This new cask ale from the UK almost seems designed to offend those that seek to preserve historical brewing style/conditioning and serving traditions. What faux pas are today’s brewers perpetrating that piss you off the most?
I'll bite. I hate when a brewery releases something that sounds great and then has to add that one more thing to make it unique or bold or whatever. For example, brewing a great stout and then conditioning it on candy bars. Come on. But to address the cask part, in some ways I'm happy with whatever you want to put on cask (as long as you do it well) just to keep the knowledge and skills going. As we've seen with the trend back to traditional-ish lager styles, I bet we'll see some trending back to mainstay English styles as well, and we need cask as a going concern when that happens.
What's the line between faux-pas and dumb shit? Or faux-pas and annoying? I don't have answers to these questions, but I wager that, without clarity, this thread will quickly become just a list of things individual BAs dislike about breweries. The OP provides a perfect example. White chocolate stout on cask is a faux-pas to one and a sign of the enduring creativity of craft to another (I'm in the OPs camp on that one). In any event, to speed up the spiral to confusion, I'll add these: Breweries naming their blonde ales "Blonde Bombshell," "Hot Blonde," or similar nonsense. It's embarrassing. Breweries serving drafts of beers that are less than 5% abv in 12 oz. pours (not talking about super rare stuff). Serve a pint for fucks sake. Plastic cups. If you're worried about the possibility of broken glass and humans mixing then working in a bar/restaurant might not be the best spot for you.
Faus pas as in deliberately offensive or just a social blunder? If the former, The Brown Note (mentioned in other forums) from Against the Grain probably qualifies.
The first 7years of my adulthood spent on the west coast, the (approximate) 12 oz glass was typical, and the beers were almost all less than 5%.. I like it. Now that I'm old and have lower capacity, I look for sizes smaller than a pint. My goal is generally 24 oz of beer or less, and might want to try at least two different styles, I would look for a 12 oz or 8 oz offering.
my favorite "faux pas" was when a local brewery had a pint glass give away then when you got home the glass fits a 12 ouncer perfectly (no room for more)
This would really annoy me, traditional English beers are so hard to come by, especially on cask, why waste one handle on a candy bar beer? Was this at your local and were there any “regular “ cask ales on tap? If there’s a bunch of taps and one was a candy bar beer, then I wouldn’t mind, but if it was the only one, that’s a different story.
Shanex the great French philosopher? Never heard of him. (That is a good statement. Never heard it before so I'll give you credit for it.) EDIT: Sorry, I had to look it up. Frank Zappa is the answer
Super common now, but having to get your own water. There's water and glasses behind the bar already.
I don't know if this would be on the brewery or the particular bar, but... A place I know of a while ago, did a cask event with a brewery (they both promoted this, so the blame goes to both IMO). My initial thought was the bar was debuting a cask engine and I was interested. It turns out they just put a keg/firkin thing on the bar, not sure what it was and not even sure if this went through secondary conditioning. It became basically room temp...in the summer in Texas and they were trying to fill growlers ha. It was pretty bad. I have been to cask events where the firkin was poured from the bar and without an engine before, which was great. I didn't even know what to say about this "event" though ha.
