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Beer Help

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Terranosaurus:
Try Old Mill Brewery Snaith - http://www.oldmillbrewery.co.uk/

My brother in law has had casks from them complete with a "loaner" hand pump. Had it on a trip to the lakes. Cask stayed in the tent and the pump click up to his defenders tow bar for use at night.

If they can sort you something for Mac and you want it bringing along - I'm only down the road  :D :D :D :D.

kizz81:
cheers for that i will look into that,
at the moment everythings up in the air, ambulance hasnt yet been brought, the 90 in my display picture is requiring a rebuild of its internals and moneys just gone tight as has time  :|

cheers kieran

CaptainColourful:
Cask ? Keg ?
It all sounds the same but there are lots of differences

Here are the facts.

 Cask means "cask conditioned" or "real ale" ...i.e the beer is left to "settle" in order for secondary fermentation to take place. On delivery you need to tap the barrel (cask) then remove the spile in the top bung. The spile should be replaced by a soft peg order to let it  breathe.  During the secondary fermentation you will get a froth escape through the soft peg as CO2 is given off.. After 24 (ish) hours, check the beer by opening the tap and looking/tasting it. The initial half a glass or so will be waste with sediment that has settled in the tap area.... run it off till clear and bright.... then taste it !
If it's OK, & to save the beer for later, replace the soft peg with a hard peg to seal the cask.
To serve, loosen the peg cos you need to replace the volume of beer you serve with air ( otherwise you get a partial vacuum and the sediment will be disturbed again). After every session re-fit the hard peg. As you can already guess, any movement of the cask/barrel is out of the question (apart from tilting it slowly and wedging it firmly) as the level drops.
Because the beer is still "live" and not pasturised or filtered the best before date is usually 3-4 days to be 100% taste wise. The problem is that as the beer is removed it's surface area increases (halfway down the barrel being the greatest) , therefore allowing airborne contaminants a greater area to settle on and grow nasty bugs..... hence ruining the beer.
The head is formed as the beer is forced through a sparkler (restrictor) on the bar tap... or maybe it's not if you're darn sarf.

Keg, or "bright" beers & lagers are already fully fermented in the brewery, is pasturised & filtered and then put into a sealed container. The coupling to it has a gas line (CO2 or nitrogen/CO2 mix depending on the particular brew) which keeps a top pressure on the liquid to keep it saturated with bubbles & also serves to replace the volume of beer removed (i.e. stop any vacuum forming as per the cask above)

Having said all that, "bright beer" is available in casks too. This is merely the same as found in a keg so therefore doesn't need a secondary fermentation. It is usually used by breweries as an emergency when an extra dose of finings hasn't worked on a cask already in the cellar.... It simply replaces the "real ale" until the brewery can get some decent stuff to you.

Therefore it would be possible to buy a cask of bright beer for your outing without the need for any gas bottles etc etc.
You could even forget using a pump, just open the tap and fill your glass, as long as you don't mind flat beer like they sell darn sarf !!

 Sorry this has been a long answer, but I hope it has helped clear up some misconceptions about casks/kegs/real ale and bright beers.

In my opinion, a lot of tosh is talked about real ales ... a keg beer is sent out to the exact standard the brewery brews it to and the only thing that can change the taste is the way it is kept and served. Clean pipes and a cool cellar is all that's required.  Real ale depends totally on the competance of the licencee/cellarman for it's secondary fermentation and is therefore more likely to end up not quite right.

End of lecture  :lol:
 

 


     

kizz81:
 :( there was no pictures in your lecture :(

cheers for the advice  :clap:

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