Real Ale

O.K. I think by now everyone knows everything they want to know and don't want to know about our trip to Denver to the Great American Beer Festival and by now you are probably ready for a beer festival yourself and guess what, on Saturday, February 12th the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild is having one at the Icehouse in downtown Phoenix. This will be the Guild's second annual Real Ale Festival. At Papago you have probably seen that funny looking tap we have at the bar. It is a beer engine and from it we serve Real Ale also known as cask conditioned beer.
Real Ale is simply a draught or bottled beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed and served without the use of extra carbon dioxide. Traditionally Real Ale is thought of as being British but that is not really accurate as it can be any beer. Many Belgian beers are in fact Real Ales since they are bottled conditioned. If you get a bottle of Belgian Beer and you see some yeast floaties in it or a coating of yeast on the bottom of the bottle that means it is Real Ale. But it is in Great Britain where the term Real Ale has developed its most loyal following. For the sake of discussion I'll just be referring to cask beer and not bottled beer for the rest of this story.
Many pubs in England have beer engines on their bars and some of the bigger places may have 20 or 30 beer engines. A beer engine is used to 'pull' the beer out of the cask since it is not under any pressure. The beer served off of a beer engine in England is generally not any different than what was originally brewed as they don't normally have anything extra added to the beer but here in the United States brewers like to make their cask beers extra special and usually add extra hops or oak chips to the beer in the cask to give it an extra special flavor.
Some people will think that Real Ale is served warm and that is why many people mistakenly believe that all beer in Britain is served warm. Real Ale is served warmer than regular kegged beer but not by a significant amount. The general guidelines are to serve it between 50 and 55 degrees. I have stated before that people think that beer served between 50 and 55 degrees is warm but it is because it is generally so damp and cold in England that people consider 50 degrees warm.
When properly served, a good Real Ale will be transparently clear, with no cloudiness or haze. In order to do this a cask must be in place and not moved around so that the yeast in the cask has time to settle to the bottom of the cask. Since Real Ale is shipped while actively fermenting, clarifying the beer is the greatest challenge. When a casked beer is ready to be tapped it must first be vented to allow extra CO2 to escape. Because it is not served under any pressure casked beer generally has about half the CO2 of regular draught beer.
The Real Ale festival will allow you the chance to taste 30 to 40 different Real Ales and for a beer purist it is the chance to try beer that is fresh, alive and unique. This year tickets can be bought in advance at http://www.azbrewguild.com/
See you there,
Ron