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Hi and welcome to Around the world in 80 drinks
You know Scots have been brewing beer for five thousand years so I think it’s safe
to say they know a thing or two about one of my favourite subjects.
We’re on the Royal Mile here in Edinburgh Scotland to speak to James, the cask master
at Deacon Brodie’s Pub about trying some cask ales.
Now, cask ales are different from regular draught beer in that they are a live, un-filtered,
un-pasteurized product, pulled from a cask rather than pushed out of a keg with gas.
I better let James explain more about that and what he does.
Each pub has a cask master they are responsible for looking after the beer within their own
business and they should be responsible for racking all the beer in the business, looking
after them, washing, cleaning the pipes and everything themselves, and they should be
on top the cellar at all times.
I’m the district cask master so it’s my job to ensure that they’re doing their job
within the business.
The hand pull pumps the beer up. So that is the beer engine as we call it. Every time
you pull it it pulls a quarter to half a pint out of the barrel and into the line.
The ales are served at 11-13 degrees whereas all the keg beer we have on normally would
be served right below 5 degrees.
If you chill these too far you’ll develop what’s called a chill haze and the yeast
will go a bit strange and it will drop out of solution and it will maybe look a little
bit like this one but this one’s fine because it’s a wheat beer it’s supposed to be
like that. But a lot of them you can get little bits floating around in them and stuff like
that.
And that’s in every cask, it’s in the bottom of every barrel.
These are a live yeast?
Live yeast, all of them, all of these beers are live. That’s the main difference between
cask ale and any other beer the product is a live product, there’s still live yeast
in it, it’s not been pasteurized there’s no filtration before it was put in the barrel
or anything. The only thing they add really is finings
which, all that does is, it’s an isinglass fining they’re called and that will make
the yeast and all the other debris that are in the barrel after it’s settled down for
a day or two they will drop to the bottom the proteins will bind and drop to the bottom
of the barrel and you’ll end up with a layer of sediment on the bottom of the barrel. And
that’s when you know you’re at the bottom of the barrel because you start sucking that
out.
You aim to sell a cask within three to five days. Three is optimum by day five it’ll
be starting to taste a bit tired.
Ok so we’ve got Nicholson’s pale ale here, it’s our brand ale so you can only get it
in any of our pubs.
Brewed in St. Austell in Cornwall which is about as far away from here as you can get.
It’s quite a dark pale ale for a pale ale.
James describes for us six of the cask ales they currently have on tap. He talks about
the different attributes of each and where they’re brewed. We do our best to pick
out the different aromas and flavours.
Citrus or mango.
It’s almost like an amber colour.
Liquorice or vanilla.
It’s not bad on a hot summer day.
Fruity smell.
I really like it.
Not a fan.
I like it.
It’s quite smooth.
I like it.
It’s quite nice.
It’s nice.
Really nice.
As he mentioned, the ales are served at the same temperature as the cellar, between 10-13
degrees celsius and there is no CO2 added for carbonation, the head on the beer comes
from the gasses produced naturally from the fermenting yeast.
After sampling them all Katie’s favourite was Stewarts 80 Shilling.
I however failed the Scots and chose an English ale called Charge.
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Thanks for watching!