Only cask beer can score 11 out of 10
By Phil Mellows
For some of us, every week is cask ale week. But from this Thursday (Sept 22) until October 2, there will be a concerted effort to get more people interested in this widely misunderstood type of beer. Cask Ale Week 2022 will see events around the country promote beers you can only get in the pub, an unusual product that has to be finished off by the retailer before you can consume it.
I like all kinds of beer. I celebrate the diversity and depth of flavour brought by craft beers from the keg. But I still spend more of my drinking time hunting down good cask ale. The difference is that while, with craft, it’s about finding a beer from a brewery you admire, or is new, with cask you’re more worried about whether it’s kept and served properly.
The beer that came out of the brewery still matters, but what matters more is the beer’s journey to the pub (hopefully short, or via a chilled supply chain), its temperature-controlled sojourn in the cellar, the publican’s skill and dedication in stock rotation and choosing the optimum time to put in on sale, and whether enough customers before you having been drinking enough of it to make sure it hasn’t been sitting there too long and gone off.
And there’s more. Don’t start me on clean glassware. As a brewer said to me recently, it’s not a mystery. We know how to get cask beer right. But there’s so much to go wrong. And every little wrinkle can be tasted in a mouthful of beer that may not be all it should.
Ordering a pint in an unfamiliar pub becomes a risk. A risk hedged by reputation or an accreditation by Cask Ale Week organiser Cask Marque or a listing in the Good Beer Guide, perhaps, but always a risk. It’s even a risk in a pub that you do know. There’s only one thing more embarrassing than sending back a pint in a strange pub, and that’s sending back a pint where everybody knows your name.
Never mind perfection. We’re happy when the beer is good enough. And when it’s more than that we talk about it, post pictures on social media. Then there are those moments, I believe, perhaps a handful in a lifetime’s drinking, when a pint is better than it ought to be. Some magic has happened, that can only happen in a living beer, that makes it more than perfect.
In the rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, in a bid to be louder than anyone else, the band brings out a custom-built amplifier with a volume control that goes up to 11, rather than the customary 10. And while you can mark most beers out of 10, when it comes to cask beer you occasionally need a dial that goes up to 11.
So the quest, perhaps, is not for the perfect pint but for something more than perfect. That’s why we drink cask beer.
Photo © John Garghan/Creative Commons