Tell me which of these two sentences rings most true, in your experience:

• Cask bitter is a lovely but antiquated beer style that hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years and is, sadly, dying in its home country.
  
• Cask bitter is a wonderful old tradition in Britain—more template than style—and is currently going through one of the most interesting evolutions in the world.
  

It’s not a trick question, honestly. For most Americans who come across a British-inspired bitter in the United States, it probably does feel like a taste of the past, so that first sentence makes some sense. For us, it’s like a style frozen in amber—less a taste of Britain, perhaps, than that of an earlier era in American brewing.

Meanwhile, cask ale—with bitter as its most popular style—has become a relatively marginal player in Britain. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant there, and it still has its ardent fans. Yet a recent report from Britain’s Society of Independent Brewers pegs cask ale at just 9 percent of the country’s declining draft-beer market, and at 4 percent of British beer consumption overall.

It wasn’t always like this. Two generations ago, when the independent brewing revival was just getting started, Americans jetted off to London to learn how to make British ales. The tradition was still lively, and an imperial pint of English bitter seemed like the essence of beer. Today, brewers are more likely to land in Prague or Munich to learn about pale lager.

Here’s the thing: They’re missing out on something. As British beer has fallen out of favor here, American brewers have missed a quiet revolution—and this is where that second sentence above comes into focus. Classics such as Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, Fuller’s London Pride, and Harvey’s Sussex Best are still around, of course. But pubs are pouring them next to a new generation of bitters that harness the zingy flavors of New World hops—and British hops bred to compete with them—as well as the techniques that American IPA brewers have developed to infuse them into beer.

These beers rest on a familiar foundation of English malts and yeasts, but they feature modern hop varieties and techniques that add bright, fruit-forward flavors that meld perfectly with their base. They are purpose-built to be sessionable at around 4 percent ABV, and they are harmonious, full, and balanced—a trick that comes into focus when served via cask, a technique Americans have nearly forgotten.

This is one of the most exciting developments in the brewing world, and these beers are accomplished, remarkable little gems.

And Americans have no idea they exist.

It’s the Cask

This may be controversial, but stick with me: The more important element of cask bitter is the cask, not the bitter.

To see why, you need only to taste that classic formula of heirloom malts, English hops, and yeast on cask and from a keg. When done well, cask conditioning is an alchemical process that transmutes ordinary beers into something really special. Naturally carbonating the beer in this way leaves it less fizzy, but it also makes it silkier in texture. It encourages the flavors and aromas to blossom, magnifying their impact. Further, the subtle flavors blend into an alloy—bready malts, fruity yeast, earthy-sweet hops, and a minerality from the water all play their roles.

Perhaps this is why cask bitter appeared to be in stasis: It didn’t need to evolve. Outside the pubs, however, the world did. In Britain, craft brewing followed the United States by a couple decades, and many newer breweries followed the American model. They helped to create a taste for punchier hops—and they put pressure on the old bitter formula to respond.

Traditional ale breweries began experimenting with these hops, which often worked nicely alongside their classics. Newer breweries, meanwhile—besides embracing 7 percent IPAs with massive intensity—also began experimenting from the other direction, rediscovering their historical roots via session-strength cask ales.

In either case, the beer engine is the common ground—the terrain that dictates what kind of beers can be served with the most success. Those that have emerged are purpose-built for cask, at traditional cask strength and with traditional balance, but they get much of their character from brighter, more fruit-forward New World hops.

Classic bitters, but different.

“Juicy” Cask Bitter

In Manchester, England, the Marble Arch is not an obvious venue for wild, countercultural experimentation. It’s a Victorian pub that dates to 1888, a longtime darling of the Campaign for Real Ale and beloved by regulars who keep the casks moving. In 1997, when the owners decided to expand operations and start a brewery, they brewed classic cask ales. The anchor was a house bitter.

Before long, however, they were experimenting with American hops—tucking them in here and there in volumes that wouldn’t frighten the locals. It took a while, but eventually they transitioned to using mostly modern, New World hops, but always via the medium of cask-conditioned ale. Marble has been one of the most important breweries in this country-wide transition.

Head brewer Joe Ince explains Marble’s philosophy, offering a mission statement of sorts for making modern cask ales: “We have a two-pronged philosophy: A holistic approach where the combination of ingredients should outweigh the sum of those things separately. And, in a basic way, less is more.”

Their pub ales now use only New World hops, but “you can’t dry hop a 3.8 percent [ABV], 1.010 SG beer at 10 grams per liter,” Ince says. (That would be 2.6 pounds per barrel, or a bit less than 7 ounces per five gallons.) “There’s just nothing there to hold the hop flavor. So, instead, make smart choices with what hops you’re going to use and when in the process you want to add them.” Their Manchester Bitter is 4.2 percent ABV; they hop it with Comet, CTZ, and Ekuanot.

Just a mile down the road, Track Brewing launched about a decade ago with a very different approach. They focused on big, bold hop flavors at a moment when British beer drinkers were falling in love with them. Like so many craft breweries, however, they eventually returned to their roots and began exploring cask. Their best-known beer is Sonoma, 3.8 percent ABV and hopped with Citra, Mosaic, and Centennial. Hazy and pale, it looks and smells American—but it becomes something different when poured on cask.

Track head brewer Matt Dutton explains what makes it work. For a session-strength beer such as Sonoma, Track gets most of its hops via a whirlpool addition—at 176°F (80°C)—of about six grams per liter, or 1.5 pounds per barrel. They prefer whole-cone hops if they can get them. “The additional polyphenols and green matter help boost mouthfeel and make everything seem fuller,” Dutton says.

Those are the very elements many Americans try to subdue in their monster double-hazies, but in bitters they can be helpful. Track also dry hops at about a pound per barrel at terminal gravity, “to lift the aroma,” Dutton says.

Getting balance means laying down a proper malt foundation. Some breweries stick with heirloom varieties, but Track takes a more American approach. Most beers start with extra-pale malt. “This base is generally cut with a small percentage of wheat, up to 10 percent, and possibly some light Munich or Vienna to add some depth,” Dutton says.

He adds that Track used to include some caramel malt to build body, but like many American breweries, they have moved away from that. Instead, they compensate in the mash. “We aim for a high mash temp, around 162°F [72°C]. This helps get some body in the beer and packs a bit more malt flavor in there, while also giving the hops something to hang off.”

While these beers have morphed with modern hopping, other ingredients are critical in maintaining that classic bitter character.

“Yeast is by far the most important ingredient in bitter,” says Paul Jones, cofounder of the Manchester-based brewery Cloudwater. After all, house yeasts are what made those legacy bitters distinctive. “It’s what makes someone a fan of J.W. Lees, but not so much of Holt’s, or a fan of Holt’s but not so much Harvey’s.”

American brewers have learned how valuable English yeast strains can be in their IPAs—London III, for example—by contributing fruity esters and sometimes boosting hops via biotransformation. British brewers have valued them for centuries.

Each brewery I asked said they use a different strain from the others. All emphasize how important it is to their own beer’s profile.

Yes, These Are Bitters

Because bitters have been so stable for so long, one can reasonably ask whether these qualify as the same style. Indeed, many breweries reserve the word “bitter” for the more traditional formulation, calling the modern style “pale ale” or something else—and maybe they sell better that way.

Historically, however, stability was not a hallmark of British bitter. At the end of the 19th century, it was stronger—5.5 percent ABV or more. It was also truly bitter, with hopping schedules that suggest they’d often exceed 50 IBUs. They even routinely used American hops—though they weren’t highly regarded and were mainly used for bittering.

Even if the world wars ultimately sent the gravities plummeting, brewers continued to produce them at different strengths. Regional differences persist, as does variation in ingredients and serving style. British drinkers still debate the use of “sparklers,” which create a mousse-like head on a pint of cask bitter. It’s a more dynamic tradition than it appears, which makes modern, hop-forward bitter look more like the latest chapter in its story.

Ultimately, however, the proof for me is in the pint. Cask bitters are a master class in balance. The ingredients all rely on each other; the silkiness of natural carbonation balances the low ABV; the fullness of the malt balances the crisp, lean finish. In this modern version of cask bitter, those elements remain in place. The hops pick up the yeast’s esters in the nose, and they complement the soft, bready malts with a citrusy tang. Modern hops make cask bitters brighter and zippier, as if charged with a small electrical current—but they remain eminently easy to drink, pint after pint.

The Brits are the ones who invented the term “sessionable,” after all, and that quality is what continues to define modern cask bitters.

As American brewers mine the world for fresh ideas, it’s well worth taking another glance at Britain—and then catching a plane. What’s happening there is remarkable and ripe for rediscovery.

“I’ll have the cask lager.”

That was not something I expected to say upon my first visit to Bulls Head Public House in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Honestly, until then, I didn’t even know it was something I wanted.

Bulls Head is one of the few places in the United States to properly and consistently serve traditional British-style cask ale. And I love it: Bitter, mild, porter, and even modern pale ale—those are the styles I crave when a bartender is pulling pints from a cask engine.

But a pale lager from Scotland? Not so much.

Disappointed by the absence of my go-to traditional ale styles, I reluctantly ordered a Harviestoun Schiehallion Lager. One sip, however, and it clicked. “This works,” I thought. “This totally makes sense.”

This wouldn’t be news back in Britain, where the beer was named Champion Cask Beer at the Society of Independent Brewers Awards (SIBA) in 2022. Cask lagers have come and gone over the years, but Schiehallion—first brewed for cask service in 1994—has proven enduring, relevant, and praiseworthy.

Why Cask Lager?

In hindsight, my appreciation for this beer shouldn’t be a surprise. I love Franconian lager, which shares some attributes with real ale. Among traditional kellerbier and zwickelbier, natural carbonation in the serving vessel is similar to that of British cask ale.

John McIntosh is one who appreciates that kind of carbonation. He’s the owner and brewer at Acopon Brewing in Dripping Springs, Texas, just west of Austin, and his brewery specializes in British-style ales—many served on cask. However, lagers also regularly appear on the cask menu. “The natural carbonation gives a finer bubble size and softer mouthfeel,” McIntosh says, “and we think that really allows the malt sweetness to be accentuated, as well as showcasing the hop aromatics because they aren’t driven off during the pour process by excessive carbonation.”

At Harviestoun in Scotland, master brewer Amy Cockburn describes that sensation in the context of Schiehallion: “The presence of the yeast creates a softer carbonation and allows for more intense characters to come through from the hops and the yeast itself,” she says. “The grapefruit character created by our yeast is present in the keg and bottle but is more prominent in the cask.”

True to the cask-ale tradition, cask lager isn’t pasteurized and continues to evolve after leaving the brewery. All that is meant by “real ale”—as defined by Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA)—also applies to “real lager.” Sure, all beers evolve, but it happens much more quickly for cask ale and lager, and that evolution is part of the plan. It should be incredibly fresh when tapped. From there, it only has a few days before quality begins to sharply degrade—but in that brief window, there is nothing in the beer world quite like it.

Instead of worrying about that inevitable evolution, it’s something that many brewers embrace. “The beauty of the cask conditioning and service is that it’s alive and unwieldy at times,” says Sam Masotto, cofounder and brewer at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s, Bonn Place, another specialist in British-style ales.

As with any beer that goes into a cask, the format offers a unique opportunity for experimentation. However, restraint goes a long way—and some limited dry hopping is in keeping with tradition.

At Good Word in Duluth, Georgia, they have some casks that they tend to use for British-style ales and some German-style stichfässer (spigoted barrels) that they tend to use for lagers. However, they will periodically try something different by putting lager into a cask. It offers the opportunity to experiment with “limited risk,” as founder Todd DiMatteo says. They often do this when they experiment with a modern hop variety that they wouldn’t normally use in a traditional lager.

Conditioning Cask Lager

As with cask ale, the initial brewing process is no different for cask than it is for kegged lager. Fermentation is where things begin to diverge.

One way or another, fermentation should continue (or otherwise resume) in the cask. Various additions of fermentables and/or yeast can do the job, including kräusen, sugar, or a bit of yeast. How you go about fermenting and conditioning the lager up to that point is up to you. For example, you can lager it in tanks before racking to cask—or you can simply lager it in the casks.

At Bonn Place, for example, their preference is to add some unfermented wort to the cask to kick off the secondary fermentation. They then lager the beer in the casks for another three to six weeks.

At von Trapp Brewery in Stowe, Vermont, they’ll lager the beer for at least six weeks, says quality manager Jack Van Paepeghem. “We will then kräusen the cask with a small amount of actively fermenting wort and seal the vessel,” he says. “We let the cask stay at room temp for refermentation and diacetyl reabsorption, and then chill it in our keg cooler until it is ready for shipment [and] service.”

To fill casks at von Trapp, they pull the beer from a larger batch—not as easy as it sounds, especially at their scale. “We naturally carbonate all of our lagers [via spunding], so during fermentation, we capture up to 95 percent of our final target CO₂, meaning that the beer is very carbonated before we even start lagering.” Filling an empty five-gallon pin cask with fully carbonated beer from a 6,000-gallon tank presents an interesting technical challenge, with few tools to assist in terms of restriction and counter pressure.

Racking from an open or unsealed (ungespundet) tank is easier, though few brewers in the United States are doing it. At von Trapp, however, the natural carbonation is important to them, as is capturing as much CO₂ as they can. “Which means we can’t necessarily afford to have flat beer sitting around for these purposes,” Van Paepeghem says.

Once the casked lager is ready for service, dispense options include a simple gravity cask setup or a beer engine. While a beer engine is nice, that requires more than just purchasing a cask, faucet, and stillage for the bar top (see “Gearhead: American Real Ale,” beerandbrewing.com). The setup is not as expensive as you might think, but it does consume space on your bar for something you may not use all that often.

Even if you have a beer engine, it might not make sense for cask lager, depending on the temperature at which you intend to serve your beer.

At Acopon, for example, they have beer engines, but they prefer to use the bar-top gravity kegs for lager. Their engines are set up for ales, which they serve at a slightly higher temperature than what they want for their cask lagers. So, they simply pull a refrigerated cask from the cooler and set it up on the bar. This has the bonus of creating a little “O’zapft is!” moment when the keg is tapped. Cooling jackets also can be applied as necessary.

When served on the cooler side, cask lager may have a greater chance of attracting newcomers to a format that has historically (and erroneously) been associated with warm beer. Generally, cask lager is best served somewhere between standard keg temperature (~38°F/3°C) and cask ale temperature (~52°F/11°C).

What Styles?

You can serve any style of lager in the cask format, though brewers who do it tend to avoid styles often associated with high carbonation, such as pilsner and schwarzbier. Instead, they look to Czech-style lagers (whether pale, amber, or dark), various bocks, or helles, dunkel, or märzen made in the Franconian kellerbier style.

An additional word of caution comes from Bill Arnott, founder of the cask-centric Machine House Brewery in Seattle: “Crap lager would probably taste extra crap on cask.”

Arnott has been successfully collaborating with his neighbors at Lowercase to brew and serve cask lager—it’s an ideal situation where one brewer excels in cask and the other in lager. They’ve been collaborating on cask lager for five years, including the London Lager that Jeff Alworth (a regular contributor to Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®) on his Beervana blog named one of his best beers in 2022.

It’s no secret that cask beer has floundered in the United States, and it has its own struggles in its homeland as well. However, with craft lager enjoying a moment these past few years, perhaps there is avenue here to draw interest in both cask service and lager.

At Lowercase in Seattle, owner John Marti notes that introducing customers to cask lager can be challenging, especially considering the generally lukewarm reception to cask ale.

However, “once they understand what we’re doing, they have an even deeper appreciation for the idea of cask lagers,” he says. “We’ve always seen cask lager as a way to help people understand just how gorgeous cask beer can be.”

What it is: The oldest pub in Leeds also happens to be a veritable haven of craft beer and real ale, nestled in the epicenter of the city’s shopping district. Countless places have come and gone since Whitelock’s first opened its doors in 1715, yet this pub with its marble-and-copper-topped bar endures as a quintessential British pub. Boasting a range of 12 quality keg beers, the four rotating cask lines are where the pub truly shines. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better hand-pulled pint in the city. Receiving the royal seal of approval from the Duke of Kent, Whitelock’s is the jewel in Leeds’ beer crown.

Why it’s great: Whitelock’s is a proper pub in its purest form—it looks like one, smells like one, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. From its mirror-clad walls to Leeds’ first ever electric clock, you can’t help but sit in awe at the history in which you’ve immersed yourself. Drinkers of all tastes, backgrounds, and ages mix harmoniously inside and out, while aromas from the home-cooked menu drift slowly from a stained-glass serving hatch. As a former luncheon club in the mid-1890s, it’s only fitting that both beer and food continue to be served in this distillation of British drinking culture.

DETAILS
Hours: 11 a.m.–11 p.m., Sunday–Wednesday; 11 a.m.–midnight, Thursday–Saturday
Address: Whitelock’s Ale House, Turk’s Head Yard, Leeds, England
Web: whitelocksleeds.com

Mystique and romance. Gimmicks and stunts. Delicate and sublime. Warm and flat. The perception of cask-conditioned beer is as cloudy as the pints of IPA that have pushed the perennially struggling subculture into an even smaller corner of the beer world.

The outlook for cask beer in America is murkier still. Already relegated to scattered bastions run by a seemingly dying breed of brewers, publicans, and cellarpeople who nurture a fervent ardor for its traditions and distinctive qualities, cask took further blows when the coronavirus pandemic shuttered tasting rooms and pubs around the country.

Is there still a place for these quiet and contemplative beers among the bluster and enthusiasm for all things hoppy and hazy?

To check the pulse of cask ale in America, I first called my friend Andy Black, a brewer and industry consultant best described as a cask-ale firebrand. (For more from Black on cask ale, see “Keeping British Brewing Traditions Intact,” beerandbrewing.com.) He broke down the state of cask ale in the industry for me, and the picture is disheartening. Even its passionate supporters express fatigue and frustration. Beyond trying to explain its allure to customers and fellow brewers who have limited experience with it, they are even more tired of defending it against lame quips about it being “warm and flat.”

“It isn’t funny anymore,” Black says. Getting those comments from drinkers is one thing, but Black also hears it from brewers—even from a few whose beers go into casks for conditioning. The joke is stale, but it’s a misleading stereotype that’s hard to shake—and all those mediocre pints and poorly conditioned casks out in the wild are not helping.

For cask ale to survive in the modern American beer scene—let alone thrive—Black says that it needs a champion to step up. Cask conditioning needs someone to sing its praises and connect to the wider beer-drinking public—and to push for quality, so that the ale can better make its own beguiling argument.

The Parts and Processes

Steve Hamburg has been proselytizing cask conditioning since he first fell for the real ales of Britain in the 1980s. He organizes the long-running Chicago event Day of the Living Ales, besides being a board member of the Chicago Beer Society and a U.S. pub assessor for Cask Marque, which accredits cask quality primarily in the United Kingdom.

I first met Steve on a drizzly April morning in Chicago’s Goose Island brewpub. I was a couple of hours into the two-day Master Cicerone exam—which I would valiantly fail—and he was my first practical examiner. I learned more about how casks work in those 20 minutes of questioning than in the months of book-learning I did to prepare. It’s all well and good to know what a shive and a spile and a keystone are. It’s another thing entirely to be at the head of a firkin holding a mallet and a tap. “A beer shower is something you get used to,” Hamburg says, with his signature geniality.

Hamburg explains that not much has changed since he carried his first beer engine—that’s what pulls the beer from casks in the cellar and into the drinker’s glass at the bar—back from England. That day I got a remedial lesson in cask anatomy and the conditioning process.

The cask itself is usually found in one of three sizes: the firkin is most common in the United States, and it holds nine imperial gallons. A kilderkin holds twice as much, while the diminutive pin holds four and a half imperial gallons.

All three sizes share the same anatomy. The cask has two holes in it: One on the head, near the rim, is sealed by the keystone; the second larger one, called the bunghole, is sealed by the shive. The keystone is where you drive in the tap and draw out the beer; the shive, meanwhile, vents excess pressure after conditioning but before serving.

The original purpose of the cask as a serving vessel was to clarify the beer—it is literally a secondary fermentor that travels to the pub and lives in one cool spot until it conditions and its contents are consumed. Traditionally, brewers rack ales into casks just shy of terminal gravity, allowing fermentation to finish in the sealed vessel. That results in natural carbonation; great cask ale has life to it and is not “flat.” It also results in flocculation, as yeast that was suspended in the beer settles down, and drinkers end up with bright beer.

At the pub, the cellarperson typically sets the cask onto its rack, or stillage, and breaks the seal by pounding a porous wooden peg called a spile into the center of the shive. This vents excess CO2, and the cellerperson monitors how much carbonation remains in the beer over the next two or three days. Once the blow-off slows, and the condition reaches the desired level—there is a sweet spot below 2 volumes of CO2—the porous soft spile is replaced with a hardwood or plastic hard spile to reseal the cask. When it’s time to serve the beer, the hard spile must be removed so that air can enter through the shive, allowing beer to be pulled or poured from the cask. That arrival of oxygen inevitably alters the flavor of the beer, which is part of the appeal—in the short term. However, a cask served in this traditional way has only a few days of life before the beer is too flat and oxidized to be enjoyable.

Traditionalists hold that nothing besides finings and perhaps a charge of dry hops should be added to the cask. Meanwhile, in American craft-beer culture, casks often get doses of additives that would make a pastry-stout brewer blush. Everything from fruit to oak chips to coffee beans to Skittles seem to find their way into American casks. Conditioning shortcuts are common, and I’ve witnessed more than one tapping of casks that were force-carbonated for speed and drama. Tapping a fully carbonated cask may be difficult and messy, but it certainly draws hoots and hollers from a gathered crowd as beer and foam erupt with each mallet blow. You won’t get a proper pint, but you will get a proper good show. It’s very Instagram-able, and wacky additives such as Swedish Fish or malted-milk balls can generate enough hype to tempt even a conservative brewer to host a gimmicky cask tapping.

“A big shive hole shouldn’t be an invitation to shove weird things in,” Hamburg says. Anything besides beer added to a cask also adds more complexity to the ecosystem inside. Hamburg suggests dialing in your cask-building processes with a simple beer—preferably a British style that co-evolved with cask conditioning—before you start experimenting with the crazy stuff.

Most of the time, stunt casks are all sizzle and no steak. Even if the stout on coffee beans or the kumquat IPA are tasty and popular, they won’t compel the same lasting appreciation and infatuation as successful cask conditioning.

Tradition, Distorted

“Cask beer in the [United States] has become more about the stunts and less about the romance,” says Christopher Leonard, brewmaster at Heavy Seas Beer in Halethorpe, Maryland. Since 2013, Leonard has overseen a thriving cask-beer operation. Heavy Seas even offered a bespoke “build your own cask” program. Beer bars and other buyers would check boxes for preferred beer style, hop additions, and other flavors and additives. It made for memorable cask nights, and it was an effective marketing tool for both the brewery and the bars ordering the custom casks.

Yet, demand is shrinking. “We’re trying to sell some of our 500 firkins now,” Leonard says. He wasn’t sure they would even need 100 casks to support the market. When I asked whether the pandemic caused the drop in demand, he told me it was falling “long before COVID.” Leonard was a cask advocate in the D.C. area, Maryland, and Virginia for years, but now he’s tired. You can hear it in his voice: He’s not defeated, but he’s pragmatic about the allure of cask. It isn’t quick. It doesn’t fit into the on-demand, variety-mad beer culture that’s developed. “It’s beloved,” he says of cask, but the meat of that market is “old men like me who’ve seen our time come and go.”

There’s something else in his voice, though. It’s that same spark of excitement that cask devotees share. It flashes when Leonard describes watching someone try cask ale for the first time and their face when they “get it.” The excitement grows when he talks process and the details that comprise the “lost art” of cask packaging and service. The passion is there—it’s just tempered by economic realities and shifting consumer demand. He says he wishes that someone would take up the torch and light a new fire under brewers and drinkers; he just isn’t sure what that would look like in a post-COVID, TikTok-obsessed world.

While Leonard sees demand for cask ale wane, there are isolated glimmers here and there. In Seattle, Bill Arnott of Machine House Brewery is building a fan base seemingly from the ground up. More than half of its annual 500 barrels of beer go into casks for conditioning; before the pandemic, nearly all of them did. Session-friendly, low-ABV pub ales dominate the tap list.

Arnott acknowledges that these styles can be tough sells, and yet “bitter only makes sense on a cask. That’s when the magic happens.” His favorite advancement in the art of cask conditioning, and one that is helping the form find new outlets, is the widge.

Turning Cask Ale on its Head

Popularized by U.K. Brewing Supplies, the Cask Widge is a trademarked term for a device known generically as the vertical extractor. Much like Sanke keg couplers, vertical extractors handle both the beer flowing out of the vessel and the gas that enters, relocating the shive vent to the head of the cask. There are a few advantages to this method: A firkin stood up on its end needs less cellar space and, crucially, it will now fit into a kegerator. Suddenly, a pub doesn’t need a temperature-controlled cellar, a separate cold room, or a complex glycol cask-cooling system to serve cask at cellar temperature—that’s the 52–55°F (11–13°C) stipulated by tradition and recommended by cask advocates such as Cask Marque and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).

Instead, attach a beer engine to the top of a kegerator equipped with a temperature controller, a Cask Widge, and a cask breather, and you’ve got a “caskerator” that can serve hand-pumped pints at the perfect temperature from a cask with at least a week’s worth of salable life. The cask breather is also critical to this setup, as it allows a controlled amount of CO2 to displace the beer, limiting oxidation and giving the ale a longer life. (Notably, CAMRA long opposed cask breathers but officially lifted that opposition in 2018.)

In the Seattle area, Arnott has helped local pubs acquire and set up their own caskerators. To him, each installation is a sweeter victory than landing a permanent tap handle. He’s more comfortable knowing that the cask ales can be served and maintained properly, and he knows that each pint sold may just be someone’s love at first taste.

It’s a slow but rewarding process for Arnott, and the brewery now has 15 to 20 outside accounts that serve their casks. “Mild was impossible to sell eight years ago, but we’ve chipped away at it,” he says. He credits the well-established beer culture in the Pacific Northwest, and the comparatively high beer IQ of its drinkers, for the success of his niche product. “What we offer people is pretty weird, but we’ve changed the scene, and people respect cask,” he says.

In Colorado, with its developed and thriving beer culture, cask has enough fans to support niche players such as Denver’s Hogshead Brewery. Started as a drinking-club that met in a basement, Hogshead developed into a working brewery with a thriving cask program; about half its beer is cask-conditioned. There are seven gooseneck beer engines in the tasting room. The dedicated cask-conditioning space is a temperature-controlled shed in the brewery’s parking lot. They keep the cold room at a standard 42°F (6°C) for keg beer, but a clever partition system keeps tapped casks and those ready for service at 52°F (11°C).

That’s on the cooler end of the range that cask advocates recommend. That makes for easier dispensing as well as a more pleasing pint for American palates (and the generally warmer American climate). That’s one way that cask evangelists are combating that tired “warm and flat” perception. As Hogshead, general manager David Liechty says, “by the time you’re a couple sips into the pint, it’s perfect.”

Hogshead always offers cask ale in its tasting room, and it sends casks to select accounts around Denver. The brewery also hosts an annual CaskFest event featuring local breweries, and it rents out a caskerator for events. Liechty handles the delivery and setup himself, driving the system to wedding venues or customers’ houses two days in advance. It’s the first step in what he calls the “educational component” of selling cask beer.

“People always want me to drop it off the day-of,” he says. “They don’t understand that the beer needs to settle before it will pour well.” His explanations and the hands-on experience with the caskerator—plus a weekend’s fling with a firkin full of bitter or porter—help cement what’s special about the cask ale in customer’s mind. Not bad for about $250.

Never the Next Thing

American beer culture is based on adapting revered styles from around the world to American ingredients, processes, and palates, while creative brewers have developed new styles, a new generation of hazy IPA drinkers, and countless other new traditions and customs. So, how does cask-conditioned ale fit into this 21st century picture?

Nobody I spoke to was sure, but sentiments varied from hopeful to grim. Even Hamburg, a tireless booster for the form, was guarded in his predictions of the future: “There will always be some diehards in the industry who open and operate outposts for cask ale, but the pandemic—and the possibility of future outbreaks and closures of on-premise drinking establishments—definitely tempers any expectations for even modest growth in the cask sector.”

Why, then, does anyone bother? Why not just tell the cask-curious to head across the pond and get it from the source?

This attraction is irrational, like love, and I think the romance is more compelling than many realize. When you ask the people making or serving cask ale why they go through the trouble, you get a lot of biographical stories. There are the British expats and their relatives. Tales of weddings or coworkers from old jobs are common. So are accounts of eye-opening discoveries made abroad. Stories unspool of formative nights out when coming of age in the local pub, or of the promise of a new opportunity in a far-off city. This passion for cask ale is fully entwined with the memories of the enthralled. It’s an infatuation that’s infectious, and one thing that’s even better than the memories of that love at first sip—and the Proustian pursuit in every pint thereafter—is helping someone new to fall in love.

When cask ale fans lay out their pitch for why you ought to drink it, you’re likely to endure evocative tales of driving English back roads past neat, picturesque farms—or wandering cobbled London side streets through Victorian architecture—before visiting some small, unassuming, consummately cozy pub that’s been doing business since the Norman Conquest, where the narrator then revels in a perfectly sublime pint of bitter or mild.

I’ve got a few of those stories—but those experiences are not what sold me on cask ales.

My aha moment didn’t involve some Staffordshire pub or biscuit-forward dry-hopped bitter. No, I was in the exotic wilds of … Delaware. Rehoboth Beach, to be precise, home of Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats—the brewpub where that brewery got its start in 1995, 10 gallons at a time.

I walked in there one bright morning in late June some years ago and ordered an Aprihop IPA on cask—and then I ordered another, about 10 minutes later. It was the easiest-drinking beer I’d ever had—despite its 50 IBUs and 7 percent ABV—and it was delightfully fresh and bright. When I crashed out for a nap about 40 minutes later, my final thought was, “Wow. I really need to brew some cask-conditioned beer at home.”

Let’s Define Terms

“Cask ale,” “cask-conditioned ale,” and “real ale” are terms often used interchangeably to describe beer that is fermented conventionally and then transferred to a serving vessel—that’s the cask. So far, not so different from a kegged beer, but here’s where they part ways: This transfer should occur before the end of primary fermentation, sometimes with a small dose of priming sugar or kräusen (actively fermenting wort) to help spark the secondary fermentation and natural carbonation.

Whatever the method, the goal is a relatively low level of carbonation in the finished beer. The brewery might add dry hops and/or finings before sealing and delivering the cask to the pub for conditioning. (For more about the equipment and conditioning process, see “Gearhead: American Real Ale: What Condition Cask Condition Is In,” p. 52.) When the cellarperson decides that the beer is ready, the pub serves it either through a spigot via gravity or through a beer engine pulled via handpump into the glass. The result is a cool beer at peak freshness, with soft carbonation and a clear field to express its flavor profile.

So, why isn’t all beer served this way?

Besides the fact that many drinkers have a taste for the coldest beer full of zippy bubbles—often fined, filtered, and pasteurized—cask conditioning is not that easy to do. There is an art to cellarmanship and a learning curve for bar staff. Shelf life is an issue, too; since air enters the cask, it typically needs to be enjoyed within a few days. Finally, cask ale requires investment in some specialized equipment that also must be learned; a conventional keg is a plug-and-play situation, with relatively little effort required beyond maintaining clean lines and a reasonable level of CO2 in the system.

Now that I’ve made it sound like a huge headache, here’s the reality: Not only is cask-conditioned ale a viable option for homebrewers, but many of these concerns can be addressed simply and cheaply.

Let’s assume that investing in your own stock of firkins and stillages and spiles and all that other “real ale” paraphernalia is something you’re not yet willing to do. Instead, let’s talk about options for brewing and serving cask-style ale using equipment you probably already have. At the end of the day, you’ll find that it’s not only something you can try, but this is something you can incorporate regularly into your home beer-service regimen.

Let’s Keep it Simple

My brewing mantra has always been keep it simple. Let’s not overcomplicate what we’re trying to accomplish here: putting a fresh ale in a serving vessel to get as close as possible to traditional cask conditioning and service, while also limiting our liabilities and risks.

Step One, then, is to brew a good beer—more on recipe and style considerations below. Once that’s accomplished, we can move on to our conditioning and service steps. Once the beer is mostly fermented, transfer it to its new vessel (the “cask”), and during this conditioning phase add dry hops, fruit, other special ingredients, or nothing at all. Priming this beer as it goes into this new vessel is an option, but it’s not mandatory. You’ll also want to add finings to clarify the beer as well as you can—more on that below.

After a week or two, when your beer is ready—that is, it’s conditioned: fermented, dropped bright, with carbonation where you want it—it’s time to serve. So, what will you serve it from? The simplest answer—and unless you’re bottles-only, you probably already have this on hand—is a corny keg.

Denny Conn, coauthor (with Drew Beechum) of Simple Homebrewing and Experimental Homebrewing, explains the method succinctly: “Corny keg on its side, serve through the gas connector.”

That’s the gist of it, really: Rather than a purpose-built cask, you can just use your existing kegs in a new way. You can find or build a stillage (a frame that holds your keg at a slight downward angle), or you can just get creative with some blocks, braces, or towels. Just be sure the IN post is at the bottom and the OUT post is on top. You can use a picnic tap to serve the beer, and you simply vent the OUT post—that can be as simple as a beer post connector with a short piece of tubing attached. That’s it.

However, to give yourself the best shot at serving a bright, pretty beer, you’ll want to ensure that you set up your “cask” and leave it alone for at least 24 hours. (This assumes you’re not serving from the same place where you conditioned it, which is ideal but possibly tricky to pull off at home—and even trickier for a party.) Jostling it will kick up sediment that you worked hard to drop out, and that’s no good for appearance or for flavor. Bed that beer down in a nice, cool place—say, 52–57°F (11–14°C)—let it settle a while, and enjoy.

Now, as with traditional cask ale, this method is going to introduce oxygen, and quickly—when you pour the beer, air enters through the vent to displace it. If you’re not hosting a party where your guests could empty that cask in a few hours, you might want to consider getting your hands on a cask breather: This is a small device that connects to your CO2 tank and gently applies carbon dioxide rather than ambient air to replace beer as it’s poured. Plenty of professional brewers and publicans vouch for the cask breather’s ability to extend the life of your ales; you may have to pony up roughly $75 to $100 for a decent one.

A cheaper option—available to many a homebrewer with more kegs than sense—is to split the batch among several kegs and treat them as elaborate one-gallon-ish growlers. I’ve also heard of folks who keep refillable mini-kegs or polypins on hand for this purpose.

If you don’t have that kind of equipment, you might consider one of the following potentially heretical alternatives.

There’s nothing stopping you from also serving your cask-style beers—hear me out, now—upright. Rather than tipping and pouring by gravity, follow all the same steps for conditioning, but serve the beer under (reduced) headspace pressure with the usual IN/OUT connections. You’ll have more sediment than usual, so you’ll need to employ one of two options to get clear beer out of that keg. First, you can do some minor surgery and shorten up the dip tube on your liquid post—say, two inches cut off the bottom. Another alternative comes recommended by Malcolm Frazer, head brewer at Pittsburgh’s Hop Farm Brewing (but “mostly still a homebrewer at heart,” he says) who recommends a cask widge or widget.

These widges or floats are flexible, floatable dip tubes that draw beer far from the muck at the bottom of the keg, so you can safely ignore it entirely. Fittings of this type are affordable and pretty user-friendly. They also let you dry hop and fine your beer with abandon, with no fear of clogging up your service line.

Both of these upright methods have two significant advantages. First, there is virtually no risk of oxidation, since they’re under light CO2 pressure. Second, you can use your normal draft dispensing equipment (whatever that might be).

Let’s Fine-Tune

That’s the big picture on dispense. Now, let’s zoom in on some details—namely, fining, hopping, temperature, and carbonation.

Good cask-style beer is bright—that is, it should be clear. Whatever your normal fining process is, hit it hard here. Filtering goes against the cask ethos, but you can do a lot with fining agents such as gelatin and isinglass. Adding them to your serving vessel will help clarify your beer, and so will choosing a good high-flocculation yeast. (Many British strains grew out of this tradition and are ideal for it.) Whatever your methods, though, clarity is a primary goal—this is no place for haze-bros. Meanwhile, dry hopping is traditional and fully acceptable in cask ales, and this can be a fantastic opportunity to showcase interesting hops. A word of caution, though: Whereas you want to go heavy on finings, use an inversely light hand on dry hops. Without a bunch of CO2 in solution, your ingredient flavors will stand out. As a result, you’ll need less hops than you think. Whatever your usual dry-hopping regimen, cut it in half to start and adjust from there.

Temperature and carbonation are physically related, and both matter here. Again, traditional cask-style beer is generally served in the low- to mid-50s°F (11–14°C). If you’re lucky to have a cool cellar or wonky kegerator that hits those temperatures, good for you. Removing the “cask” from the fridge a short while before serving is another low-tech option. A surer bet is to connect your fridge or kegerator to a temperature controller. In any case, be mindful of the relationship between temperature and pressure: As beer temperature changes, so does the level of dissolved CO2 under the same pressure.

Here’s some advice from Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey Brewing in San Marcos, California: When it comes to carbonation, aim high at first: “You can over-prime and always knock down the excess CO2 to get the right mouthfeel. If you undershoot, it can be harder.”

So: Keep it simple, mind the details, and you’ll be in great shape.

Now, Let’s Brew a Cask-Friendly Beer

There is no such thing as a list of “approved” cask-style beer styles. Options abound.

Some styles are more intuitively suitable than others, of course. “Classic British styles are the best beers for cask service,” says Jamil Zainasheff of Heretic Brewing in Fairfield, California. “They’ve been developed over time to truly make the most of cask conditioning and service.”

Fresh hops, bready malts, highly flocculant yeasts, and beers that can actually benefit from a touch of diacetyl and low carbonation—yes, British styles across the spectrum are right up our cask alley. Zainasheff also urges us to put in the work: “For the homebrewer, don’t try to take shortcuts,” he says. “Use the right [British] yeasts, malts, hops. Cask condition and serve at the correct temperature. It is worth the effort.”

At Lost Abbey, Arthur echoes that sentiment, especially when it comes to malt: “I have always found imported English malts provide a depth that American two-row and domestic crystal malts come up short on.” Tradition is a path to success in these beers.

It’s not the only path, though. Any style that doesn’t lean expressly on high levels of carbonation—saison and Berliner weisse come to mind—is a good candidate for cask service. As I mentioned at the outset, even bitter and hop-forward beers can be outstanding on cask and bring flavors that can get lost in a lot of carbonic acid. Likewise, spiced and herbed beers can be cask-friendly. Nor do they need to be low-ABV: I once watched my wife camp out for two hours next to a cask of heavily honeyed imperial stout (attempt this at your own risk). At the end of the day, cask ale (or cask lager, for that matter) is a flexible approach that can create new and diverse flavor opportunities for brewers large and small.
Which reminds me: There was this one time I was tooling around on a countryside tour of the Midlands, when we spotted this old pub with a thatch roof …

For cofounders Michael Messenie and Tim Lee, the idea behind Dutchess Ales in Wassaic, New York, was to recreate the kinds of cask-conditioned ale they loved when living in Britain. If you’ve enjoyed a proper pint of cask ale in New York City in recent years, there’s a good chance it came from Dutchess.

Today, the brewery is branching out, brewing beer for distribution at a host brewery on Long Island, and even making forays into lagers (such as Ketzer Helles, which scored a 98/100 with our blind panel). But their first love is, and always will be, cask ale.

These are no historical reenactors. Messenie blends just a touch of inspiration from his Southern California roots with this British focus, resulting in beers that aren’t slavish renditions but exhibit a flash of personality (within proper context). That same fusion with a heavy dose of tradition informs newer beers such as GB Pale Ale, where seven malts and a copitched blend of three yeast strains lends it notes of past and present.

In this episode, Messenie discusses:

• Cask ale roots, history, and inspiration
  
• How pale ale speaks in a more compelling way than IPA
  
• Brewing GB Pale Ale with blended yeast and an evolving malt bill
  
• Tilting pub ales toward a drier finish
  
• Blending malts to build character
  
• Finding interesting notes in lesser-known English hops
  
• Working collaboratively through contract brewing
  

And more.

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Brewers are always under the influence, so to speak. That influence comes either from your predecessors, from admired colleagues, or from your own brewing culture. All the beers you encounter in your life—especially before you start brewing—help, step-by-step, to create a vision of what your own beers should be.

Having a vision is key if you want to make great beer. It should be something personal, showcasing your values. But unless you’ve lived all your life on an island, then you have been—even without noticing—under the beer influence of others. It’s a good personal exercise to try to understand that. It probably makes us better brewers because it forces some humility upon us and connects us more deeply to our industry. Of course, that influence should lead us to get inspired while making our own things, not to basically copy.

The first three beers I’ve selected are, for me, some of the very best examples of styles and beer cultures that influenced my approach to beermaking. As a Belgian, I have, of course, been influenced by the beers of my homeland (perhaps most importantly by lambic) but maybe even more so by traditional English bitters—with their low ABV and super-high drinkability—and by German pilsners, with their clean palate and the precision used to brew them. Those are the main causes of what my beers are today—or, at least, what I’m trying to do with them. Funnily enough, both those brewing cultures deeply influenced Belgian brewing in the second half of the 19th century.

The three other beers are made by some dear American friends whose work I admire. I know that they also have been influenced by Belgian beer culture—and I have to say they are influencing me in return. They were the most difficult to choose, as they are far from being the only ones I love, coming from what is now the most influential beer country. A six-pack is definitely too small a package!

Schönramer Pils

(Schönram, Upper Bavaria, Germany)
If you’re a brewer and your brain is telling you, “I want a beer!” then the beer it actually wants is a pils—it’s the definition of beer, right? I believe in Darwinism, also for beer: There’s a reason why this style became the most successful of all time. When well-made, it’s simply irresistible. And if there is to be only one pilsner on this planet, for me it’s Schönramer. Located in beautiful southern Bavaria, the Private Landbrauerei Schönram owes its reputation to an American: Eric Toft. Eric is one of the most precise brewers I know—and a fantastic person, too! But, like all the best brewers, he can give soul to a beer—through technique certainly, but also through love, intuition, and sensitivity.

Schönramer Pils has a bright, hoppy aroma, a malt depth that gives it a perfect structure, and an assertive bitterness that is at the same time clean and sharp as a razor, yet extremely elegant. This crisp lager is simply liquid perfection.

Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter

(East Sussex, England)
Good beer is a question of volume. I’m not joking. One should not sip it but gulp it to see whether it’s good or not. And what beers are easier to gulp than traditional English cask bitters, with their perfect balance between malt and hops and their gentle carbonation? Of course, the key word here is—as it should always be—balance. And Harvey’s Head Brewer Miles Jenner is a master of balance. He carefully hand selects the best possible ingredients, allowing the magic of open fermentation and traditional yeast strains to do their thing—under his expert guidance, of course.

The results: delightful biscuity notes from the malt supported by a gentle fruitiness, a balanced bitterness, and the perfect combination of fermentation and hop flavors. The yeast(s) haven’t been propagated since the 1950s (which is just cool), and they impart a sort of tamed wildness to the beer, melting with subtle sulfur notes to give it a lot of character. It is probably one of the finest remaining examples of post-WWI British brewing. This is a beer you could drink all day (which I never fail to do when sitting at The Royal Oak, their house pub in London).

Cantillon Grand Cru Bruocsella

(Brussels, Belgium)
If I’m a professional brewer today (and that does appear to be the case), then it’s probably thanks to a few great Belgian brewers who were miraculously still active in the late 1980s. They fueled my passion for beer, especially Jean-Pierre Van Roy from the Brasserie Cantillon in Brussels. I met him first in 1989. We chatted for a couple of hours, but it didn’t take more than five minutes for him to transmit to me his passion for (good) beer. He showed me that, behind those beers, there are values, that those values can be endangered, and that it’s worth fighting for them. He was my Beer Yoda. Later, his son Jean showed me, in turn, the importance of the art of blending, when I worked for him years later.

Of course, my first Cantillon was the Gueuze, but I was quickly intrigued by the mother beer of the brewery: lambic. Grand Cru Bruocsella is Cantillon’s best three-year-old lambic, carefully chosen before each bottling. This flat, wine-like, deliciously tart and complex beer opened my mind to a new world, permanently connecting me with the roots of my own brewing culture.

Allagash White

(Portland, Maine)
I have a profound admiration for Rob Tod and Jason Perkins. Not only are they the friendliest people, but they also succeeded into doing something quite extraordinary: embracing the beer culture of a foreign country and, for some styles, surpassing the level of the beers of that country. That country, of course, is Belgium. They’re not alone in the United States; people such as Tomme Arthur at The Lost Abbey and Will Meyers at Cambridge Brewing are also experts in the field. Allagash White—another brewers’ beer, by the way—is an excellent example.

Over the years, witbier probably became the most boring style you could find in my country—sweetish, over-spiced, it became a “beer for the people who don’t like beer.” It’s sad because originally, this style was extremely interesting and way more complex than it seems to be. But the people at Allagash understood the essence of it, re-creating it in a superb way. They especially understood the importance of wheat and of overall balance in this beer. The result is a delightful, thirst-quenching, wheat-forward beer, with just the right amount of spiciness that doesn’t overwhelm. It’s a gold-medal beer in the style, as its many honors demonstrate.

Russian River Beatification

(Santa Rosa, California)
Talk about great people and great beers! Vinnie and Natalie Cilurzo count among the nicest humans in our industry, and the way they brew beer should be an example for all of us. They also take bits and pieces of other beer cultures and mix them with their own ideas and terroir to create something unique and very personal, always with a strong sense of its place. They even dared to attack a stupid myth that claimed that spontaneous beers could only be made in Belgium! (They were joined by other skillful brewers such as Jester King, Oxbow, Jolly Pumpkin, Allagash, Pen Druid, and many more now.) Although it is inspired by Belgian lambic, they helped to create a new style (that one could call “American spontaneous”), which is fascinating because it is such a difficult beer to make.

Beatification is a great example. Vinnie uses his deep knowledge in wine to age the beer properly and blend it to perfection. The wild yeasts and bacteria take the lead, but in a mellow way that perfectly complements the oak and vinous notes from the barrels. Some minerality is also present, creating another bridge to the world of wine. The result is a very complex but still refreshing beer that carries you back and forth from Belgium to the Sonoma Valley in a tasteful journey.

Keeping Together The Art of Holding Space

(Chicago)
Averie Swanson is one of the best brewers I know. She’s meticulous in the way she brews, but she also uses all her senses at all times to create the perfect beer. A master in blending, she can also talk to the yeast, which is one of the best qualities a brewer can have. Averie is also a lot of fun! And The Art of Holding Space is truly wonderful.

This table beer has everything the educated beer lover or open-minded drinker can dream of: It’s very complex while super-easy to drink; it imparts a subtle fruitiness, balanced by the right level of bitterness and mild funkiness; and it’s highly refreshing—with its low ABV of 3 percent, you can drink gallons without hurting yourself, like a light mid-19th century saison. It’s a real brew(st)er’s beer, and a real masterpiece.

“When we opened, everyone said ‘You can’t open a brewery with three beers,’” says Hogshead founder Stephen Kirby. “And I think the answer to that is ‘You can if they’re good ones.’ I think the truth’s out—I only make three beers. You’ve got guys who want to make everything. I make bitter, I make porter, I make mild.”

That approach of doing only a few things but with an obsessive focus is highly unusual in today's beer market, where everyone seems to want everything, all the time. But Kirby is straightforward about his motivations—he’s in it to brew the beer that he loves and wants to drink. True to his British roots, that beer is what he grew up with—traditional cask ales. Kirby doesn’t hold back, sharing his views on a wide range of subjects, including:

• Why brewers should have the “bollocks” to name beers what they are
• Selecting hop varieties for balance in flavor and aroma
• Underpitching English strains at slightly lower temperatures for proper yeast flavors
• Innovation versus tradition
• British versus American takes on IPA
• How carbonic acid impacts hops bitterness
• Building small beers with big body while avoiding the impression of sweetness
• How water chemistry affects English beer styles
• Mash regimens to benefit head retention
• Using controlled oxidation through the life of a beer to tell a story
  

“I brew the beer that I love, and I invite you come come over and have a pint,” Kirby says. “As a business model, it sucks, but it’s good for the soul. If you’re not making the beer you love, why the fuck are you doing it?”

This episode is brought to you by:

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If you've homebrewed a cask ale, but don't have access to a firkin, Paul Odell demonstrates how you can use a cornelius keg for serving with similar results.

In Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®’s online course, How to Brew & Serve Great Cask Beers, BJCP-certified judge Paul Odell walks you through everything you need to know to brew, then serve (both traditionally and through homebrew kegs) great cask beers. Sign up today!