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“Whether you want a nice dinner, a great beer after work or a fun place to hang, you can’t go wrong with Pratt Street Ale House.” by Metromix

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The Anatomy of a beer festival

Baltimore Beer Week is over. The dust has settled (or should I try a more beer-centric analogy …. perhaps “the lacing is on the glass”) and we have a few moments of quiet reflection before going about our business. Our business of course is making beer so not much change really except maybe I can get a bit of sleep and spend some time with my son! I have to admit that the 10 days of Baltimore Beer Week were filled with contradictions for me. Much of this has to do with unrelated influences but, nothing exists in an isolated state,  so the rigors of daily life imposed themselves on occasion and made for a very tense and stressful time!  Without doubt though the Beer Week was a joyous celebration of all things beer. The scope of events was mind boggling and certainly required some careful planning in order to maximize the number of events that one could attend. In terms of scale there is little that could come close to the Oktoberfest at the fairgrounds but most important for me was the 6th Annual Chesapeake Real Ale Festival. This event is close to my heart for a number of reasons. I have a personal involvement with the event as I have been fortunate enough to work with the wonderful people of the SPBW (big shout out to Dominic and Alan) for these last 6 years as the host brewer.  Also cask conditioned ale is the cornerstone of my brewing history. The first 6 years of my brewing career were spent with the Firkin Brewery, brewing nothing but cask conditioned ale. I had not even touched a keg until I started brewing for Oliver’s. So, for me, cask conditioned ale is the norm rather than some sort of niche product. You may have noticed that cask conditioned ale is often referred to as “Real Ale” and there is good reason for this. It is ale in it’s most natural form. It has a purity, if you like, untouched by the processing techniques of the modern brewery. The cask is filled directly from the fermenting vessel with the addition of finings (to aid yeast flocculation and ultimately it’s removal from the beer that is served at the bar) and is designed to mature in the cellar. Secondary fermentation in the cask produces a low level of carbonation. The beer is then ready to be vented, tapped and served. Cask ales are not designed to be aged excessively, in fact the opposite is true. Whilst some of the “bigger” beers benefit from aging (for example, our Hot Monkey Love had been in cask for 8 months prior to the festival) most ales should be used within about 4 weeks of the fill date.

So, onto the Real Ale Festival …. preparation started in earnest several months ago when Alan Moore of the SPBW began the laborious task of contacting brewers, distributors and sales reps to gain commitments to supply casks to the festival. Over time a list grew and we knew that this was going to be a very special festival. The placement of the event as one of the closing highlights of the first ever Baltimore Beer Week helped push this celebration of cask ale to an unprecedented scale! Clearly we were going to need more casks than ever before. Fortunately people such as Erin Tyler of Legends Ltd exist and was on board early to help arrange for us to ship empty casks to the Boulder Brewery, Weyerbacher, The Bruery and Lagunitas so that we were able to offer the festival goer a more diverse range of cask ale than ever before. Of course this whole process is never as straightforward as it sounds and the possibility of some no shows sent us scrambling around for more casks (and a big shout out to Casey at Max’s and Clipper City for helping out here!) For whatever reasons casks we had hoped to get from Lagunitas, Magic Hat and Evolution did not happen but we still managed to present the best line-up of cask beer that I have seen for a very long time. Needless to say we had various other logistical issues to deal with from making sure that we had enough tapping equipment, planning where we would put all of these casks to ensure that everybody attending would have the best possible festival experience and so on. Obviously this is still a learning experience and some issues that we hadn’t foreseen will be addressed next year, most notably bathroom facilities to deal with the increased number of attendees. Set up of the actual festival is made easier by the army of volunteers supplied by the SPBW who hauled all of the casks from the basement and placed them all per our set-up plan. Assistant brewer Justin oversaw this part of the deal and I returned later that night (2.30am to be precise) to deal with the task of venting and tapping the 39 casks we had distributed throughout the Ale House.

It turns out that venting and tapping that many casks is quite an undertaking and I didn’t leave the Ale House until 6.30am.  It felt like managed to get to bed just in time to get up and go back to work! I’ll have to plan this one a bit better next year. Of course, the proper stillaging, venting and tapping of the casks is of paramount importance to quality of the product. We wanted to ensure that all of the beer was presented in the correct way so that the beer had time for the yeast to settle and excess carbonation to vent. Tapping can sometime be hazardous as a few casks were excessively lively and in one case there was so much pressure that the tap was blown from my hand and I was left wearing a few pints of pale ale! Not fun.

Once the final beer line-up was in place Alan made laminated signs for each one and Sarah our events coordinator printed out a list of all of the beers with room for the discerning beer fan to make notes and we even provided pencils … that’s how much we love you guys! The event was staffed by volunteers who did a wonderful job, cheerful and enthusiastic one and all! The Ale House provided a special festival menu for the day, as the weather negated the possibility of using the outside grill that we have used in previous years. Speaking of the weather, the cold rain didn’t seem to dampen anybody’s spirits. The outside areas were well covered and I hardly even noticed the rain (but hey, I’m English so I’m used to it!)

So that’s it. The Real Ale Festival has come and gone for the 6th year. Bigger and better than ever before with more beer from more breweries than ever. More people than I could possibly mention were involved in making this event such a success. You know who you are. Thank you. Here’s to next year!

Cheers

Steve

Tags: Cask Ale, firkin, Real Ale Festival