It has to be strong-armed or it won’t move. It's hard to find. It isn’t cool. It doesn’t get the respect it deserves. I’m talking about cask-conditioned beer, of course.
For those who aren’t familiar, cask-conditioned beer is finished in and served from a small cask, not a half-barrel keg. It isn’t carbonated using tanks of carbon dioxide. Cask beer carbonates itself as it’s finishing its fermentation. It isn’t put under pressure and forced through lines. It has to be pumped to your glass by your friendly publican. When it arrives, it hasn’t gone through an in-line chiller. It’s the temperature of the cask it came from. It’s not what we’re all used to, a beer that’s a little bit warm and a little bit flat, but it is special in its own right. Cask beer was the only kind of beer before refrigeration. It was state-of-art for centuries, but then, in these modern times, it was dismissed as being obsolete.
To my mind, traditional is never obsolete. If we forget the tradition, we forget the craft. So cask beer is worth drinking whenever the opportunity presents itself. It’s like walking out of an air-conditioned building on a breezy sunny day. It’s open, bright, flavorful and balanced.
Where can you get cask beer? Locally, Allen Street Pub is your best bet, especially on February 28 when Paul and Steve celebrate their tenth year of owning the place. Cask beer will be on and Pat and I will be there drinking it. There will be some Perfect World beer there as well and we’re bringing food, homemade black bean chili. Hope to see you there.
Jeff
