#cask ale

Agony and ecstasy warred in my mind sitting at the bar in this masterpiece of a pub.  The ecstasy was a pub as perfect as I could imagine or had ever experienced outside of England, while the agony was so many years wasted, it was opened in 1990 by an Englishman and this was my first visit.  I could have been coming here for decades.  Damnit! 

D surprised me on Friday by saying she wanted to go to Indianapolis.  There was something at Ikea she wanted and...”they don’t ship?” I asked.  But I readily agreed.

I love Indy, it’s chock full of unique bars, restaurants, and breweries that make up most of my middle-age adventuring but, at two hours distant, I’ve had to settle for experiencing them only a few at a time.  At most, I visit twice a year and at that rate, I can’t even keep up with new places always opening and I’ve a list of well-known Indy establishments, favorites I’m drawn to return to like Black Acre and Chatham Tap and too many I’ve still never visited such as 20 Tap, Metro Diner, and Chatterbox.

Broad Ripple Brew Pub (BRBP) had been on my radar for years but somehow I’d never focused on it.  I’d come close, one of the first places I’d visited after moving back to Indiana, was Brugge Brasserie in Broad Ripple.  I remember walking along the street from several blocks away and passing so many interesting places calling me in, if there were only time.  BRBP was only a five minute walk from there and though I knew it, I never knew what I was missing.

In Cardiff, on Westgate Street, there are two pubs that are, given good technique and a fair wind, literally spitting distance from each other. And yet, despite their physical proximity, it sometimes feels like they couldn’t be further apart.

One pub, Tiny Rebel Cardiff, is the expansive taproom of the popular Welsh brewery. Built in the modern craft beer vernacular - exposed brickwork, band posters, giant TV screens with up-to-the-minute taplists - there’s an accompanying food menu which is a teenager’s fever dream of American diner classics (the pork belly burger was incredible), while it also plays host to gigs and comedy sets as well as slinging pastry stouts and hazy IPAs.

Over the road is the City Arms. A de facto tap for the venerable Brains brewery, it’s a wood-panelled, sticky-tabelled kind of joint, with pump clips above the picture rail and a mix of old black and white photos and cartoons of dubious political correctness on the walls. The beer list here is almost as comprehensive as its neighbour, but with a focus on cask, particularly Brains classics like SA and Revered James.

I stopped into both last Sunday, a strange morning to be in Wales, where the Rugby World Cup loss had left a mild pall in the mid-morning air, offset only by the startlingly sun-filled October sky. In the City Arms, I ordered a pint of SA, a perfect Malted Milk biscuit of a pint, served via a sparkler - proof, if it were ever needed, that Wales is spiritually Northern (I will die on the hill that the dividing line runs from the Severn Estuary to the Wash). With bright blue light steaming in the condensation-fogged windows, and men in red shirts already struggling to keep balance alongside the well-scrubbed bar, it was a moment of such striking clarity, such simple pleasure, that I wondered why I ever bothered drinking anywhere else. Yes, there’s the small matter of living 200 miles away, but a good pint of bitter - one that makes you instinctively go “Ooh, that’s good” after the first swallow - is a remarkably persuasive thing.

Over in Tiny Rebel, I wanted to try as much as possible, and I did - a passable lager with a disconcerting peanut note, an opaque pale ale with an acerbic citrus edge, a synthetically sweet imperial stout. There was nothing necessarily wrong with these beers - and they were obviously popular with the crowded lunchtime tables - but each one left me thinking about the bitter over the road, the trad ale I’d drunk so thoughtlessly as a teenager and neglected for so long.

Am I getting old? Am I just being contrary, or needlessly nostalgic? Was I just seduced by a shaft of sunlight and a familiar flavour? Is it just because the City Arms is name-checked by my favourite band?* I think it’s all of these things. The shock of the new is beginning to wear thin - now I’m digging deep in the back of the cupboard for thick, cable-knit sweaters, the kind that can keep you warm in any weather and last a lifetime along the way.

And yet, I’m glad that these two places can co-exist, offering different things to different people, but both showing the range and the moods of beer today. They’re not necessarily opposites, they complement as much as contrast.

They take turns living in the other’s shadow, depending on the time of day.

Kegged and Conditioned

This weekend, we found ourselves driving through the state capital in search of a nice pint. Salem isn’t a particularly beery city, but the metro area hosts a respectable ten or so taprooms and brewpubs. We went straight for Santiam Brewing on the southside of town. It’s not the fanciest place in town, nor the most famous, but in addition to a dozen beers on tap, Santiam serves not one but four cask conditioned ales. 

For the uninitiated, cask conditioning is a beer serving method most often seen in the UK. In a typical American brewery, when beer is packaged in kegs, carbon dioxide is forced into the beer. Carbonated beer is then dispensed on tap with more gas. Cask conditioned beers, or “real” ales, are fermented right in the keg giving it a much lighter carbonation. When it comes time to serve it, a tap can be inserted right into the cask and dispensed like a big gatorade cooler. To keep the yeast working, cask beers are kept at about fifty degrees fahrenheit. It’s this unique conditioning that gives English beer the appearance of being warm and flat.

Santiam has four beer engines which pump the beer from under the bar. The result is a smooth, slightly bubbly beer. Without the extra carbon dioxide, even a light beer feels full bodied. But this is America, and an ordinary bitter with less than four percent alcohol won’t move too fast, so all the Santiam taps were over six percent. But that’s not to say they weren’t tasty.

Spitfire is an amber colored extra special bitter. It’s brewed with traditional Maris Otter malt with a little crystal malt and Belgian candi sugar for color and English Admiral and Fuggle Hops. Despite being on the strong side for a bitter, it’s incredibly drinkable, and even in the afternoon warmth, Spitfire is still cool enough to be refreshing. 

The IPA, Stonehenge, is a burnished copper color and full of classic Cascade hop flavor. I could stick to that for an afternoon very happily. The cask conditioning really brings out the grapefruit flavor. It’s not harshly bitter, but it’s far from the fluffy, sweet hazy IPA currently in fashion.

Coal Porter feels like a pint of nitro Guinness but with a deeper flavor. The low carbonation calls for gulping and glugging instead of the usual taproom sniffing and swirling. The toasty flavor goes perfectly with thick cut french fries.

Beer releases, music events, food happenings and so much more! Releases and Events – March 2nd Bagby Beer Cask Night – March 3 Releases and Events – March 2nd Join Bagby Beer for their cask night featuring Worker Bee Golden Ale w/honey. As described by London’s Independent Real Ale Guide – “Real ale or cask-conditioned beer is a natural, living product.  At the end of the production process –…