BURP Real Ale Festival

If you live in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, and you're a fan of cask-conditioned ale, there's good news for you this weekend. It's the B.U.R.P. Real Ale Competition & Festival, Saturday, Nov 7, 2009, noon till 6, in suburban Maryland.

B.U.R.P. —Brewers United for Real Potables— is the D.C. area's premier homebrewers' club, founded in 1981.

For this festival, members have brewed cask ales in several categories; many of the beers will be judged the evening before. On Saturday, all the beers will be served from firkins, pins, and converted Cornelius kegs, and with beer engines and simple taps.

There is one catch, however. As the festival is held at the private home of a B.U.R.P. member (as are most of the monthly meetings), the address of the location is known only to members.

The solution? Become a member here.

Some terminology:

• Firkin: 10.8 gallon cask.
• Pin: 5.4 gallon cask.
• Cornelius keg: 5 gallon keg used in the past for soft drink dispense. Common now in homebrewing.
• Beer engine: a handpump used to pull beer from a cask to a tap at a bar.
• Real Ale is a neologism coined by CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale), a cask beer consumer advocacy group in the UK. The term refers to cask-conditioned ale: "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."