Firkin Gravity Festival April 5th

For those who like cask beer, there is a Firkin Gravity Festival in Berkeley next week. 

For those who aren’t sure what the hell a firkin is, here’s a quick intro:

A firkin is an 18 gallon wooden barrel, a quarter the size of a standard beer barrel, also called a cask.  Cask ales are beers that have not been filtered, pasteurized, or artificially carbonated or nitrogenated. 

Beer is made when you add yeast to a wort, which is a solution of grain sugars in water.  The yeast eats the sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as its outputs.  In most brewing today, much of the carbon dioxide produced is released through a pressurized valve from the fermenter, and then the beer is artificially carbonated during bottling.  Cask beer, or cask conditioned beer, is beer that does not need to be artificially carbonated because it goes through a secondary fermentation, in the cask it will be served from.  Active yeast is added to the cask with the beer, and it continues to convert sugar to alcohol and CO2 in the cask.  This CO2 is retained in the cask and naturally carbonates the beer.  This same explanation applies to bottle conditioned beer, in which a small amount of yeast is added to the bottle before capping, so that fermentation will continue in the bottle until it is opened and drunk.

Cask beer has a lot of highly enthusiastic proponents.  This is because naturally carbonated beers are not as fizzy and full of CO2 as artificially carbonated beers.  The result is that more of the molecules from the beer itself, those that give the beer its flavor, hit your tongue with each sip, instead of a bunch of CO2 bubbles. 

Cask beer is also often served somewhat warmer than keg beer because a very cold beer numbs your tongue and taste buds, preventing you from tasting all the flavors in your beer.  It’s funny to think about the fact that macro-brews really hype how cold their beers are, frost-brew liners and all, when a lot of beer fans know that they only time you’d want a really cold beer is when you don’t want to taste what you’re drinking.   It’s like advertising, “Our beer is as bad as the next guy’s, but you’ll taste ours less!” 

With all this said though, I haven’t really come around to cask beers yet.  Maybe it’s just what I’m used to drinking, but they taste warm and flat to me.  I recognize that I’m missing some flavors in my beers when I drink them chilled and artificially carbonated, but I think that what you gain in this trade-off is a more pleasant texture and mouthfeel.  I’m trying to open up and appreciate more cask beers, but I’m not quite there yet. 

For more on cask beer check out:

New York Times Article (10/24/2007)

Washington Cask Beer Festival, Seattle (3/22/2008)