Containing a Problem

There are many interesting issues associated with running a brewery. It is not unreasonable for those who don't work in a brewery to be blissfully unaware of many of these problems. It's not their fault.

One very interesting problem is that of containers. Casks, kegs, KeyKegs and other draught beer transport mechanisms.

They cost money. Sometimes quite a lot of money. There are ways of reducing those costs, i.e. through the use of plastic casks for instance. However, there is generally a cost of ownership somewhere along the line.

We like eCasks and eKegs. We like them a lot because we simply call up our friends over in the depot, they send a pallet or two, or three and we get along with filling them. We generally buy them in clean, which costs a little more, but we reckon it's worth it as cask washing is somewhat labour intensive. We could reduce the man-hours for cask washing by buying a big expensive machine, but then we'd have costs associated with the big bank loan we'd need to take out.

Plastic casks are less expense than stainless steel, but our experience is that they also have a significantly shorter life span and eventually you'll loose more than the savings in lost beer due to split casks. Stainless casks cost around £75 each to buy. Some might be less, and better ones a little more. There is second hand, but often the differences are not that great.

We are lucky at the moment that none of our finance is associated with our container population. This probably won't last long as we need to up our population. We do have some kegs on lease, which is not too bad, but there is a monthly charge.

All in all there is no wary around the fact that there is a "cost of ownership" associated with container populations. There is an inevitable shrinkage of this asset pool and every day a container is out of the brewery it's costing money.

Pubs probably don't think too much about it. It's not uncommon for pubs to have the clever idea of cutting casks open to use as planters, or make hand stools from, or even to use as parking bollards.

This last example did sort of annoy me as they were our casks. We uplifted them. I considered many courses of action including sending the offender a bill or asking the police to look at the criminal damage aspect. I also considered contacting the paper and putting our case, but thought that might just be bad PR. I ended up doing very little on the grounds that it might just spiral out of control resulting in an unpleasant tit-for-tat fight with the pub out of which no one would win. After all, the pub landlord probably didn't really understand.

You can perhaps understand my bewilderment when I saw the Publican Morning Advertiser piece where the pub has clearly decided to use their criminal behaviour¹ to gain more publicity.

You can imagine I was somewhat further annoyed by the audacity of the pub's landlady for clearly going out of her way to publicise her clear vandalism. However, after further consideration we still decided to do very little².

But I duo want to record some errors and misinformation in the report.

1. We have more than once tried to recover the casks, but had been told they were not there. We have also phoned the pub for orders, but they hadn't ordered since those casks were delivered. They had every opportunity to inform us that the casks were there to be picked up. One can only assume they knew the state of the casks.

2. The casks have been out of the brewery for less then 2 years and not the stated 6 years in the article. We know this from our cask tracking software.

3. We did not "confiscate" them. They our ours, we were simply reclaiming our own property.

But meanwhile, there is a nice thread on Facebook regarding the matter. Certainly those in the know in the industry seem to think the pub is out of order.

In other news, we have a nice table in our new bar.

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¹We have since gained advice from various sources and we could indeed ask the police to consider a case of criminal damage. We would of course be totally within our rights to send a bill for either refurbishment or replacement and follow up with debt collection should it remain unpaid.

¹Write this blog post, actually, was the agreed course of action. I suspect few of my readers will side with the landlady. Also, I think there might be an attitude that casks are free for operators of pubs to do with as they wish. I mean, leave them out in the hot sunshine, without a bung, so as the files lay eggs and cutovers post in fag ends. Makes the job of cask cleaning such a delight.

The point is that there is a lot of work to do to inform the on-trade of the costs they push onto breweries and so the cost of beer due mainly to a lack of appreciation rather than maliciousness. I can imagine that out there in pub land many publicans actually don't see a problem. It's not their fault, bless them.

Container Snobbery

We've recently invested in some proper stainless kegs. We've been putting beer into KeyKeg for some time and we have a few plastic kegs too. Most of our kegged beer has been exported to Italy where it has been well received. Today we are sending a further 48 KeyKegs.

As we've been gaining experience putting un-filtered craft beer into keg we've found there to be some issues. Un-filtered means the beer will contain some live yeast. This can sometimes, if there are some fermentables left, result in over-conditioning of the beer. This is especially true if the beer is allowed to warm up¹ during transportation.

Cask of course can, and should be vented prior to being served. Any over-condition is allowed to be released until the carbonation is at an equilibrium with cellar temperature and atmospheric pressure. This means that fresh cask beer should have a minimum carbonation of about 1.1vols upon serving. Effectively this is an advantage of cask beer for micro-brewers as the exact carbonation level is determined by how the cellarman treats the beer rather than precise process at the brewery. Every good cask cellarman knows there will be some variability in the carbonation dependant on many factors including the timeline activities between racking in the brewery and the point of being tapped and vented.

I've talked before about how to reduce the pressure² in KeyKegs - it works. I even managed to do it on-the-fly in Turin last year for various British brewers' beers to help get them served on the bar at Salone Del Gusto. My thumb acted as the release valve. It was a risky process. And yes, I did end up getting a beer shower.

We have improved significantly in our skills at getting carbonation right since we started putting beer into keg. From that respect the beer will be no better, or worse, in the stainless kegs than the beer we are now sending out in large quantities in KeyKeg. However, as is the case with most craft brewers who are exploring keg the early editions have been in KeyKeg and less well executed versions than the beer we now send out.

When we first started brewing all our beer went into plastic casks. It worked for us because way back then, in late 2005, we only sold it through the pub we then owned. Any problems we could manage and anyway, as the beer went straight from racking into the pub cellar there were rarely any issues. However, when we started selling a lot more to various outlets we found that the beer was less tolerant to variability especially in hot weather.

Again, we've improved. A lot. We rarely send out beer out in plastic cask, or plastic kegs. Mainly because in trade they just don't stand the knocks. Longterm, plastic just isn't a sensible investment. However, for startups it makes sense and as a result many new brewers use plastic. Low investment costs equals reduced risk. The result is that less experienced brewers, who have yet to perfect their processes, may have a greater degree of variability.

I've noticed a wide range of snobbery towards containers. There is of course the ongoing question of exactly what CAMRA should accept. I've noticed some distributors now refusing to accept KeyKeg because of a high rate of return of over-conditioned KeyKegs. The same distributors will accept stainless kegs. I've heard publicans snoot at plastic casks because the beer tends to be more variable. Either it is under-conditioned and flat or it has a much bigger tendency to blow keystones and shives.

I'd argue that none of this is the fault of the container, although I don't doubt that the correlation is real.

Our beer is getting better and better and better all the time. Over the next few months we will be putting out much more keg beer into the UK and it will mostly be in stainless kegs. It'll be very good indeed, trust me. It's not getting better because we are putting beer into stainless, we are putting it into stainless because we are better and way more confident in what we are doing.

Of course, I could now start to talk about bottles versus cans.........

If you are in Leeds next week you might find kegged Azimuth and/or Duality in North Bar. We're also sending keg Azimuth to BeerX in Sheffield. I believe there are also places in Newcastle that might have our keg either now or in the very near future. These include The Free Trade Inn, Bacchus and Lady Grey's.

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¹Beer will always keep better, irrespective of whether it is filtered, live or even pasteurised, if kept cool from the point it is packaged to the point it is served.

²Although I accept that beer ought to be as good as it can be for the establishment to handle, I do wonder why some don't at least make the effort to gas off kegs from those brewers who are experimenting. I'd love to still have my own bar so that I could iron out all the troubles within my own control. However, we do make mistakes and sometimes places get beer that fobs due to over condition. If it's not right then clearly a refund is in order, but it would be nice to still get the beer on the bar and showcased, especially if we've made the effort to ship it a long way.