the cask project
Big boys have ‘dumbed down cellarmanship’
Cask v keg
Here are some key aspects when it comes to defining the difference between cask and keg beers from St Austell’s Georgina Young:
• Cask is most natural form of beer. Carbonation comes from the yeast and is naturally made whereas a keg beer or bottled beer is has carbon dioxide forced into it to make it fizzy
• Cask is a fresh product with a short shelf life – the flavours that you get from cask beer are quite natural
• The difficulty of cask is you rely on the cellar to look after the beer properly, which is why St Austell invests a lot of money into on-trade quality to look after their cask, and will only serve it where it can be sold correctly
• Keg beer on the other hand allows brewers to mask flavours by hops and fermentations – chuck a lot of hops in there and if anything has gone wrong in the process, you can’t detect it. Easier product to produce, more forgiving, co2 is there
• Keg beer is served colder, which is better for summer.
• Natural flavours come in much better in cask beer than keg
• Cask beer appears to be more environmentally friendly due to less travel and differing production methods. It is served locally so people tend to have it at their local breweries
• St Austell has an in-house beer quality team, not all cask brewers have that.
She also cited the fact cask beer has much more credibility in terms of being sustainable over kegged options as another reason why cask needs to come back into the limelight at our pubs.
Young told The Morning Advertiser: “Cask beer is our national drink because of our temperate climate here in the UK. We are ideally set up for growing hops, growing malting barley and obviously looking after cask at the right temperature and that’s why the United Kingdom is the only place you can get cask beer – you don’t get it in California or Alaska.
“It’s also the naturalness of it, it’s pure brewing. [With kegged beers] you can hide behind carbon dioxide, you can hide behind hop bonds if you make mistakes in brewing and it’s that skill that I really recognise in making cask beer, the fact that the beer is so natural and the skill of the cellarman to ensure that beer is served correctly is really important.
“The big lager boys have developed things in the cellars such as SmartDispense. You know, they’ve all got their own systems. They’ve just dumbed down the art of cellarmanship. If there’s a red light on, you just go and press a button to make it green and it just gets going.
“We should be really celebrating those skills and really rewarding the ones who look after cask beer so brilliantly.”
Less chilling needed for cask
She continued: “Lager tends to have travelled more. It has more refrigeration in its making because it needs to be at lower temperatures. Cask doesn’t need to have all that refrigeration and cooling in its processing, therefore, it is more sustainable environmentally and it tends to be local. For example, you get more Broadside in Suffolk than you do in Cornwall and you tend to get more Tribute in Cornwall than Ghost Ship.”
Young, who studied brewing at Heriot Watt university in Edinburgh for her master’s degree, says fears from licensees about cask’s limited life are part of the artistry involved in the category. She said: “It is that short shelf that is part of what makes cask so special. The pandemic certainly hasn’t helped cask. We’re not seeing the numbers that were there going back to the pub that were there pre-pandemic.
“You can serve it in smaller containers and pins, and things like that, so that you still get the variety. I get very nervous about any pub I walk into that’s got more than three or four handpulls because I think ‘they can’t be getting to through that volume’ – even in the centre of London. It’s really about reducing the range but still giving people variety.
“They have to get the ratio right for cask. They shouldn’t be on even with aspirators (breather valve that extends the life of cask beer). Three days is the optimum – you can extend that with gadgets but, in our heart of hearts, we all know three days is the lifetime of an open cask beer.”
Cask has so much going for it
The former Fuller’s head brewer, who joined the now Asahi-owned business in 1999 – becoming head brewer in 2017 – before moving on to Bath Ales as part of St Austell in 2019, went on to talk about women in the cask beer world. She stated: “I don’t think it matters whether I’m a woman or not a woman, however, in this modern world, I suppose I am seen as a bit of a role model. I don’t go into work, and go, ‘my goodness, I’m the only woman here’.
“I’ve been in the industry for 30 years so I think it’s more about actually seeing more women drinking. Fizzy kegged ales may make you bloated but you don’t have to drink pints, you can drink halves. Cask beer, on volume, has fewer calories in it than white wine. Barley has got lots of vitamins. It has a lower ABV, even the strongest at about 5% is much weaker than wine. Cask has so much going for it. We just need to promote it and talk about it.”
Meanwhile, Young is keen to get people to try St Austell’s cask ale Anthem, which was launched in June as a permanent beer to its range. She said: “We still believe there’s a lot of room for cask. Anthem is all British. The hops come from the new hop breeding programme, so it’s giving you tropical fruity flavours, which is perhaps slightly different from the traditional, earthy taste that you might get in a premium bitter. It’s a golden ale at 3.8% ABV and is very drinkable and very refreshing.”
On the subject of Cask Ale Week, which runs between 22 September and 2 October, she said: “The more we can do such as getting together and shouting about cask and enjoying cask beer together, the more important it is for the whole nation because, like I said, it’s our national drink.”
