Since we started selling beer last year, we’ve focused mainly on beer in cans and kegs, so I’m really excited that our first cask beer is going to be served very soon! Lone Goose is our first ‘real ale’, and we’ve brewed it specifically for cask (so you won’t see it in any cans – you’ll have to go to the pub to taste it!). It’s a refreshing, hoppy pale ale with hints of peach and citrus – you’ll find it pouring from next week at our local pub Platform 3 on Linlithgow High St, and pretty soon it’ll also be available at the Corbie Inn in Bo’ness as well.
I have to confess that I took a small cask home for testing, and it’s been tasting great in the sunshine.
If you don’t know the difference between keg and cask beer don’t worry, you’re not alone. You can get brilliant beer in both, but there are a few differences…
Casks contain real ale which is a ‘live’ product, where the beer undergoes a secondary fermentation after it’s been put inside the cask. The bubbles of carbon dioxide in real ale are created during that process, and there’s no added gas during the serving process, so they tend to less highly carbonated than keg beer. Cask beer is served at ‘cellar temperature’, so generally a touch warmer than the beers coming out of cooled keg lines. The lower carbonation and slightly higher temperature gives a softer mouthfeel to the beer, and this works really well with a lot of ale styles. Kegs on the other hand are filled with beer which has completely finished conditioning, and which has generally been force carbonated by trickling CO2 through the beer tank. This tends to give you a brighter and fizzier beer, and kegs tend to last longer as they are generally filtered to remove the live yeasts present in cask beer.
So try and find a pint of Lone Goose if you can, and look out for more cask ale coming to more pubs soon!
Cheers,
Brett
