Cask ale in a corny?

[Huntsekker]

I suggest to watch Jonny on the Craft Beer Channel and maybe employ how he managed to get cask and hand pump pulled beer at home.

Even includes a recipe for Five Points Best Bitter

Part 1

Part 2


You can thank me later

Really interesting and very helpful.
Thank you very much!

 

[peebee]

I kegged my bitter a couple of weeks back and with the right level of carbonation it had no head whatsoever. I ignored the advice I received in response to this post and ordered a stout spout.

I removed the plastic restriction so that only the sparkler disc remained and it worked perfectly. Here’s my bitter at about 5PSI:

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It’s quite a nice creamy head it’s given me too, not too unlike the head given by a hand pull sparkler. It’s also knocked a bit of carbonation out.

Overall I’m very happy with how this turned out.

I'm pleased you are happy with how your beer has turned out. That is the prime purpose of brewing your own after all.

But I'm slightly worried that you had to ignore advice you received in this post. I'm equally worried that you choose to ignore the title of the thread! Just as a reminder, it's "Cask ale in a corny?". I think your own statement "Here’s my bitter at about 5PSI" , sort of excludes you from making any serious contribution to the thread.

I do mention regulators in this thread that will output up 4PSI, and I do pressure some of my beers at 5-7PSI. But I do not try to suggest they emulate "cask ale". Because they don't. Have a little respect for those trying to protect our heritage of "cask conditioned" beers.

 

[MickDundee]

I'm pleased you are happy with how your beer has turned out. That is the prime purpose of brewing your own after all.

But I'm slightly worried that you had to ignore advice you received in this post. I'm equally worried that you choose to ignore the title of the thread! Just as a reminder, it's "Cask ale in a corny?". I think your own statement "Here’s my bitter at about 5PSI" , sort of excludes you from making any serious contribution to the thread.

I do mention regulators in this thread that will output up 4PSI, and I do pressure some of my beers at 5-7PSI. But I do not try to suggest they emulate "cask ale". Because they don't. Have a little respect for those trying to protect our heritage of "cask conditioned" beers.

Sorry if I offended by saying I ignored your advice. I wasn’t trying to say I thought you were wrong, all I meant was that I thought I’d give it a go since it cost me less than a fiver.

Some of us are after cheap and cheerful rough approximations of cask ale through their corny kegs and I thought I’d share my experience for others in the same boat. I did it in this thread because I’d already mentioned the stout spout and didn’t see the benefit of starting a new thread for it - if I’d asked it in “what did you brew today” or one of the more general corny threads I would have made that post in there. Apparently the fact I’ve posted it in here has offended you and now means that I’m “excluded from making a serious contribution to this thread”! I shouldn’t have bothered!

Also, you’ve picked me up wrong on my PSI, which appears to be what has offended you so much. 5PSI is the serving pressure to get a decent flow through the disc. It’s not the carbonation pressure, I’ve had it sitting at 2PSI for the last 2 weeks. Secondly, my preference for cask ale is a freshly changed keg which has a nice little bit of fizz on the tongue - it’s not flat, in fact I’d say it’s probably about the level I achieved through this method.

 

[peebee]

Sorry if I offended by saying I ignored your advice. …

You ignored my advice? Maybe I should be offended now? And for plastering an "angry" reaction on my post too!

But you should have made clear the "5PSI" was only to force the 2PSI conditioned beer through one of those taps. This could even be argued that's what a hand-pump does: Using negative pressure to effectively increase the serving pressure for the time it's passing through the pump.

I won't use a "sparkler", but do have 12/24V actuated valves that shut the pump off and the very tight restriction these create probably acts like a "sparkler" which perhaps suggests an even cheaper way of creating a foamy pint than expensive hand-pumps and stout taps?

But for that badly thought out post of yours, you probably deserved a Flame" reaction (a very subdued flame). Trawling through some historical posts I dug this out (different forum) from when I was developing my ideas for serving "cask ale" style home-brew:

Re: Cask Conditioned Homebrew
by Graham_W » Sun Feb 07, 2016 21:51

It seems to me that PeeBee is aiming for something far fizzier than cask beer is meant to be. I can see echoes of the effin dreaded 3-Fs creeping in here -- Freeze, Fizz and Foam. A cask breather is just an excuse for poor cellar management, such as not putting a hard spile in the cask between sessions. Good publicans can easily get a week out of a cask with proper management, and it is true that a cask breather does not increase sales life by much, considering that there is always a blanket of CO2 over the surface of properly managed cask beer and that cask beer is not sterile filtered so that any bacteria picked up during brewing is sitting there waiting for the opportunity to get going. Live yeast does a good job of cleaning up a beer anyway and a bit more CO2 is not going to make much difference.

A sterile filtered beer, like a keg beer, on the other hand, could go off within a day if the gas wasn't there. There is always a device known as an auto-spile for those publicans who are too lazy or too forgetful to remember to fit a hard spile between sessions. If a pub does not have enough customers to shift a cask of beer within an appropriate time, there is something wrong with the business, and that requires either a change of landlord or conversion to a Tesco Express.

Yes, "Graham_W" is exactly who you think he is! Unfortunately the forum this comes from (the forum that "calved" this one) seems to be dying slowly, and I remember the original post being a bit longer (Graham didn't write short posts).