew at Mad Fox get to play with their beer while it’s still in production, casks give Engert and his ilk a chance to tool around with the brews coming in from distributors by adding their own twists and tweaks into the firkins. “I filled one cask with wet hops that had pulled out of a farm in Maryland the day before, which gave [the beer] this wonderful delicate fresh hop effect in the nose that made it a different beer,” mused Engert, “In another I put strawberry and vanilla that gave [the beer] a nice subtle sweetness and fruity quality.”

Carrying cask ales, however, isn’t without setbacks.

One major downside for bars looking to stock cask ales is availability. While brewpubs like Mad Fox can incorporate filling casks into the brewing process—making their entire line of beers potential candidates for cooperage—bar owners that rely on distributors must choose from the handful of breweries that have cooperies on site. In this area, that means a lot of casks from Maryland’s Heavy Seas Beer and from Flying Dog Brewery, both of whom reliably put out a variety of cask ales.

Setting up your own cooperage is one way around that hang up.

Engert’s restaurants maintain their own firkins, 80 in total, shipping them out to brewers to be filled and shipped back to the restaurant through his distributor. For Engert, this means that he can get beer from any brewery within his distribution circuit that’s willing to fill his casks, including international brews. “During the fall and winter and early spring we do get quite a few casks coming over from Great Britain primarily, even further afield through importers,” he explained, “but they can’t really ship those during the warmer months because they’ll go bad due to being unpasteurized and unfiltered.”

Availability issues aside, the effort that goes into cleaning and preparing the wooden firkins and trunk lines can be relentless. Without proper maintenance, cask conditioned beers can get corrupted by unclean lines or poorly maintained firkins, resulting in stale, muddy beers.

“It keeps us pretty busy because it’s very labor intensive, and it’s a very hands on sort of product,” Madden said.

Because wooden firkins fall apart under the pressures of mechanical cleaning, Madden and his crew at Mad Fox have to clean and fill them by hand. Then, the beers take time to condition within the cask at the brewery, after which they’re moved to a cooler and then moved from the cooler to the cask station, where it sits for a couple of days before it can finally being tapped.

It’s not any easier for bars that get their beer from distributors.

Because Engert’s restaurants use their own firkins, staff has to keep up an equally strict regimen of keeping them clean. To insure that his lines flow clean, Engert replaces his every month, a hassle that many bar owners aren’t willing to deal with. “[With cask,] you don’t have the gas pressure behind the cleaning mechanism like you do on a draught system,” he said, “and the casks themselves have so much more stuff in there, much more yeast and sugar and protein, as well as the ambient temperatures, [which] can cause infections, so we tear them out.”

While the work is hard, casks sell like crazy for both Madden and Engert.

Mad Fox goes through roughly 10 to 12 casks a week, while the Rusticos burn through three to five. Despite casks expanding popularity, Engert doesn’t seem confident that we’re in the midst of an all out real ale revolution. “I think a lot people are talking about casks and that a lot of people like them, but I think it’s a very small, but radical community,” Engert said with a laugh. “A lot of cask drinkers still like things a little bit more effervescent and carbonated, or would rather get the same beer at a better price on draught than they would on cask.”

Price is a problem from the bar’s perspective as well, as casked beer doesn’t provide as big of a return as kegged brews. Bar owners pay the same price for a 10.8 gallon firkin as they do a 15.5 gallon keg. “That’s pretty significant,” Engert conceded. “You’re getting 2/3rd the beer for the same price… Not to mention, because these casks are not filtered, they’re going to typically have a good amount of sludge at the bottom that makes that bottom portion unsellable.”

So why do it?

Casks are labor intensive, costly, restrictive and only popular in certain sections of the beer community. Why go through the effort? For Engert, it’s simple. “I do it because it’s awesome. I love cask beer. I think it’s amazing… If you’re in this business for money, then you shouldn’t be in this business,” he asserted.

Madden echoed a similar sentiment: “It’s a lot of handling, it’s a lot of moving around and cleaning of casks,” he lamented, before concluding, cheerfully: “It’s a labor of love.”

Tags: food, Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia Magazine, NoVA