This post starts like any bad joke you’ve ever heard. “I was sitting in a bar and this guy says, what the hell is that?”

Yep, that’s right, I was sitting in a bar, and I am sure everyone is stunned to hear it. I had just finished a nice American brown ale (Long Trail’s Sick Day) and was looking at the beer this establishment had on cask. It was Left Hand’s Black Jack Porter, and what is better than a good porter on cask or nitro? Not much, so I ordered one. The bartender got to work on the lone beer engine, and the guy two stools down starts in with the whole “modern beer” and “modern beer drinkers” stuff. I mean, it’s not like I am some hipster tool, with a knit hat, neck beard and insufferably smug attitude. I tried to assure the near-octogenarian that this “new-fangled” thing was anything but new.

To be fair to my bar-acquaintance, the beer engine was cool in the US a little while ago, then went out of favor, and is now enjoying a comeback, sort of. I had my first cask ale while in Gibraltar over Christmas in 1993. Although my beer experience was legendary among my own shipmates even then, cask ales were something I had never seen. The couple of ales I tried were truly British, and the names and styles of the ones I tried have faded from memory. What is still perfectly clear, though, are the flavors and mouthfeel of a cask conditioned ale. They felt creamier, a little softer, and really drinkable. I thought it was some “new” technology that us “ugly Americans” had yet to embrace. I could not have been more wrong.

The original beer engine was invented by John Lofting in 1691, some 300+ years before I ever laid eyes on it. The beer engine was created to solve the problem of moving beer from the cellars to the serving rooms. It was invented by that old mother Necessity, and has been around in various forms ever since.

The real beauty of the beer engine is that it requires no power, other than your arm, and it doesn’t require refrigeration. Simply brilliant, and unique to American culture. In the last few years I have really taken note of the unused beer engines in the Irish and British establishments I frequent here in New England. Kind of sad really, but cask ales have a shelf life. If you don’t move them quickly, they degrade. This is a product of the beer engine’s simplicity. It pumps the atmosphere of the bar right into the keg/cask, oxidizing the beer and making it taste “old” very quickly.

I had another interesting experience with cask conditioned beer on my second trip to Brisbane, Australia. A friend of mine had been there many times, and knew of a place called The Breakfast Creek Hotel (the locals call it the “Brekky Creek”). This place had the best steak house going (the kind where you choose your steak in the case) and the Paddy Fitzgerald Bar, a really cool bar that still serves cask ale. The beer was XXXX Bitter (spoken “four-ex”),made by Castlemain Perkins in Brisbane, Australia. On its own merit, XXXX Bitter is a good beer, a kind of English bitter hybridized with a Czechoslovakian lager yeast. It is great, 4.6% ABV, and crushable. The XXXX Bitter on cask at the Brekky Creek is from another world. There is something amazing that happens in the cask. I don’t know if it is the brewers pitch, the wood, the tradition, or the specter of seeing it tapped with a hammer…but it is amazingly different. I have consumed many, many pints of XXXX Bitter, “off the wood” as the barman says, while at the Brekky Creek and they were all amazing. The cask mellows all the flavors a bit. The bittering from the hops is toned down, and the wood adds a different mouthfeel than you would get from a bottle of standard CO2 draught. The differences to most people would be significant enough to suggest the cask and non-cask versions of the same beer were actually two different beers. As a really cool side note to the Paddy Fitzgerald Bar fame, I would add that they have a very interesting tradition regarding a tapped cask. They finish it that day. Don’t get me wrong, they are small casks (10 gallons/38 liters I believe), but those of you sitting in the bar within an hour of closing could get a special treat. The last time I was there, in 2006, I happened to be there with only four other patrons ­– two locals and three of us Sailors. The locals kindly accepted the free pitcher that the barman poured for them and took a while to consume it. My friends and I went through pitcher after pitcher of wonderful beer while discussing such lofty topics as US football vs. Rugby, Rugby Union, and Australian Rules. We also debated who had consumed more, and which of us had the largest bladder (Big Head Todd drank way more, and I had the largest bladder).

These two great experiences with cask conditioned ale whetted my appetite to try more, and to seek out establishments bold enough to serve it as well. It also made me an ambassador, which is why I am offering the links to the British Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) as well as the New England Real Ale Exhibition (NERAX) both of which are a wealth of information.

In this lightning-paced world we now occupy, you can check the ratings of a beer you never heard of in less than 10 seconds on your phone. What you cannot do with your phone, is experience something that takes time, and adds subtlety and complexity over a few weeks, months or years. So wherever you are, take the extra few seconds as you peruse the beer menu to ask you server what is on cask. It will add something to your tasting repertoire, and it just might change the way you look at beer, like it did for me.