Need Cask Help

Chris,

A valuable lesson I learned from this thread is that if I ever start a thread in the future with the word “Cask” in the thread title I will take great pains to ensure that there is absolutely nothing in the message content that is non-traditional in nature lest I befall the same fate as poor @TheBeerdedCharmer of being skewered with pitchforks by the Cask beer traditionalists.

Cheers!

 

If 'murican brewers want to add whatever they want to cask beers then go for it as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure a lot of it will be turd, but that's par for the course. No doubt some will be tip top.

It would be a really dull world if american beers in cask just tasted the same as british cask beers.

 

I consider myself one of the cask beer traditionalists but I don't yet own a pitchfork.

Cheers!

 

Aw oh. I am guessing that means you have not bought one yet!

Cheers!

 

I'd definitely try some ginger (we use about 10 grams in a cask/8 slices) with hibiscus and lime. The amber could be great with the right coffee or 1/4 of a medium toast oak spiral. Cacao nibs could work too. Have fun with it!

 

OP - ultimately your name is on the beer, so whatever comes of it bounces back on you. Your account wants something in it, it is a circus thing for them with no skin in the game. If it tastes like shit it is your name not his that gets dragged through the mud. Despite the fact that he is a customer, I'd politely decline to bastardize your product on his behalf.

 

Probably the best beer I drank in 2014 was cas Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA. Just a straight up Double IPA, full of juicy American hops. No extra crap in the cask, not like a traditional British cask beer, but delicious. And this year I had a cask Ballast Point grapefruit IPA that was always pretty damn good.

 

OP please be sure to report back what you ultimately do, how it turns out, and how it is received.

 

As I understand it, cask is to let the subtle flavors of fermentation and light oxidation become a part of the flavor profile. I have only had this done right once, and it is something I remember well and fondly. To me, this thread is like asking what brand of earplugs to wear to an acoustic guitar concert.

 

Not quite that way for me.

For me it's more like the earplug manufacturer is asking about ideas for the design of the earplugs because he has a customer (the concert hall manager) who has a guitar player performing before an audience he expects to include several folks who want to buy and wear earplugs for the performance.

Seems like an interesting side effect of rapid growth in demand for lots of flavorful beer options where few if any existed before.

 

But is that really "innovation" - especially on the brewers' part? Those hops would not have existed if the hop growers, labs and state ag departments hadn't developed them - usually with input from the brewers, but also looking for easier styles for the hop growers (more resistant to disease, better yeild, more adaptable to US growing conditions, etc). It's not as if Maytag, McAuliffe or Grossman came across some bales of hops that were being grown and processed with no potential buyers until they came along.

In the case of Cascade hops in particular, they would not have been available if, several years before Maytag first used them for OSA in 1975(the first batch of Liberty Ale earlier that year were brewed with Hallertau, according to Steele), Coors - then #4 in the US - hadn't committed to contracts for 1 million pounds or more a year for the next decade in 1973.

Three years later, Blitz-Weinhard released Henry Weinhard's Private Reserve, brewed with and prominently advertised as using "scarce" Cascade hops "...more than any other brewer that we know of...". Blitz-Weinhard was a pre-craft era brewery -~ 3/4 million bbl./yr at the time and best known on a national level for its Olde English 800 malt liquor - and would be purchased by Pabst in 1979 (later moving to other macros in what might be a record for a US beer brand - Heileman > Stroh > Miller).

 

Since the brewers made the choice to use the new hops in my opinion they were being innovative here. The brewers could have decided to just do nothing new at all and brew with heritage hops.

Cheers!

 

But brewers have always incorporated new varieties ofof hops and malt. Using a different variety of apple in an apple pie doesn't create a new dessert although it may taste different. This isn't innovation , simply evolution and has always happened.

 

I don't know - I think it was more coincidence than innovation - those beers were being formulated by the "craft" brewers at the same time Cascades were introduced and becoming widely available. According to a USDA report in 1973 (so, before any of the "craft" Cascade hopped beers) besides that large Coors contract:

 

Sure. You've given a nice review of what made an innovation possible (made the ground fertile, so to speak), but innovation doesn't require that you create everything yourself. Innovation is actually more common where there are already a number of existing things, but those things are brought together in some way that did not exist before.

Very few things (if any) "spring full blown from the brow of Zeus." So a number of modern techniques and technologies used in brewing today were based on putting new things or ingredients to use in the process. Some are innovations that involved physical objects (e.g., measuring instruments), others involve techniques (e.g., decoction mashing) or ingredients (e.g., Belgian Candi Sugar as a fermentable to drive up ABV). For a similar example outside beer, according to one of my colleagues some years ago, an entire widely acclaimed form of modern dance was created by a particular expert recognizing that by assuming a certain classical dance position and then rotating their foot 45 degrees that that "new" position along with many traditional dance elements made it possible to build/create a new art form in the realm of dance.

 

Why? Please define innovation. Otherwise this mini-thread will go round and round in circles.

 

Where does it say that coincidences can not trigger innovation? Fleming developed Penicillin as the result of a coincidence. Would you deny the label "innovation" to development of that drug and several other antibiotics?

 

Certainly not using different hops.The Scots brewed IPAs using Saaz hops simply because they could easily be shipped over to the breweries.This was simply an ingredient adjustment , they are still hops despite being different from those used by the Burton brewers.
Innovation is defined as creating something fundamentally new.
Innovation in brewing ; nitro (yuk) , thermometers, hydrometers ,refrigeration. Fiddling with recipes is variation not innovation.

 

Well this is a start, but I'd say this needs to be edited down to "creating something new." While the term innovation is sometimes applied to situations where the term "fundamental" is appropriate, it is not limited to such situations.

In fact talking about innovation does not even require that nobody has ever done it before anywhere else in the world. Its true that some innovations change the course of human events, but those are not the only things that exist under the umbrella of "innovation" and sometimes the innovation may only be at the personal level. Nor is there a requirement that the innovation be a physical object of some kind. It can be a novel process or ingredient not used before by the individual or by human kind.

 

So, 350 acres of Cascades had already been planted by 1972 and 3 years later Fritz Maytag "innovatively" brewed a beer using them?

What did those poor dumb hop ranchers figure there were going to do with all those hops before Maytag got the "Eureka!" idea to use them for the Christmas Ale? Hell, what was Coors going to do with their "million dollars a year" worth of Cascades?