Yours for Good Fermentables ™: Pic(k) of the Week: Good to the last drip!

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Pic(k) of the Week: Good to the last drip!

A thirsty bartender found the cask ale to be ... good to the last drop. But, hey, dude! That's ... the drip pan.

It's a blast from the past, a throwback Pic(k) of the Week. On 29 June 2007, Clipper City Brewing tapped a firkin of Loose Cannon Hop3 IPA, at Barleys Taproom & Pizzeria, in Greenville, South Carolina. It was, in fact, the first cask the pub had ever served.

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Clipper City Brewing is now known as Heavy Seas Beer. It remains in the same location (but much expanded) as it did then, just south of the city of Baltimore, Maryland, and under its original ownership.

Barley's remains open in Greenville, if now called Barley's Craft Pizza & Beer. More photos: here.

Fast forward eleven years. The 14th annual Atlanta Cask Ale Tasting (ACAT) takes place today, Saturday, 20 January 2018, from 2:30-6:00 p.m., at 5 Seasons Brewing Westside, 1000 Marietta Street, Atlanta, Georgia.

All firkins are casks; but not all casks are firkins. A firkin describes a cask specifically sized to 9 U.K. gallons, which, in U.S. measure, is 10.8 gallons. A filled firkin contains 84 U.S. 16-ounce pints, although, with all the yeast and proteinaceous sludge (and dingleberries and cocoa-puffs) present, the yield is usually less than that.

Cask-conditioned ale, or real ale, is not a brewing process but a serving process. Here's how the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) —a cask-ale consumer organization based in the U.K.— puts it:

Real ale is a beer brewed from traditional ingredients (malted barley, hops, water, and yeast), matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.
Brewers use ingredients which are fresh and natural, resulting in a drink which tastes natural and full of flavour.
It is literally living as it continues to ferment in the cask in your local pub with a light natural carbonation (i.e fizziness) produced by the secondary fermentation that has occurred in the cask.
A real ale should be served at 11 – 13C so that the flavour of the beer can be best appreciated.
You can recognise real ale in a pub as it is usually served using a handpump.
Real ale is also known as ‘cask-conditioned beer', 'real cask ale', 'real beer' and 'naturally conditioned beer.'

Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of photos taken (or noted) by me, posted on Saturdays, and often, but not always, with a good fermentable as the subject.