The Cask Anomaly

Life goes on, and you might be surprised to know; so does Hardknott. We have plans afoot to continue, perhaps against my better judgment, and will be involved with the business of making beer for a while yet I hope.

We have definitely stopped brewing at Millom. The brewhouse is just old, tired and in need of serious upgrade. We simply cannot justify solving that where we are. But we have some nice tanks and a bottling line. It seems there are people out there who believe they could use them, and perhaps use me too. People who might just be able to help me with the issue of lacking a decent brewhouse. It's all top-secret, and I might even be jumping the gun by leaking this little snippet.

That preamble is relevant however. As part of working out what to do for the future I've thought long and hard about a number of aspects of the beer market. My conclusions are that the British beer culture is still largely stuck with a huge number of preconceptions, traditional practices and frankly stupid dogmas that inhibit microbrewing from emerging out of the twentieth century.

I've contemplated the issues regarding cask beer before on several occasions. As part of my review I have considered cask very carefully indeed and have come to some fairly decisive conclusions, key to it is the following point.

The vast majority of draught beer brewed by brewers below 200,000hl/yr production is cask. The vast majority of keg beer is produced by brewers over 200,000hl/yr production and these brewers produce nearly no cask at all.¹

Something is very wrong with this situation, very wrong indeed. I do not think one can understate how this is linked to another fairly important point.

Cask beer represents less than 10% of the total beer sales in the UK and around 16% of the total draught sales. The remaining 84% of draught sales are keg beers and the vast majority of that volume is from the big global producers.

The total beer market is shrinking, partly due to overall reductions in alcohol consumption but also critically due to changing customer preference to what are seen as more artisanal products. Cask remains roughly static as a proportion of the overall beer market. Cask in the free trade also appears to remain largely free from dispense equipment ties and this is in itself an interesting observation.

People like cold and fizzy

It is undeniable that people like cold fizzy beer. Only the deluded would try to deny that, and indeed it is important to note that contrary to the message CAMRA have put out for years, people who drink keg beer are not morons simply influenced by the advertising campaigns of large multinational brewers. Drinkers really do prefer beer that is cold and fizzy.

The artificial restriction of microbreweries largely to cask rather weakens their ability to capture a larger market. If a drinker's enjoyment of a beer experience is inferior under certain circumstances then that consumer is likely to be swayed away from that situation.

I have long pondered this situation. A long-time lover of the pub experience, brewer of cask, keg and bottle beers, twice over publican, past lover of cask beers and now a firm believer in keg as the future of great beer has come from observation and thought about the whole market.

What is wrong with cask, surely it's the best?

Have no doubts, cask beer is technically easier to produce, needs less capital investment and is less expensive to produce. It is ideal in many ways as a method for a brewery to gain an entry to the market.

Cask beer has a number of serious disadvantages;

• ·      Served at a warmer temperature and with less "fizz" making it less palatable to many consumers (this is true, get used to it)
• ·      The open container results in the beer noticeably deteriorating in a couple of days (actually, in my experience, a few hours)
• ·      The lack of carbonation inhibits the demonstration of great hop aromas
• ·      Variability in the quality of dispense resulting in brewer's beer not always being as they'd intended
• ·      Significantly more skill required by staff to ensure quality is maintained
• ·      Poor cellar cooling and cleanliness impacts on cask over keg
• ·      Due to significant over-supply in the market the wholesale price of cask beer is very depressed
• ·      Simply not funky and trendy enough for youngsters resulting in microbrewed beer losing out to trendy spirits, fruit ciders and fizzy rancid grape juice from Italy

The dichotomy

The beer market is still very much sliced in two by the terrible dogma instilled into the culture of British beer. Whilst there is no denying that some changes have been made and craft keg has become a thing, despite many people being sceptical, it is still very much a niche and confined to craft beer bars and a few very bold progressive pubs.

Mainstream pubs generally have a number of keg fonts almost exclusively for multinational brands. They may well, if free of tie, have handpulls serving locally produced cask beer, if they serve any microbrewed beer at all.

Beer drinking customers can be broadly divided into two types; the cask drinker, who might default onto smooth-flow if desperate and the solid keg drinker who wouldn't wash their socks in that cask stuff.

Admittedly, there is a group of wise and discerning people who are much less blinkered, and who will drink based on their mood, thirst, level of sunshine or just because they are curious, but I'd suggest this group of people are in fact a small proportion of drinkers.

The future really is keg beer

A bold statement you might think, and indeed it is only part of the future, but a very significant part of it. It's not an easy road though. Much investment is needed along with working out the route to market.

Equally there is the task of convincing cask-only drinkers, who are only so in my view due to the pressure from CAMRA, to love microbrewed keg along with gaining trust of the keg-only brigade to try new beers. Changing that is likely to be a bit of an uphill battle, CAMRA AGM voting continues to prove this point.

Not only that, we have to tackle the stranglehold of the multinationals on the bar front. Various "soft ties" that effectively prohibit microbreweries from even being permitted to sell their keg beers to pubs in fact tie much of the market even where a pub is apparently free of tie. This last point is important. Many observers are getting their knickers in a twist about PubCos and brewery owned estates forgetting that this is actually not the really big issue we have to deal with.

And for Hardknott?

It is almost certain that in whatever form we finally re-emerge we will be focusing on keg much more than cask, very probably eliminating cask all together. For a start, the most likely solution to continuing would be to join with an existing cask producer thereby possibly forming a conflict.

My task then for the next few months is to work out how to tackle the various barriers to getting really great keg beers available and better accepted by the beer drinking public.

I think a return to a much more combative, confrontational and outspoken ethos for Hardknott is required; there is a lot to change in the minds of the public if we are to see microbrewed beers on keg fonts in many more regular pubs. I do not think there is any good reason for this not to happen other than inappropriate inertia emanating from a Luddite attitude.

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¹OK, so I expect I'll get some challenges here. Yes, there are the likes of Fullers and Marstons who put quite a lot of beer into cask, but even so, that vast majority of beer produced by breweries over 200,000hl/yr is keg beer.

Bad definition

Continuing the theme of blogeratti and craft keg, I noticed in The Cask Report the following definition;

"Keg beer:
Beer that has been pasteurized and/or filtered to remove any yeast, before being sealed in a pressurized container.

It is then dispensed with the aide of CO2, nitrogen or a mix of the two to give fizz or ‘smoothflow’ texture."

The author, Pete Brown, is well known for his broad appreciation of beer, including both keg and cask. Shame the definition is wrong, my keg beer is neither filtered nor pasteurised.

Not Chemical Fizz

I've been playing around with keg. I'm a CAMRA member and a micro-brewer, what on earth would I want to do that for?

British style "traditional"¹ beer is often best represented in cask. It is as simple as that. I don't think I know a single beer enthusiast who would have an argument with that. Not even my very good friend Jeff Pickthall, who is a confirmed and uninhibited CAMRA basher. I share some of his concerns, but to use the phrase often used, it would be a shame to throw out the baby with the bath-water. CAMRA is not all bad and cask beer is good.

Much contemporary beer is great from cask. There are plenty of modern beers that are fantastic served through hand-pull and I hope that some of mine classify in this group. There are also in my view, a number of beers that are generally better in keg. They are generally the stronger "craft" beers that have, up until recently, been responsible for some beer enthusiasts to drink more at home than in pubs or bars. The progressive craft keg market might well be small, it might well never overtake cask in volume, but it is growing and I'm interested in that as a brewer and a drinker.

The irony is that beer served from cask often contains more processed material than beer that is mass produced. Chemicals, you see, cost money. The main addition that is used in cask beer is Isinglass, which is made from processed fish guts and also contains chemicals like sulphur dioxide and citric acid.

Most brand keg beer by contrast is chill filtered and although I cannot guarantee these substances are not used at all, I know for a fact they are used in significantly lower quantities. Filtering, or separation of solids by centrifuge uses less chemicals and therefore costs less money to make. They are, therefore, not chemical beers at all.

I have been interested in kegging for some time. I've tried some trial kegs and found mixed success. I like the idea of completely unfiltered beer and beer that does not use isinglass. This seems just about impossible to do unless you can afford to leave it in a conditioning tank chilled to -1°C for six weeks.

I've recently racked some Infra Red into 20l kegs and there is a second trial keg of Queboid which is loaded right now into the van for delivery to the Rake Bar. The Infra Red has light filtering and the Queboid just chill conditioning. Both are likely to have haze to some degree, but I hope to acceptable levels.

I am a supporter of the idea of kegging beer over 6%. There is no reason for keg beer to be overly fizzy and indeed, I expect some keg enthusiasts will proclaim my interpretation to be under-carbonated, as the carbonation is likely to be very similar to cask. Of course I have no control over the take up of carbon dioxide in the pub and as most keg set-ups will quickly introduce extra carbonation I expect this might be a problem. In any case, for beers at this strength the sale time makes cask impractical except for high turnover pubs and beer festivals.

With luck we will be rolling out our kegs over the next few weeks. We would love you to try them and let us know what you think, good or bad.

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¹OK Jeff, just shoot me now.

The Burgeoning March of Craft Keg

I'm really not keeping up with stuff that is happening these days. It's very frustrating because there is a lot happening it would seem. BrewDog have gone and done it again and got everyone all worked up about stuff. James is reported to have said that there is no future in cask beer and keg is the future. His comments, which are a little derogatory regarding CAMRA and suggesting that cask beer is stuffy and a poor way to introduce people to beer, have got some all properly insulted.

During my trip to the deep south last week I picked up a copy of The London Drinker. It's the rather well put together magazine of the London CAMRA branches. Towards the back there is a somewhat vitriolic rebuke to Mr Watt's comments¹.

I'm somewhat bemused. First of all, what is the most common form of dispense for beer in the UK, or for that matter, in the world? Yup, it is keg. So of course keg is the future, silly.

Secondly, is it the future for craft beer? Well, what is craft beer anyway? Why is crap cask made by major national brewers, like Marston's for instance, considered craft? It's pants. Give me the choice between a pint of Pedigree on cask or a pint of Trashy on keg which do you think I'd choose? Which would you choose? Which is craft? And who cares if it is craft if it tastes good anyway? Or perhaps tastes crap?

Of course there is a future for cask. Of course there is a future for keg, that one ain't going away. BrewDog, Lovibond, Meantime and Thornbridge all produce keg. Summer Wine brewery is playing with it and we will be too before long.

Although we sell some BrewDog we haven't sold any of their keg, yet. We're not stupid, this is conservative² Cumbria and the market for craft keg is yet to be developed. Here they tend to like a Guinness and blue WKD³ cocktail. So we make do selling cask and bottle. I need to develop my own craft keg market before I start letting James in on that.

But whatever, I am becoming increasingly amused at this "war" between cask and keg. I'm absolutely sure that James has deliberately set out to wind up some cask hard-liners. It's worked; in this case he's gone and got his logo in a CAMRA mag - for FREE.

Really, you have to tip your hat.

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¹I can't link directly to the on-line version. A shame that, but at least it is on-line.

To access the article select publication year "2010" then select Edition "Volume32 No6" and then scroll down until you see the logo for "....this latest threat to cask ale......" that is BrewDog.

²Take care to note capitalisation, it is so important. Alfie, are you listening?

³No, really, there is one bloke in our "local" who drinks nothing else. He even puts up with a short pint of Guinness so he can still fit in his WKD - there is really no accounting for taste.

Muddy waters

I was at a very nice beer dinner on Friday night. It was organised by CAMRA, the Westmorland branch as it so happens. The whole thing was very enjoyable, yes sure, I'd have preferred stronger more tasty beers and was a little taken aback by comments that a 5% beer was not for the faint hearted, but for the vast majority of the attendees I'm guessing the choices were to their preference.

There has been a lot of fuss over the last week regarding CAMRA's stance on keg beer. It was all started by Pete Brown, the outgoing¹ beer writer of the year. Martyn Cornell also jumps in with a bit of a dig at the only consumer beer movement in the UK. Anyone who knows me will also know that I am a CAMRA member who also has sympathies with the views of Pete and Martyn; I'd prefer there to be an all inclusive beer movement that concentrated on quality rather than where the CO2 in the beer comes from. However, perhaps we're not going to get there in the near future.

It was unfortunate that on arriving at the venue of Fridays dinner we went straight into the function room. Unknown to me the cask beers were all in a bar just across the way. The function room bar had the usual selection of keg beer and being in need of a pint several of us plumped for a pint of Guinness each. This later caused an interesting situation when the CAMRA volunteer beer runner for our table was handed an empty Guinness glass. He clearly thought about objecting, although I'm unsure whether this was due to it being dirty nasty keg or just because really his job was to run for the beers that were matched for the meal rather than clearing away dirty pots.

Pete Brown was speaking at the event. He spoke enthusiastically about beer and how it brings people together in ways that almost nothing else does. He spoke about how, when he was in advertising, found that it was the one product that would inspire passion more than any other product he was responsible for. I was sat on a table occupied largely by CAMRA sceptics. I think I'm right in saying that none of use would hide the fact. We all attended the event and enjoyed it. We all attend CAMRA organised beer festivals and largely enjoy them too.

Speaking later to another brewer who had been sat on another table, we observed that although the beers were all good examples of session beers there was little that stirred our inspiration; in our view a multi-course gastronomic delight requires different beers to the highly drinkable session beers that work well in pubs, but I suspect this view would probably be limited to our table and perhaps an equal number of other people in the room - perhaps 10% of those present.

Despite this misgiving the social cohesion between the people in the room was highly observable. Several brewers, active branch members and CAMRA sceptics alike, shared in a common enjoyment, in the form of a malt and hop based beverage that both tastes good and also enables a state of neurological contentment, where even us sceptics could mingle and love everyone there.

The Pub Curmudgeon makes some interesting observations on his blog regarding the CAMRA sceptic view. Mudgie himself often shows a healthy scepticism but interestingly warns of the problems of changing the definition of Real Ale. He also points out that often, and despite this point being denied by many, CAMRA manifests itself as the campaign against keg, rather than the campaign for cask. Sure, the official line is that it does nothing of the sort, but the blindness to this fact betrays the lack of understanding that some of us see activists as being the old dinosaurs that they deny they are.

Which brings me on to Tandleman² and his rebuke. A lot of important points are made, many I don't agree with, but it does make me think, what is the point in worrying? CAMRA exists because a lot of people support a point of view. They are a minority when you look at the total beer drinkers in the UK even to the point that it's tempting to wonder why they bother either. Cookie even suggests that cask should be abolished, which I know he doesn't really believe, but his approach does put this "shit storm" into perspective.

I'd like to see an all inclusive beer movement, one that even includes people who appreciate lout. But realistically it isn't going to happen anytime soon. As Tyson pointed out on twitter, you can't even get CAMRA to agree on sparklers, what chance have we got of changing the view on extraneous CO2? The view is just far too far entrenched for us to expect a change until it hits them between the eyes.

Stringers makes some interesting points about keg. I'm still actually trying to understand what their stance is, but it's thought provoking, which makes it all the more interesting. In the comments it is made clearer that perhaps it is silly to continually complain³ about CAMRA.

What seems clear to me, and is the main point in Tandleman's post that I disagree with, is that there is a growth of craft British produced keg beer. It's small at the moment but I do not agree that it is just done " .......for the gratification of beer geeks" and that " .....it doesn't actually exist". Meantime, for instance, has many outlets around London selling its keg beers. And anyway, do beer geeks not count? A smaller minority than cask drinkers perhaps, but they do exist and their, our, numbers are growing.

I agree that CAMRA can only be changed by democratic process from within. This by itself shows that it's not likely to happen very fast, the active members are the voices that count, like it or not.

Perhaps, as Stringers and others have suggested, we shouldn't complain and just get on with the job of forming something that will satisfy these rare beer geeks. Perhaps it is already happening organically in this apparently on-line world that doesn't really exist. Yes, you know, the one that had scores of people meeting up in Manchester for one hell of a twissup. But of course, that can't of happened because we are all just on-line nutters who don't really exist.

One thing is for sure, CAMRA isn't going to change and the CAMRA sceptics are not going away; there is more chance that that Labour will start agreeing with Conservatives. Good job really, otherwise blogging would get a bit boring I suggest.

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¹Pete is most indignant that because the annual awards dinner is two weeks earlier this year, he is only beer writer of the 50 weeks rather than the year, bless.

²OK, sorry Tandleman, but I couldn't resist it.

³But I doubt I'll stop writing about what I see as our⁴ bad points any faster than Tandleman will stop defending the organisation.

⁴Just remember, I AM a member too and occasionally go to branch meetings. And I even like most of the members.

Appropriateness of beer technology

At the Great British Beer Festival I was invited to the Tasting of Fullers Brewer's Reserve No2, and a damn fine beer it is too. I had already been drinking a few beers of the Bières Sans Frontières and am still not convinced I have fully appreciated this beer, nor do I remember the exact detail of the talk John Keeling gave. I have a couple of bottles here so I will try to rectify my lack of full appreciation on another occasion, just so long as I don't do what I did last night and weigh into a bottle after the pub, when my palate is half shot.

Whilst I can try the beer again, what I always fail to do when listening to great brewers talk is remember all the detail of the brewers knowledge. John talked about the technicalities of bottling barrel aged beers, not a subject I'm completely incompetent at, as the success of Æther Blæc has proved, but I'd be a fool if I even pretended to know as much about the microbiology of beer as John does.

I seem to remember John talking about the brewers reserve No2 being a little more susceptible to Brettanomyces generated flavours as brandy has a lower ABV than whisky at cask strength. Actually, I can find no evidence that cask strength brandy is any weaker than cask strength whisky, so I may have misinterpreted¹ this point.

Whether specifically about the No2 or generally about barrel aged beers the point about the microorganisms in the wooden cask is important. John indicated that to enable the beer to be stable after bottling, chill filtering is required, and the beer reseeded with yeast. Although I don't chill filter I am very careful to get very good, recently emptied, long matured whisky casks for my whisky aged stout; this ensures as sterile an environment as possible before the beer comes into contact with the spirit soaked wood. Storing in as cool an environment as possible during maturation is also important.

I know of beer commentators who are horrified at the idea of bottle conditioned beers being re-seeded with yeast. Some purists think that the only correct way to make bottle conditioned beer is to chance the yeast from primary fermentation being strong enough to ensure secondary, anything else is cheating. This could not be a more erroneous point of view.

It is also worth referring back to a post by Zak Avery about beers that go wrong, the dicussions in there about Brettanomyces and a suggestion about pasteurising is interesting; every brewer has to consider what is best for their beer and moreover may not get it right every single time.

I would never make a bottle conditioned beer that wasn't first cleared in conditioning tanks, or perhaps a whisky cask, and then re-seeded and almost certainly primed at the bottling stage. I choose to use finnings where appropriate to clear the beer. Chill filtering may well have advantages to ensure unwanted spoilage microganisms are removed. I understand that Thornbridge have a shiny new centrifuge² which should remove these pesky little guys but leave the flavours much more intact.

I suspect that any good bottle conditioned beer will undergo some form of treatment indicated above. I certainly re-seed every bottle conditioned beer I make, it's madness not to.

This makes me wonder about the "fizzy chemical beer" mantra that occurs in some circles. The use of modern techniques and equipment to ensure quality beer doesn't mean the beer is not a high quality worthy product. It does not mean that re-seeded bottles are inferior to the purity of a bottle that depends on the primary fermentation yeast, quite the reverse. It does not mean that a keg of unfiltered beer is somehow inferior to a poorly kept cask of some poorly executed clone of yesteryears mild, quite the reverse. It does not mean that a week old cask kept under a gentle blanket of carbon dioxide is inferior to a 3 day old cask of the same beer even under ideal cellar conditions, quite the reverse.

As we improve our brewery and our abilities we will be turning to technology to help us out at any point we feel it is appropriate, we hope it will make our beer better and better and better. If it loses us points with the purists then so be it.

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¹I sometimes wonder if my honesty is what keeps me from getting any paid writing roles; after all, a real journalist wouldn't be caught admitting that the story might not be true.

²Look in the comments in this post.

A bit of quality

As readers might know, I've been playing a little at putting my ale in keg. I'm not doing it to try to reduce my cask sales or in any way to undermine the great reverence that cask deserves. For whatever reason there is a section, even now, of my customer base that does not like cask ales. Some of course drink wine, others drink spirits, some might even be teetotal, but some like to drink beer that is not cask.

Two years ago we decided to remove all major British keg brands from our bar. A bold decision that I'm pleased about. We used to sell a brand of standard "lager" as well as a "premium" product from the same stable. We also sold Guinness, which the sales rep very thoughtfully told us we'd be better off not selling as the throughput was too low. We are very proud to have 85%+ sales of cask beer as a total of our draft sales. We sell a very low volume of keg.

 

If I'm on the bar and I get asked for a lager I give a taster of my own keg and a taster of something else. Fair enough sometimes I loose, but often I don't. I get lots of compliments from people on how nice my "lager" tastes, despite it not being lager. I've given up telling people that it's not actually lager, because most start to go glassy eyed once I start.

 

It may be true that people are being polite when they say they like my beer. Indeed, it is interesting how many people walk to the bar and say "It would be rude to come here and not try your own beer" I often reply that they should drink what they want. After all, I only have to buy other peoples beer, brewing my own results in me doing even more hours for less than minimum wage. In any case, I do think there is genuine appreciation, which regularly makes my day.

My keg beers do not compete with my cask beers. If somebody wants cask then that's what they buy. It does however make some keg drinkers realise that there might be more to beer than cask, smooth, lager or Guinness, which of course there is, but not terribly available in this country. I rather think it might make some habitual keg drinkers think about cask.

Jeff Bell talks about Adnams Spindrift. Although I've not tried it myself, I don't think that it would be much different to my kegged version. Jeff seems indifferent to the product. I think it is a way of enlarging the quality beer market rather than competing with cask or lager. Why not? I'm probably going to continue with the concept, the trouble is the keg the beer is in right now is on loan, so I need to spend some money on some kegs of my own. Ann looks after the money. Time to grovel I expect.