questions about draught beer

Draught beer is so called because it is drawn from the cask.
Most certainly cask beer is draught,until relatively recently in beer history it was the only beer thus served.It is either pumped into the glass or delivered by gravity. It is fully carbonated but not over carbonated.
The answers to most of the other questions you ask are "sometimes" Of course you cannot carbonate beer with N2 because carbonation means using carbon dioxide.

 

01) The kegs of draught beer are already carbonated before they are distributed to end users - true or False.

That is true for the majority of kegged beer in the US. The exception would be the small number of cask beers where the bar performs the cellaring function for that beer.

02) Kegs of draught beer are always artificially carbonated (usually in bright beer tanks after which they are kegged) - How far is this statement accurate.

This is accurate for most of the kegged beer in the US. It is possible (economical) for larger breweries to capture the CO2 that is produced during fermentation and then use this captured CO2 to carbonate the packaged beer. A smaller brewery could choose to do this but for most small breweries it is cheaper (more economical) to just purchase CO2 (e.g., from a company like Airgas). There is a process called spunding which could be implemented in the primary fermentors for carbonating within the primary fermentor but this is not used much in the US.

03) When gas CO2 or CO2 + N2 is used to force the beer into the spigot pipe, does any of it dissolve into the beer giving it more carbonation and if so is this increase taken into account when carbonating kegs in the brewery? What would be the percentage increase, if any?

I supposed some ‘extra’ CO2 could be dissolved in the beer while serving if there is a pressure differential between the serving CO2 and the carbonation within the keg. The exposure of the serving CO2 to the beer during the pour is of a short time duration so I would expect there would be limited increase here. There are so many variables here I would not even speculate on a value (percentage).

04) Are cask conditioned ales also considered draught beer? how are pulled from the casks ?

Yup, they are draught beer as well. As already discussed they could be served via a hand-pump or simply placed on stillage and served via gravity pour.

Cheers!

 

Kegged beer can also be carbonated by kraeusening (AB's Budweiser perhaps the best known in US) as well as, as noted by @jackorzempa above, by "spunding", which is sometimes referred to as "tank conditioning" (by Sierra Nevada, for one).

Depends on the brewery - traditionally, draught beer in the US was not pasteurized but that changed with the invention of the sankey keg, which allows beer to be flash-pasteurized and then racked into kegs. But, it took quite a while for many US brewers to adopt the practice, even after the sankey keg became the standard in the US. Anchor Brewing was one of the earliest (along with Lone Star) but, apparently, Anheuser-Busch is also experimenting with the process.

 

Interesting questions I never really thought about before.

Can I throw another into the ring? I'm assuming it's safe to say that beer was generally less carbonated in the past than it is today. Was this a gradual process where the public's tastes shifted over time or was there more of a sudden shift back whenever the technology for specifically pumping CO2 into beer became widely available?

 

Some information on Sankey Kegs, in case you're not familiar with them, like me.

https://beerandbrewing.com/dictionary/fQw9VH6uFE/sankey-kegs/

 

Except that entry leaves out the primary purpose for developing the Sankey, the ability to keg pasteurized beer.
Kegs & Keg System Theory & Practice - IDD

What the Brits refer to as "keg beer" - sterile, pasteurized beer in a keg - didn't really happen in the US until a few decades later.

The then so-called process of "carbonization" of beer (i.e. forced carbing) was developed in the late 19th century - the brewmaster at Pabst, I. F. "Fritz" Theurer, is credited by some with having done much of the work on the method in the US.

As for historic carbonation levels, I've never seen much on the topic - my first impulse would be to think that, if anything, levels might be lower than in the past since it is much more common to drink from the bottle or can these days than it was a century ago, and thus excess CO2 is not expelled from the beer during pouring, and the higher carbonation levels would slow down drinkers. But, again, that's based on supposition, not statistics...

 

Here's some carbonation stats going back over half a century - looks pretty similar to today for AAL's (if anything, over that period of time, the variation narrowed).

 

I still pronounce that “draft”

 

Cuz that's correct.

 

Thanks so much for the great info and astoundingly specific data and graphs as always. As you noted the mean is awfully consistent so I wonder if the variance has more to do with the technology simply getting better.

If I can indulge further, I didn't actually ask my question as clearly as I should have. When I said I assumed they were lower in the past I meant to be comparing things to the era before force-carb was invented when I figured everything was more or less like what we call cask beer today.

You answered one part of my question in that your data shows relative stability for an awfully long time post the invention of force carbing. But I was also curious about what happened right around the time that the technology was invented. Did people suddenly start making extra carby beer (compared to casks) right out of the gate simply because they could ? Or do you think they started off trying to stay closer to the natural levels you'd get in a cask and then things evolved to higher levels over time based on the public acquiring a taste for very carbonated beverages. I wonder if the new found popularity of soda pop around that time had an effect on the beer industry regarding how 'fizzy' people wanted their drinks to be?

 

I think lager beer in the US was always noted for its higher carbonation and large frothy head - mid-century when it was first introduced, it differed from the native ales, most of which were relatively "still". Keg beer being pushed with CO2 (aka "carbonic acid gas" in the terminology of the day) also dates back to the end of the 19th century.
Draught beer at the turn of the Twentieth Century in the US

 

Thanks for those great couple of articles (and the link to your site. I think I'll be doing some reading tonite). They answered a couple other questions I had too that I wouldn't have wanted to clutter the thread with.

Interesting how hard they were pushing the 'dangers' of using air to pressurize beer while referring to the CO2 as 'carbonic acid gas'. I wouldn't have blamed anyone for thinking the latter sounded a lot less safe than the former

 

It depends which "draught" beer you are talking about. If you are talking about a sterile filtered and pasteurized force-carbonated keg where there is not oxygen ingress, then shelf life should not be an issue. There are many other threads that talk about dissolved oxygen content in cans vs. bottles vs. kegs. I don't want to get into that here, but suffice to say the shelf life of the beer depends more on process and quality control than the shape of the container.
If you are talking about a growler poured from a keg, the shelf life is very short because a lot of oxygen is introduced in the filling process.
Similarly, if you are talking about cask ale, oxygen intake and development of the beer is part of that process, which leads to short shelf life.

 

Only some - very few - draught beers brewed in the US are flash pasteurized (can't imagine there's a brewer paranoid enough to do both micro-filtered and flash-pasteurizing but, obviously, the advantage of the Sankey keg is that it is an aseptic container).

Traditionally, in the US draught beer racked into kegs was unpasteurized and bottle/cans were tunnel-pasteurized. But there were always exceptions - half gallon "picnic" bottles in the 1930-1950s (always kept refrigerated), and then some post-Repeal breweries (Hoffman, Coors, Haffenreffer) experimented with micro-filtering/sterile filling until it became a thing in mid-1960s with "real draft beer in cans" (and, eventually, bottles).

With the coming of the Sankey keg, some US brewers did start flash-pasteurizing their draught beer, but most did not.

Comes the "craft era" and that old rule of thumb went out the window and now your question becomes brewery-dependent. Some draught is probably not filtered as extensively as the same beer in bottles and some brewers recommend keg refrigeration for both freshness AND the fact that the volume of beer makes bringing it to average drinking/draught system temps longer than desirable.