what is cask beer?

[DuncB]

OR pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch
https://walkers-snacks.co.uk/walkers-monster-munch
In the old days ( pre covid ) on the bar in a bowl of course, small chunks of roast potatoes or mini yorkshire puddings. Ahh.

 

[bracconiere]

mini yorkshire puddings

hey, now let's not get distracted! puff pastry is better in food & pairings!




edit: but if you post your recipe for mini yorkshire pudding in that forum tag me so i see it, i'll soo crucify it with lentil or split pea flour! split pea yorkshire pudding with salsa con queso?

 

[DuncB]

I prefer a slither of roast beef and some horseradish on the mini yorkshire pudding.
Which forum to post that recipe in?

 

[bracconiere]

Which forum to post that recipe in?

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/homemade-bread-thread.457601/page-68

 

[DuncB]

It's not bread but I'll post it there. Have a go and send some pictures.

 

[bracconiere]

It's not bread but I'll post it there. Have a go and send some pictures.

sure it is it's just kneeded in a blender, and leavend with steam? and i'm thinking, if i make it work with my mix of split pea flour, and vital wheat gluten, some cheese sauce and a slice of ham on it would be...my kind of cooking! to each their own!

 

[Northern_Brewer]

i think i'm liking this 'cask beer' thing more and more...So a 'sparkler' is a poor mans nitro tap? and instead of fancy beer gas at high pressure for the lazy people

More the other way round, Michael Ash came up with nitro as an attempt to simulate cask Guinness in a format that needed less skill from the barstaff/cellarman. Admittedly the traditional way of serving cask Guinness was particularly difficult as to give more consistency in carbonation they mixed beer from a fresh cask with beer from one that had lost its initial fizz..

https://allaboutbeer.com/man-invented-nitro-guinness/
As Jeff Alworth put it:
"There’s a reason Americans picked the bones of British brewing while leaving its cask soul behind: it’s just too hard to make...It is a crazy beer that shouldn’t exist. There’s a reason Americans took one look at that and said no thanks. There are many places for it to go south, from the brewhouse to the brewery cellar to the pub cellar to the pint glass. It takes many people to deliver that perfect pint, and that means many people who can screw it up....cask ale is not just the most important symbol of British brewing, it’s also one of the hardest to make beers, the craftiest beers, and, when it’s made and served properly, the best beers on the planet. Nearly everyone seems to hold cask in contempt, even while they fall in love with Bavarian kellerbier (a poor man’s cask beer) and hazy IPA and rustic saison. If I were English, I’d be swanning around bragging about making the best and most difficult beer. The problem is, that’s not a very British thing to do, is it? Well, take my word for it as a braggy American, it is the hardest to make, and the most hand-crafted."

Sparklers are very much a regional thing - they're the norm in northern England down to around Birmingham or so, and in the southwest a bit, but not in London and the south. And one of the biggest debates in British beer is whether beer is better with or without a sparkler - the southerners say that it knocks some of the flavour out of the beer and it's just a way to artificially stimulate beer that's a bit tired. I guess it's a bit like the debates about whether to put tomato or cream in your clam chowder - they're different but both good, and your views probably reflect more what you grew up with rather than the real merits of the case.

Recipes do need to be a bit different if you're expecting to serve through a sparkler - southern beers tend to have a bit more crystal to make up for the perceived lack of body, and northern beers tend to be a bit more bitter to cut through the creaminess, we're not talking huge differences but ranges that overlap.

The different colours of sparklers in Dunc's picture above have different size holes which give different amounts of sparkle. In a good pub, they'll put on different sparklers depending on how lively the beer is, there's a bit of an art to it (even though most pubs don't care).

 

[hamachi]

This is the perfect thread for the following question: Who can recommend a good pub for cask ale within walking distance of Paddington Station in London? I will be there for a few days in July.

 

[Miraculix]

This is the perfect thread for the following question: Who can recommend a good pub for cask ale within walking distance of Paddington Station in London? I will be there for a few days in July.

There is a fullers Pub directly within the station, a bit hidden on the upper flour. I guess that they should be ok. London pride from tap is a whole different storry than the bottled version. Start with a pint there, and then go to the next Pub for the next pint .

 

[duncan.brown]

There is a fullers Pub directly within the station, a bit hidden on the upper flour.

Yes, the Mad Bishop and Bear on the mezzanine level of the station is a CAMRA-certified pub and has Fuller’s ESB and London Pride on cask. If you’ve only ever had them in the US, it will be a completely different beer (in a good way!). If you want to get out of the station, the Sawyers Arms’s just across the street has decent cask beer (although it’s a Greene King pub...)

You can also download the Cask Marque app from Cask Marque – Cask Ale Accreditation to locate CAMRA-approved pubs.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

This is the perfect thread for the following question: Who can recommend a good pub for cask ale within walking distance of Paddington Station in London? I will be there for a few days in July.

Well, this is a rather more perfect thread for the question....
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/planning-a-real-ale-trip-to-london-help-appreciated.672199/
But anyway.
Historically, west-central London hasn't been the best place for beer, but the short answer is the Victoria, a Fuller's pub about 400 yards from the main entrance towards Hyde Park - or at least what used to be the main entrance, I've not been since they started knocking everything down for Crossrail aka the Elizabeth Line, which should be opening (at last) in the next few weeks. Well kept beer and a proper pub (with an interior of national importance according to the CAMRA heritage list). See :
https://retiredmartin.com/2021/08/27/top-100-pubs-the-victoria-paddington/
Similar distance on the other side of the park is the Star in Belgravia (again Fuller's), one of five pubs in the UK that have been in every edition of CAMRA's Good Beer Guide, which is the CAMRA-member-recommended guidebook (also an app) for pubs that serve the best cask (in theory), as opposed to the Good Pub Guide which is a pay-to-play commercial guidebook.
https://retiredmartin.com/2016/03/05/last-5-standing-the-star-tavern-belgravia/
The other obvious guidebook to consult is Des de Moor's guide to London pubs, which has just had a new edition.
whatpub.com is CAMRA's basic pub database which is updated (somewhat erratically) by members but doesn't seek to judge beer quality.
Cask Marque is nothing to do with CAMRA and it's a bit of a box-ticking exercise for the big corporates to show they're Doing Something about cask quality, but it's more about a bare minimum and I don't know anyone who pays much attention to it.

It's worth emphasising that the average quality of cask in London pubs is quite possibly the worst of any major city in England - I guess it's a bit like in the US where you think of smaller places like Portland and Burlington as go-tos for beer rather than LA and NY. High rents tend to be affordable only by big corporates who don't have the passion to do cask well, and the nature of the labour market means there's a lot of transient employment where barstaff don't have the experience or enthusiasm needed for cask. It's so big that there are some gems among the dross, but you have to look for them.

Personally, if I see Greene King on the sign I walk on by - they've got a lot of pubs in London now especially since buying one of the big pub groups but the beer is pretty ordinary when it leaves the brewery, let alone once it's been in the pubs.
The quality of Fuller's pubs is generally pretty good - but there are exceptions, and of course you're limited to Fuller's beers which isn't ideal stylewise for my northern tastebuds.
Wetherspoons are not tied to a brewery and are the supermarkets of draught beer - they're cheap but I guess it's like buying your steak from Walmart, not the highest example of the producer's art but it's adequate and cheap. Their relentless focus on price means that the beer range is rather traditional - in US terms think more Willamette and Cascade than Galaxy and Sabro and they don't have pubs as such but repurposed commercial buildings. In some cases they are very dull but they have a lot of spectacular 19th-century banks etc, such as Hamilton Hall which is the old ballroom of the station hotel at Liverpool Street. Quality of cellarmanship is pretty variable, it just depends whether that particular pub has someone who givesadamn. And they're cheap.
Nicholsons are part of the M&B property group which is a big chunk of the old Bass estate. So proper pubs, with a slightly corporate/Wetherspoony/touristy vibe to them but they're generally a fairly safe bet if you're in a part of town you don't know.

If you're looking for "pretty" pubs then the CAMRA list of heritage interiors is your obvious place to go - London has a lot of spectacular pubs but they tend to be owned by corporates so the beer isn't always that exciting, and they tend to be more towards the Square Mile, particularly eg around Fleet St/Holborn rather than Paddington way.
https://pubheritage.camra.org.uk/pu...7571&range=2&perpage=100&orderby=distance:asc
But with all of the above, bear in mind that the critical thing with cask is always turnover, which is something that London does tend to have in its favour. You'll almost always get better beer from an "average " pub at 6pm on a Friday night than from a CAMRA-lauded pub at opening time on Tuesday - and sometimes the beer can be singing at 6pm and a bit lifeless by 10pm. It never hurts if you're in a pub before 5pm to have a look over the bar to see which driptrays have been used - or just go for the lowest ABV most "normal" beer, as nobody will be drinking that exotic garam masala-spiced barleywine during the day.

Oh, and if you have flexibility on dates, the big CAMRA festival is the Great British Beer Festival 2-6 August at Olympia with hundreds of cask beers.

 

[Miraculix]

Pub Lunch at wetherspoons with the colleagues on steak day. Bringing back memories!

 

[duncan.brown]

Checking in on this thread from the Mad Bishop and Bear. They only have London Pride on the engines right now, but it still smells of the fields that I used to play on when I was a kid. English hops and straw.

 

[DuncB]

Pint of Harveys Sussex at Selsey arms in Coolham, first pint in UK since January 2019.

 

[stupot]

"I blame Margaret Thatcher!"

And so you should. Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher.