What is Barley's Real Ale?

Warning: this is not a short page. If you have a growler of Barley's ale in your fridge, we suggest you pour yourself a pint so you have something to enjoy while you read this. If not, go to your closest Barley's and get one. Go ahead. We'll wait.

OK, now we can start.

CAMRA’s (Campaign to Save Real Ale) official definition of Real Ale is, “beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.” It’s an awkward definition that, like Germany’s Reinheitsgebot, can be quite restrictive. However, the term “traditional ingredients” is designed, like the Reinheitsgebot, to prevent artificial preservatives or cheap adjuncts or chemicals from being used in the making or storing of the beer.

So even if the American Budweiser was served straight from a cask, it would not be considered real because of the rice and other non traditional ingredients. The heart of the definition is the “matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed”. If the beer is unfiltered, unpasteurised and still active on the yeast, it is a real beer - the container can be a cask, a bottle or a tin can, it doesn’t matter. If the yeast is still alive and still conditioning the beer, it is “real”.

All cask ales have finings added which drag the yeast to the bottom - when the finings have cleared the beer it is said to have “dropped bright” and the beer will look clear rather than cloudy. But if a beer has been filtered, or has been cleared of yeast by using finings, and then transferred to another container, this is “bright” or re-racked beer. Bright beer is essentially unpasteurised beer which has been cleared of yeast and placed in a different container. It no longer sits on the yeast. As such, strictly speaking, it is not real ale because it cannot continue to ferment in the container in which it now finds itself.

Filtered beer at Barley's is considered bright beer. At Barley's, we say these beer are "from the tower," although some of the beers we serve from the tower can be unfiltered or coarsely filtered to suit the style being served.

The main restrictive element in the definition of real ale, and the one that causes most confusion is the last phrase - “served without extraneous carbon dioxide”. Real ale must be naturally carbonated as a byproduct of secondary fermentation in the cask. All others are fake. Counterfeit. A scam. Not real.

Cask-Conditioned Ales at Barley's

Cask ale is the term given to unfiltered and unpasteurised beer which is conditioned and served from a cask without additional pressure. The expression cask conditioning is sometimes also used, as is the term real ale. Some of the beer served at Barley's is cask conditioned. Cask conditioned ale is "pulled" hydraulically by our bartenders via a beer engine. We have one beer engine at Barley's downtown and two beer engines at Barley's Smokehouse & Brewpub.

Our beer engines are behind the bar and have a goose-necked spout on them. When you order a cask conditioned ale, you'll see your barkeep pump your ale into the glass. It will take a moment for it to settle, and then you'll be served. Real ale.

The way it's been done for hundreds of years. Naturally conditioned with no preservatives or additional ingredients to stabilize your refreshment.

Firkin Friday at Barley's

One more term and we're done.

Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.

— Robert Frost, "Directive"

Technically, a firkin is an old English unit of volume. The name is derived from the Middle Dutch word vierdekijn, which means fourth, i.e. a fourth of a full-size barrel. At Barley's, our firkins are 10 gallons.

For beer and ale a firkin is equal to 9 Imperial gallons (about 40.915 l) or a quarter of a barrel. Casks in this size (themselves called firkins) are the most common container for cask ale.

So, a firkin at Barley's is 10 gallons of real ale. It is also cask-conditioned, as above. Other than the size of the vessel, there is one other important difference. For our cask conditioned ales, drawn via beer engine, no air is ever introduced to the cask. Therefore, the ale can remain drink-worthy for several weeks. (Barley's does not pasteurize any of it's ales, and therefore has a shorter shlef life. Good thing all of you don't let it sit around too long!)

With our firkin, though, it is dispensed by gravity. We tap the firkin, pull the spile on top to let air in, and open the faucet to fill your pint. We pull the spile for the same reason that you have to put a second hole in a juice can--it equalizes the pressure in the vessel with that in the atmosphere. It allows the beer to flow.

Once tapped, this form of real ale is extremely perishable. We allow the firkin to be consumed for only about 40 hours. Luckily, many times the firkin expires empty in about eight. Once air is introduced, the ale tends to go flat and develop off-tastes.

This is a tedious and arduous process. Frankly, it's a pain the the butt. So, why do we do it at all?

We do it because this is how ale was served from the time beer was first discovered in Babylonian times. Since firkin ale is so perishable, we tap one only on Friday. When you order a Barley's ale from the firkin, we'll pull the spile and open the tap to pour you a pint of ale. Real ale.

The way they've done it for thousands of years. Naturally low in carbonation with no nastiness added, because we don't have to. We brew only ten barrels at a time. Take that, multinational brewers!

Firkin Fun Facts

For wine the firkin had a larger size, namely a third of a tun. A tun being 210 gallons in the UK and 252 fluid gallons in the US, thus a wine firkin is about 318 l (318.226 or 317.975). It is also called tertian or, preferably, puncheon (in the US also shortened to pon).

Butter and soap used to be sold by the firkin, too. In these cases it was rather a measure of weight, 56 lb (25.4 kg) and 64 lb (29.0 kg) respectively.

The word Firkin is also the NATO reporting name for the Su-47 Russian fighter aircraft.

A Short History of Cask

The term cask merely refers, of course, to the container in which the beer is stored. It comes from the Spanish cáscara which means tree bark, in the sense that the bark surrounds and holds the tree in the way that a cask surrounds and holds the beer.

The Histories of Herodotus, written in 424 BC, refers to “casks of palm-wood filled with wine” being moved by boat to Babylon, though clay vessels would also have been used. Stout wooden barrels held together with an iron hoop was really something the north European Celts developed during the Iron Age for storing all manner of goods. But whether the “cask” was made of clay, palm-wood or oak, whether it was a barrel, a pot or a storage jar, all had one thing in common - they all contained unfiltered, unpasteurised beer.

Put simply, cask ale is the original method of storing and serving beer - the history of cask ale goes right back to the origins of beer itself. Over the centuries other methods have been developed for preserving and storing beer but this ancient method is still used, particularly in Britain.

That is not to say that this traditional serving method hasn’t come under threat. Bottled beers were commonplace by the 17th century for the well off who didn’t wish to drink in public inns, or who wanted to take a beer with them when fishing. Such as the famous story of Alexander Nowell, the Dean of St. Paul’s, who, in 1568, left his bottled beer by the river bank, and upon returning a few days later discovered the bottle opened with a bang and that the contents were very tasty.

But while the middle and upper classes could indulge themselves with such expensive luxuries, the ordinary folk continued to drink their beer served direct from the cask. The famous ale that was shipped to India was delivered in casks, and only transferred to the bottle for the civilian middle classes - the troops drank their beer the same way they drank it back home - from flagons filled direct from the cask. But as beer developed and became paler and lower in alcohol, so it became more difficult to keep it fresh tasting in the cask, especially in countries with warmer climates. By the late 19th century commercial refrigeration and Louis Pasteur’s flash heating method of sterilisation prolonged the life of beer. In Britain’s cooler climate these methods did not catch on. At least, not immediately.

Of course not all beer in mainland Europe is pasteurised - there are plenty of examples of unfiltered, unpasteurised beers, but these will commonly be served from a chilled container under pressure - a keg.

The keg was introduced in Britain in the 1950s as a means for breweries to keep the beer from going stale. Unlike a cask which allows air in, the keg is a sealed container. In order to get the beer out of the keg and into a customer’s glass, it needs to be forced out with gas pressure. By the early 1970s most beer in Britain was keg beer - filtered, pasteurised and artificially carbonated. Some of the last remaining natural beers in the world were about to disappear forever. Though rare examples of natural beers could still be found in the farmhouse beers of Northern Europe and the maize beers of South America for example, in essence the last great stronghold of natural beer was about to be wiped out. And that’s when the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) stepped in to save what they came to term Real Ale.

Today, especially in the USA, only a few brewpubs are keeping this ancient tradtion alive. It has been said that there is now more real ale being served in the United States than in England.

Barley's is proud to be one of those brewpubs. Cheers!

A Few Links

CAMRA's website

A Question of Carbonation

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Another pint gets served dwontown
at Barley's Brewing Company