Never Mind the Bubbles: Here's the Real Ale?

As British beer drinkers ready themselves for Cask Ale Week, most of us stateside remain completely content with our cold, force carbonated, perfectly delicious brewery offerings.  For many, the sight of a beer engine displacing air for ale at one's local taproom or bar appears as an odd little gadget, or a hip offering to beer nerds at best.  In England however, cask ale's prominence owes itself in large part to an actual campaign (complete with an iphone CaskFinder app), whose supporters have coined the term "real ale" in referring to their brew of choice.  All of this suggests some level of elitism at work here.  Though a closer look seems to reveal something entirely worth campaigning for.

Real ale, cask-conditioned ale, and cask ale are terms used to denote beer that shares qualities inherent to both the process and delivery of any given style.  The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) of England defines this as "beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide".  Cask ale is typically dispensed at 45-55 degrees fahrenheit either through a gravity spout (meaning open and IT comes out) or a hand pumped beer engine.  You're basically receiving an unfiltered, unpasteurized, "living beer".  If all that sounds a little old school, that's because it is.

Beer engine photo courtesy of kegworks.com

Cask ale dates back to the origins of beer itself and remained the primary method of making, storing, and serving beer for hundreds of years. It wasn't until 1936 that beer first found itself being served from pressurized containers.  Coupled with a new found desire for the pale lager-type beers which didn't keep well in casks, and lingering effects of war-time emergency measures pertaining to beer strength and ingredients, giant breweries and their pressurized draft systems all but completely drove cask conditioning out of the cellar.  Yet on an early Spring Tuesday in 1971, four men in the northwest of England set about to campaign for the revisitation of ale traditionally brewed and served with quality and flavor in mind.

Fast forward forty-odd years and there are is no shortage of pressurized ales beaming with both quality and flavor on either side of the Atlantic.  So why cask?  Certainly tradition and the "good ole days" mentality is not enough to see this campaign through.  The simple answer is, it's different.  And yet, this is THE way it once was.  With nothing added or taken away for manufacturable purposes, what's in the glass is the closest representation of the brewer's intent.  Because the beer is conditioned and served at a higher temperature, less CO2 (of the natural variety) is dissolved within the product.  The end result is a beer that bursts with newfound aromas, an all together richer mouthfeel, and a completely altered flavor profile than that of its cold and fizzy counterpart.

That isn't to say that either is superior to the other, just different.  And while there remains a fair number of bearded old men who inconveniently mistake "real ale" to mean the "only ale", cask conditioning remains viable as a completely traditional and alternative beer drinking experience.  Which of course begs the assumption that beer does not merely serve as a tasty delivery vehicle for the life cushioning effects of alcohol.  I've found myself queasy on more than one occasion witnessing a beer being called off its menu into a pint glass, short-sightedly referenced by its ABV strength alone.  I digress.  Go find some cask.