Condition, Glorious Condition

A week ago Nick Paige contacted me asking whether I would be able to lend him one of my beer engines and help him set it up in order to serve a firkin of Twisted Hop Challenger that he had shipped in for a workmates party, I was of course welcome to help in its disposal. Needless to say I jumped at the chance, even without the offer of free real ale I would have been there to have a crack at conditioning an actual cask. Unfortunately Nick had forgotten to ask for a tap and spiles so we decided to serve it on end by running a beer line through the keystone with a piece of wire attached to the end to keep the line clear of the lees. On Friday Nick and Dougie whose party it was picked me up from work we assembled what we needed and headed to Dougie’s kitchen which was doubling as the cellar. Martin from the Twisted Hop had told us that since we didn’t have spiles he recommended venting the firkin by piercing the keystone with a needle. We gently hammered the needle in and then slowly removed it with a pair of pliers…

Woosh we weren’t quite expecting the fountain of beer which erupted from the hole covering the kitchen ceiling with beer and raining back down on us, Dougies partner came to the door, looked on with a bemused grin and said in her fantastic Scottish accent that she had never been all that homely so it was fine (remarkable woman), his beagle just got stuck in drinking ale from the floor. We let the fountain subside a little before returning the needle to its hole reasoning that once we knocked the keystone out we would be losing condition out the tap hole around the beer line.

Last night I showed up at the party to enjoy the fruits of our labour, the party was fantastic with a good mix of people from different back grounds and ages , a mixture of regional council employees, neighbours and beer lovers, it was a little like a British Isles club b\meeting with Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Oxfordshire all represented. The BBQ was going, the ale was pouring and it was fantastic! There was a slight haze and the beer was perhaps just a little over lively but it tasted fantastic, it provided a healthy head without a sparkler, in fact it was so fantastic that we drained the cask in 3 hours. Cheers

Cellarmanship

Recently I have fine tuned my cellarmanship practise, and if I do say so myself, the condition of my beer at present is excellent. When I first played at cask conditioning beer in corny kegs I was much helped by George Busby at the Wassail Brauhaus. His advice was to not prime the kegs, it was advice I followed until recently. Ale was racked into the corny at the end of primary fermentation, oxygen purged from the head space with co2 and the beer then left to drop bright and build some condition with the small amount of fermentable sugars that were left. This method served me well, however as I have learnt more and more about real ale I have grown to demand a decent level of condition in my beer. Some batches would struggle to achieve a head and as I am loath to use a sparkler to hide the lack of condition it had gradually become clear that I would need to prime. At the same time I had been striving to achieve crystal clear beer. It often amuses me to hear American and Kiwi homebrewers talk of how real ale must be cloudy because it is naturally conditioned, what rubbish. A long time ago I had played with gelatine as a fining agent, my then status as a vegetarian hadn’t been the issue, the fact that you couldn’t boil it and that you often ended up with lumps of jelly at the bottom of the corny had. Then I stumbled across agar, boilable, effective and traceless it has worked a charm. So now an addition of boiled sugar and agar goes into every corny as its filled and the results are sexy, as the picture of a pint of Berhampore Best reveals, cheers.