Actually, for the record, don’t call it hard cider to folks in the industry. It’s cider. That “soft” stuff is juice. You don’t call grape juice wine.

Apples from an orchard at Sea Cider, near Victoria, British Columbia.

The TTB permit required for making fermented cider is the same that bonded wineries need. (The Bureau also does some bizarre differentiation when said cider contains more than 7 percent alcohol and/or any fruit besides apples or pears.) Yet it can be said that wine people don’t love fruit in general; they love grapes in particular. Most oeonophiles wouldn’t be caught dead sipping strawberry or elderberry wine, or even the mead (a.k.a. honey-wine) variety “pyment,” which contains both honey and grapes. So while part of that crowd opens up to what is essentially sparkling (though sometimes still) apple wine, a good part of cider’s growth stems from gravitating beer lovers.

Beer aficionados rightly revere hops the way vintners genuflect before grapes. Yet beer geeks (and their girlfriends)* seem to embrace many non-beer fermented beverages, mead notwithstanding, so long as they’re made artisanally (Zima-esque malt beverages need not apply). So, while cider’s nothing new—vastly predating the Norman conquest of England in 1066 credited as cider’s tipping point—more bottles of it are showing up at the collective beer table.

Dobranska Desitka is the 10˚ unfiltered house lager, light orange-colored in the glass and sitting beneath a fine and firm head of snow-white foam. A nose of crushed grain (think Grape Nuts) with underlying hints of resin and ripe pineapple in the background leads through to an appetizingly crisp mouthfeel that is softened by a flurry of light sugary caramel notes before a dry, bittersweet finish. It’s marvelous.

Dobranska Hvezda is the 12˚ svetly lezak (light lager), a superlative beer with sweet toasted grain, slight pepperiness and delicate Saaz-derived floral notes all vying for attention on the nose. The palate has a hint of fruit pastilles, a slight sweetness and a long lasting dry and bitter finish. A lightbulb flashes on in my head. I ask Petruzalek if what we are drinking is really a pilsner style, bearing in mind the closeness of the historical brewery (I didn’t know then that he had worked there until 2003). The answer, translated, comes back, “All these beers would be adjudged to be a pilsner style because of the way they are made.”

I guess he means yes. However, search through the rest of the Czech-brewing world and you will only find one brewery using the term pilsner: the mighty Pilsner Urquell, a Hercules of beer that has bestrode the world since its arrival in 1842. On that sunny afternoon, passing through this gorgeous array of beers, I wonder why this is so. Especially as in the rest of the brewing world the terms pils and pilsner/pilsener are sprinkled about as freely as ticker tape on a big day in Lower Manhattan.

In recent years, craft brewers have reveled in pushing the bounds of bitterness, challenging their thirsty fans with beers heaped with hops. Starting with India pale ales and their more aggressive younger siblings, imperial IPAs, the trend then spread into other categories, with pilsners, porters and barley wines jostling for bitter supremacy.

But craft brewers are a restless bunch. Lately, a growing number have looked to another element to balance beer’s basic sweetness: instead of bitter-sweet, these beers lean towards sweet-sour. And although the term “sour beer” sounds off-putting at first, there are some exciting flavors awaiting the adventurous drinker. Sour beers faithfully preserve a centuries-old legacy. And, to the delight of modern drinkers, today’s brewers are shaping old styles and techniques to produce an array of new possibilities.

Sour—And More

As we learned through the bitter era, bitterness in beer is not one-dimensional. It can come from a number of sources and be expressed in an array of intensities. Most obviously, hops add bitterness. But the hop variety, the amount used and the timing of its addition, as well as its combination with other varieties, can take a beer from lightly floral to teeth-peelingly harsh. And hops are not the only source of bitterness: Roasted grains, malted and unmalted, can add a burnt-toast astringency to a beer even when the presence of hops is negligible.

So it is with sourness. An assortment of bacteria can contribute sour tones to beer, with intensities that range from lightly tangy to puckering. Rogue yeast strains also contribute acidic notes, and all these organisms produce different effects depending on their succession in fermenting and aging beer. And fruits, spices and other unusual additions can contribute to a sour profile.

Lumping all these beers under the description “sour” runs the risk of emphasizing their most simplistic quality. Jeff Sparrow, the Chicago-based beer author of Wild Brews, originally titled his book Sour Beer. But as he explored the Belgian brewing traditions that have contributed so much to the topic, he changed his mind. “I always say that this beer isn’t sour—it’s wild. I say that because, if all a beer was, was sour, who’s going to like it? There’s so much more going on.”

Lactobacillis

That’s true, but “sour beer” is the term showing up in both headlines and competition categories, which makes “sour” hard to avoid as a leading descriptor.

But Sparrow is right, there is much more going on. In fact, there are three closely overlapping trends attracting attention in specialty brewing. Although all three can have a role in a single beer, they can also exist alone or in combination. It’s a useful exercise to tease them apart: You may discover you like one or two qualities, or you may embrace them all.

Sour Beer: Our tongues register sourness as one of the five basic tastes (sour, bitter, sweet, salty and umami). Taste buds can detect levels of acidity: basically, they measure the pH value. More sophisticated discrimination—does this taste tart? Is it lactic? Is it vinegary?—relies on the interaction of our senses of taste and smell.

The primary sources of acidity are the closely related bacteria Lactobacillus (the sour milk bacteria) and Pediococcus, which both produce lactic acid; and Acetobacter, the source of acetic acid, or vinegar. Lactic acid is a relatively simple flavor, with a sweet-sour quality; acetic acid is sharper. And both acids can interact with alcohol to form chemical compounds known as esters. When all these elements combine, they can produce great complexity in a beer.

Wild Yeast: Brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, was purified in the late 1800s, allowing brewers to exclude other yeasts they found undesirable. One particular genus of “wild yeast,” Brettanomyces (“Brett”) is considered a source of off-flavors in both beer and wine. Indeed, the common Brett descriptors—horse blanket, band-aid, barnyard, sweat—scarcely sound appetizing.

But fans of lambic, Belgium’s most ancient beer style, recognize these flavors and aromas as essential components of these complex beers. Other Belgian beer styles display lower but still important levels of Brett as part of their character. And now, a number of American craft brewers are infatuated with these wild yeasts whose presence once would have been considered an infection, and are learning to deploy them in their beers.

Brettanomyces also contributes some acidity to a beer, but that can be easily overwhelmed by other sources.

Wood or Barrel Aging: For centuries, brewers used wooden containers to ferment, age and store their beer. When an alternative presented itself, most brewers happily adopted materials that were easier to sanitize and more resistant to invasion by unwanted organisms.

But some brewing traditions clung to wood’s qualities. Wood is permeable to oxygen, which allows communities of organisms to live on and in its surface, where they contribute to beer character. If allowed to, Brettanomyces and other organisms will take up residence permanently in wooden barrels.

Wood has other qualities, too. Oak, the most common material for food-grade barrels, releases vanilla-like compounds into the barrel’s contents. Wine makers value different species and sources of oak for different wines, and distillers have learned to char the inside of a barrel to impart toasted and caramel notes to spirits. Brewers take advantage of both new and used barrels to give their beer added flavor.

Wood- or barrel-aging, then, can mean different things: It may be that the beer is affected by the flavors of the wood itself, or by previous liquids stored in the wood, or by microorganisms that colonize the barrel—or all three.

It adopted a passport theme, providing a pocket-sized booklet that participants could fill in as they drank mild in different pubs. There were organized social evenings for group mild tastings over the course of the month, so drinkers could go on their own or with friends.

At least 47 pubs took part, in this, the fourth Mild in May for the region, and around 210 participants joined in.

Every year after we do this, we hope we have a few more mild drinkers because people mostly drink bitter and golden ales in this part of the world,” said Peter Bridle, membership secretary for the branch. “Mild is … not commonly available in southwest England, so we’re sure that by doing this we’re making this beer style more commonly available. It’s opening people’s eyes to the fact that there are more beer styles out there.”

People appreciate local produce and people have had it up to here with national brands of bland lagers,” continued Bridle. “There’s a lot of innovation in brewing in the U.K.—far more than there’s ever been. There is an increase in mild, and a lot of breweries are now producing mild. I wouldn’t say they’re all doing it but I think we’ll see more.”

The Nottingham branch of CAMRA also ran a Mild in May promotion, but that was less surprising, since Nottingham sits in the heart of the Midlands in a former coal-mining area where mild would have enjoyed popularity. Leaflets advertising the event showed a trail of all 58 pubs that were taking part.

More than half of the pubs serve mild as a regular, but thanks to the campaign, more of Nottingham’s pubs have started selling mild over the years. They put it on as a test and often find it’s so well liked that they keep it on as a regular all year, said David Mason, vice chairman of this branch.

Selections include Rock Mild from Nottingham Brewery, a 3.8 percent beer, described as “smooth and dark with a biscuity flavor;” Black Gold from Castle Rock Brewery, also 3.8 percent, which is a “dark mild ale with some bitterness, full bodied, but not overly sweet;” and Midnight Mild from Magpie Brewery, a 4.4 percent, nutty ale.

“Mild seems to be still taking off,” said Mason. “It’s mostly the small companies that cotton on to this because they know what’s happening in a local level.” The smaller breweries can also easily and regularly switch the beers they’re producing, he added.

And it’s taking off with everyone, he said. There are older people who’ve drunk mild their whole lives, but also younger people, at least a quarter of them women.

This traditional English beer, once the most popular style in the country, fell from favor in the last century. However, it is staging a comeback in its native land, and has even made its way onto U.S. shores. You’ll have to do your research if you want to try it this side of the Atlantic, but mild—sometimes dubbed the original session beer—has qualities that make it a great choice for American audiences.

Mild is a malty, low-hopped, low-alcohol, and light-bodied beer. The style is highly diverse: milds vary in color from light amber to dark brown and black.  They range from warming roasty examples to more refreshing summer lunchtime choices.

The name “mild” comes from the fact that the style is low in hop bitterness: in that, it is mild compared to the other English pub staple, the style called bitter. Mild dates back to the late 18th century, and grew to meet the demands of a new class of industrial laborers. It became particularly popular in the Midlands, a heavily industrialized area of England. There it was drunk by miners and factory workers looking to quench their thirst after a hard day’s labor—people who were also looking for a value beer.

Then, in the 1950s, the popularity of mild began to slip. Britain’s industrial base declined and, with it, the demand for this sweet, sustaining, low alcohol beer. Mild’s reputation was not helped by the publicans (however few) who dumped drip tray waste and cellar waste, known in the industry as “slops,” back into the beer.

Things became even worse for mild in the 1970s when large breweries introduced keg beer, which was filtered, pasteurized and dispensed with the use of added carbon dioxide. Publicans liked keg beer, which had a longer shelf life and required less care, but the new method displaced the older cask-conditioned method of tending and serving beer to which mild and other traditional beer styles were well suited. Beers dispensed in this manner from the cask declined dramatically. Shortly afterwards, light lagers started to take hold.

Fewer and fewer breweries by the 1970s were producing mild and those that were tended to drop “mild” from the names of those beers. Soon, mild became something that old men drank and “beer” became pretty synonymous with fizzy golden liquid.

Mild stayed out of favor until the 1990s. By then the practice of putting the slops back into the beer had been stopped. “There was a lot of opposition at the time but now it’s virtually unheard of,” said Graham Yates, licensee of The Brunswick pub in Derby in the Midlands, who worked for big brewer Everards at the time of the changes.

“[Adding the slops] was done because the licensees were all being pushed on profit, to make sure any beer that was in the barrels or in the bottom of drip trays was returned to the mix,” he added. “It was easiest to put it in the mild because it’s a dark beer.”

Mild Rebounds

Although mild ale can be served in any format, including bottles and conventional kegs, in its heyday it would have been found most often in pubs as a cask-conditioned beer. So it is fitting that supporters of this form of beer, also known as “real ale,” have been instrumental in mild’s return.

In 1971, CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale was launched to bring cask-conditioned beers back from the brink of extinction. Now 100,000 members strong, the organization is backed by plenty of Brits tired of drinking poor quality beer. CAMRA promotes good-quality real ale (defined as “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”) and the pub as a focus of community life.

CAMRA has focused extensively on mild and every year runs its Mild in May Campaign, through which it encourages its 200-plus branches (which are spread through the U.K.) to encourage at least one pub in their area to stock at least one mild during the month.

Over the years, more and more pubs have begun participating in Mild in May. But some pubs in England have success with mild all year long. One is The Brunswick, where they’ve always done well, said Yates, constituting 8 percent of sales.

Yates sells two milds at all times, and four during the Mild in May promotion. Recently on tap was Black Sabbath, which at 6 percent ABV is a very strong mild, and Midnight Express, which is a more standard 3.6 percent.

“There’s a general trend back towards traditional beer, brewed in the old way and as part of that, mild’s becoming more popular,” said Yates. “Mild used to be just drunk by old men over 60, or in certain areas, like Birmingham, where a lot of mild is drunk. But I’ve noticed more and more, even young girls come in and drink it now, although not too much of the strong one. It’s because they like the flavor.”

Kelham Island Tavern in Sheffield, in the north of England, always has a mild on tap, such as Thwaite’s Nutty Black (3.5%) or the slightly stronger Cock Mild.

The milds vary from 3 up to 5.5 percent, but people tend to think mild is a weak beer,” said licensee Trevor Wraith. “That’s not true—they’re mild as opposed to bitter; they’re lacking in hops.”

Mild started getting more popular at Kelham Island about four years ago. “We always would try from time to time, but we didn’t always have one on permanently. More people have become interested in it. It did have a bad reputation in this country,” said Wraith.

Iain Loe, research manager and national spokesperson for CAMRA, thinks mild will continue to be popular, but will remain a small proportion of the real ale market.

And much of the mild, he anticipated, will come from the small and medium-sized breweries. “The people in the smaller and medium-sized breweries are coming into the industry fresh and are not burdened down by the fact that they have to make certain numbers for their shareholders and have to appeal to lots and lots of beer drinkers,” said Loe.

“The big brewers tend to brew beers that no one objects to the taste of. The smaller ones make beers that some people love and some people loathe, but that’s great, because the people might hate one beer you produce but love another one. The smaller brewers can afford to be more innovative and experimental. They also network more and get ideas from within the country and aren’t afraid to get ideas and even get ingredients from abroad.”

Bayrischer Bahnhof Leipziger Gose: Pours a lovely unfiltered bright gold with a long lasting creamy white head. This 4.5 percent ABV German beer has a slight fruit aroma that opens to a wonderful sharp flavor combination. Hints of dark skinnned fruit and some spices, and finishes with a solid dry note.

Chuckanut Dortmunder: Golden-colored beer with a clean crack of hops in the initial flavor. The malt quickly balances things out, leaving a refreshing aftertaste in this 5.5 percent ABV Washington brew.

Firestone Walker Double Barrel Ale: Plenty of smooth flavor from a 5 percent ABV pale ale. Pours a bright copper color with a sturdy tan head. Aroma offers a slight sweetness that is paid off in the flavor. Very drinkable ale, with drying hops emerging in the finish that urges you to take another gulp.

Flying Bison Aviator Red: This 5.2 percent ABV beer is a dark ruby color with a fluffy head that thins fairly quickly. The beer has a nice caramelized malt character, coating mouthfeel and a decent level of balancing hops.

Fuller’s London Pride: Pours a copper color with a healthy off-white head. This 4.7 percent ABV ale has a nice hop aroma and good amount of caramelized malt in the flavor profile. If you want to experience British bitter, this is a good place to start.

Geary’s Pale Ale: Pours a classic pale ale copper-amber glow with a rich creamy off-white head. Slight hop aroma and the beer opens with a touch of fruitiness before the Cascade, Mount Hood, Tettnang and Fuggle hops take control. Nice level of hop bitterness throughout this Maine ale, with hints of roasted malt around the edges.

Hitachino Nest White Ale: Pours a cloudy yellow with a fluffy lacing white head. This 5 percent ABV Japanese beer starts as you would kind of expect from a Belgian-style white ale, with a slight apple note to the nose and a crisp citrus flavor bed that has traces of coriander. Then a flavor starts to emerge that at first hinted at smoke, but appears to be the nutmeg used in the recipe.

Mendocino Black Hawk Stout: A thick creamy tan head and a rich roasted aroma open this dark-as-night 5.2 percent ABV stout. Plenty of coffee and dark chocolate notes. Big, filling brew with a rich mouth feel and some burnt grain notes in the finish.

New Holland Mad Hatter IPA: Full rich hop nose and flavor in a 5.25 percent ABV golden amber package. Great floral notes throughout the beer. The rich head stands firm throughout, lacing the glass.

Pikeland Pils: This 4.9 percent ABV beer from Pennsylvania pours a bright golden color with a lacing white head. Spot on for the style, the malt is clear in the aroma and initial flavor, with hops taking over in mid-palate. The finish is dry and slightly grassy.

Rogue Mocha Porter: This 5.1 percent shows off the coffee primarily in the aroma. Pours black with a decent tan head. Plenty of roasted grains, with hints of cocoa and coffee in the flavor.

Samuel Adams Boston Ale: Wonderful tarnished brass color and lacing off white head. This stock ale is 4.9 percent ABV. Malty, caramel nose. Nice caramelized malt flavor bed with mild hop and a light fruity finish.

Full Sail Session Black: Pours a nice rocky tan head and offers a malty aroma. A lovely dark mahogany color and very drinkable 5.4 percent ABV black lager with a good caramel malt base and a slight amount of balancing hop bitterness.

Brick Store Pub, Decatur, GA: If the solid tap selection and 75 or so bottles at the main bar are not enough, you can head to the upstairs Belgian-focused bar. Good Southern-leaning pub menu with some innovative snack items.

Coleman’s Authentic Irish Pub, Syracuse, NY: This pub has been around since 1933 in a Syracuse neighborhood called Tipperary Hill, where a traffic light has the green on top. The bar has a small leprechaun’s door. Decent Irish food, drink and music.

Grey Lodge Pub, Philadelphia, PA: Good food, darts and art on the walls from local artists all play into the atmosphere. While many bars celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, the Grey Lodge also marks the feast days of lesser-known saints, including St. David (March 1st), St. George (April 23rd), St. Jean-Baptiste (June 24th) and St. Andrew (Nov. 30th).

Horse Brass Pub, Portland, OR: A great range of beers, with the emphasis on the Pacific Northwest and United Kingdom. Relaxing pub atmosphere and a knowledgeable staff. English Premier League soccer is likely what is on the television.

My Brother’s Bar, Denver, CO: It does not have the tap selection of some of the better-known Denver beer hangouts, but you will find something you like. The place has a following and it does not have a sign outside. The burgers are well-known.

Raleigh Times, Raleigh, NC: Housed in an ex-newspaper building, this spot has a good range of beers that change on a regular basis. The menu has some interesting takes on traditional pub classics.

Sheffield’s, Chicago, IL: Solid selection of Midwest beers and several unique seating areas. The outdoor beer garden is a delight after a Cubs game.

Studio Square, Long Island City, NY: This Queens beer garden features long communal tables and a decent list of German and domestic brews. Studio Square has the beer hall-style foods you would expect, along with sushi and other treats.

The Sugar Maple, Milwaukee, WI: An impressive tap range that is heavily invested in some of the best the Midwest has to offer and a friendly, knowledgeable staff make this a great stop. Décor is on the modern side, but it still is a comfortable place to relax over a brew.

Music is OK, but if is too loud for reasonable voice levels, there needs to be a “quiet room” for conversation.

Televisions should be kept to a minimum. There is a reason man invented the sports bar. One set in the corner for sports or news junkies is fine, big screens everywhere you look is not.

Décor should include subdued lighting. Dark woods add warmth.

Seating options are critical—at the bar, tables and even booths. A few snugs for privacy are a big plus. Outdoor patios during warm weather months are also nice.

Access to games enhances the experience. Darts, pool, shuffleboard, backgammon and board games encourage interaction among friends and strangers.

A local newspaper, a few current magazines and perhaps a beer book or two is a nice touch. They say relax and hang out.

Food. Let’s face it, if you are going to have a few beers, you should think about having something to eat. The better the food selection, the better the session.

An attentive, beer-smart staff makes a session enjoyable. Eye candy is not important, but a smile and a good attitude are key.

Clean bathrooms should not be too much to ask, especially if you want people to hang out for a few beers.

A big part of beer’s allure is how it brings together all sorts of people to hang out, talk, shoot a game of pool and cheer on the local team. Beer has a social side: you’re not there just for the beer, but you are there because of the beer.

For all of the talk about high-gravity beers and dry-hopped, triple-hopped and wet-hopped ales, when rounds are being bought over the course of the evening, it is often best to think outside of the big beer box. It’s not about pounding beers. It’s not about finding the highest alcohol content on the beer list. And it goes way beyond trying to one up the other guy with more IBUs. Sure, all of these things may take place from time to time, but this constant search for the extreme is blurring a key component of why most of us started enjoying beer in the first place—the social side.

Let’s be clear. While we are talking about “session beers” we are not imposing some uniform artificial alcohol by volume limit to a beer before allowing it to be admitted to the party. For the Great American Beer Festival a beer entered in the “Session Beer” category must have an ABV of 4.1 percent or less. If you stick to these guidelines, you would have to steer clear of Guinness Stout (4.3%), Red Stripe (4.7%), Samuel Adams Boston Lager (4.9%) and Pilsner Urquell (4.2%)—plus a bunch of other taps that no one would ever label extreme. Even Full Sail Brewing’s Session Lager comes in above the GABF limit at 5.1 percent ABV.

“There really is no defining statement as to exactly what a session beer is,” says Rob Denton, brewer at Snake River Brewing in Jackson, WY, which makes A.K. Sessions, a 4.1 percent ABV English mild. “A session beer is anything that is meant to be consumed in quantity—lower alcohol, usually lightly hopped. It can be an ale or a lager, it just has to be lighter drinking.”

Tone It Down A Notch

As craft beer enthusiasts, we all want flavor, freshness and fidelity. We want beer that tastes good, is served properly and lives up to some standards, including being faithful to a style. When we order a Baltic porter, we want a full-flavored, high-octane beer. But as a beer community we tend to get too caught up in the pursuit of doubles, triples, quadruples and imperials. There is a quieter path with plenty of great beers that won’t bring your palate or your brain cells to their knees. These are the brews that don’t always get the attention they deserve in beer magazines or blogs, but they give the beer fan a safe, flavorful haven during an evening at the bar.

There seems to be that reverb around doubles and imperials that quality is somehow attached to being extreme. But there is good beer in all styles, a beer for every purpose,” says Jamie Emmerson, executive brewmaster at Full Sail Brewing in Hood River, OR. “The truth is it is harder to brew a really good small beer. There is less there to hide any defects.”

Emmerson says the idea for the Session brand emerged after a group of painters working on a project at his house turned down some Full Sail Amber and Full Sail Pale Ale because they considered them middle-of-the-road beers, “too heavy and too bitter.”

We started thinking: Could you make a beer to intrigue these people and still make a quality beer? Could we bring these people into the craft beer fold?” Emmerson says. Session Lager, an all-malt brew with 20 IBUs and 5.1 percent alcohol by volume was the result. “We made a beer that is not diluted with corn and rice.”

What Full Sail has done with Session Lager has been going on for centuries in places like Cologne, Germany, where the typical kölsch is around 4.8 percent ABV, and London, where a good pint of bitter is often at or below 4 percent.

For the last 20 years, cask ale has seemed like the Next Great Beer Trend in the United States, but it has always had too many mitigating factors conspiring against its success. After all, if it has required the advocacy of the 100,000-member Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and the industry-sponsored Cask Marque education and accreditation program to sustain quality and relevance in England, think about how difficult its chances are over here. The fact that any cask ale is available in America at all is remarkable in itself. But passion is not enough.

Many businesses have tried mightily to make cask ale viable in this country, but failed. Some overestimated consumer demand; others never understood the extensive support network of brewers, importers, distributors and trained bar staff needed to make it work.

Gradually, relentlessly, others have endured and the good news is they’re succeeding. Greater New York City has dozens of bars now regularly serving cask ales (Manhattan’s Rattle N Hum typically serves four; many more during frequent festivals), ditto Philadelphia. Down I-95 in D.C., ChurchKey established a new precedent by opening with five cask beer options on their extensive beer menu. Handpumps are sprouting all over the country: you can find them in pubs and festivals in Atlanta, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Houston, Pittsburgh, Portland (ME and OR), St. Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, and beyond.

On the other hand, we still have bars and festivals where cask-conditioned beer is viewed as a decorative gimmick. The question is, are American craft beer consumers astute enough to know the difference? Perhaps not, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be. That’s my goal here; to teach you how to distinguish the real deal from the pretender, the sublime from the mediocre.

Gimmick or Gestalt

Let’s begin with some basic assumptions. The mere presence of handpumps (also known as “beer engines”) or firkin kegs is no guarantee that authentic cask beer is being served. Sad to say, but this always involves a leap of faith that goes beyond your trust in the dedication and honesty of the bar owner―you also have to trust the brewer and the entire infrastructure of our three-tiered system.

That’s because cask-conditioned beer is not a style but the result of a specific process of brewing, fermentation and dispense. At every point in the supply chain, critical steps must be taken to deliver to you that authentic, beautifully served, sumptuous glass of beer you were hoping for.

That process, once widely followed around the world, persisted in the British Isles while other nations adopted different methods, so it remains strongly associated with British ale styles. Indeed, even contemporary American consumer expectations about the appearance and flavor of British styles are still largely driven by this tradition, whether we are aware of this or not.

Regardless of style, authentic cask beer will have certain shared characteristics. At the very least, it should contain live yeast, because it completes its secondary fermentation in the cask. Then it must be kept and served at a cool cellar temperature (52-57° F), naturally carbonated to lower levels than standard draft beers, and dispensed without the use of any extraneous carbon dioxide pressure. The result should be decidedly less gassy, lacking the often prickly, acidic bite found in other beers. The mouthfeel is softer and gentler, while the slightly warmer serving temperature allows for a greater range of flavors and aromas to emerge.

Going Live

Few consumers are aware that the presence of live yeast is the defining characteristic of cask beer. If it’s not there, it is something else entirely. It doesn’t matter if it’s been stored at cellar temperature and served via handpump or from a gravity tap―it is not cask-conditioned, merely in a cask. The distinction is critical. Brewery-conditioned, filtered beer that’s been racked into a cask might still be very tasty, but it’s just a warmer version of a brewery’s standard beer dispensed from an unpressurized container. Authentic cask-conditioned beer completes its secondary fermentation in the cask. Period.

Two other distinguishing features of cask beer run counter to expectation. Despite the mythical image of British ales, cask beer should never be served flat. And no, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been to pubs in London that serve it that way―it’s simply not correct. A beer without any carbonation is dull, lifeless, at best insipid, and certainly not what the brewer intended. A good head and the resulting “lace” adhering to the sides of the glass are signs that both the brewer and the pub’s cellarman have done their jobs well. Indeed, many brewers still add a small dose of a sugary solution known as “primings” to the cask to produce a more vigorous secondary fermentation and livelier condition in the beer.

The other feature that runs counter to expectation is clarity, and by that I mean the beer should be brilliantly clear, without any floating particles or haze. The fact that cask beer is unfiltered leads to the misconception that it’s OK if it is served turbid and cloudy, but this is definitely not the case.

In the U.K., a cloudy pint is never accepted at a pub―it is sent back and replaced with another without question. In this country, especially in the craft beer market, clarity isn’t considered a requirement. These days, even the most casual beer drinker has likely been exposed to German hefeweizens or Belgian-style white ales, so a cloudy pint is often considered a sign of quality. But beer styles that traditionally have a hazy appearance are almost never served in cask-conditioned form. For those that are―British styles like mild/brown ale, pale ale/bitter, porter and stout―cloudiness is typically a sign that something is amiss.

If you’re presented with a muddy pint of cask-conditioned beer and told by the server that “it’s supposed to be that way,” don’t believe it. In fact, it’s a sure sign that something has been neglected in the process or the bar staff doesn’t know any better. A slight haze―OK, cut them a break. But otherwise, send it back. If they are unwilling to pour you a clearer pint or offer you another beer, you have little choice but to drink what you’ve been given and chalk it up to experience. Just make a note to yourself that you won’t order a cask beer at that establishment again.

You see, most brewers typically add “finings” to cask-conditioned beer. Finings (a substance whose purpose is to attract organic compounds like spent yeast, hop particles, and other proteins and cause them to fall out of solution and form stable sediment at the bottom of the cask) have been used for centuries as a means of clarifying beer. They were employed long before modern methods of filtering were invented.

Finings are not required, as most beer will ultimately “drop bright” when given enough time to settle in its serving vessel. But as a practical matter, a pub can’t wait indefinitely for beer to clear. Finings make the process more predictable and controllable.

So, if a cask of beer is given ample time to settle and reach its optimal temperature in the bar cellar, and assuming that certain basic techniques have been applied in the pub’s cellar or cooler, the beer in your glass should be absolutely bright and clear. The only exception is if haziness is considered proper for the style of beer being served.

In the U.S., cloudy cask beer is most often a sign that the beer is still “working,” that is, it hasn’t been given the time to complete its secondary fermentation and drop bright. It’s also a sign that the cask might have been jarred or shaken prior to dispense. On the other hand, it can also be a sign of infection, either in the cask itself or due to dirty beer lines and handpumps. In this instance, the aroma and flavor will be obvious indicators, and any good bar or pub should take it out of service immediately and replace your beer without question.