5 Seasons Brewing hosted the fifteenth annual Atlanta Cask Ale Tasting in January. Owen Ogletree launched ACAT in 2005 with a dozen second-hand firkins, a passion for real ale, and dreams of recreating a UK-style regional cask ale festival in Georgia. The firkins were Ogletree’s, and he delivered each with all necessary accoutrements, a dose of priming sugar, and precise instructions. These days ACAT encompasses 50+ casks, half are brewery-owned, and most brewers can tell a shive from a bung.
A Friday night ice storm pushed the inaugural ACAT back a day, but icy streets and near-freezing temperatures were no match for a chance to sample casks from 13 Atlanta-area breweries in a corner of SweetWater Brewing’s then-new Midtown plant. Maybe it was the weather, but the first blue ribbon went to a one-off version of Terrapin’s Wake-N-Bake imperial stout. Wood-aged, adjunct laden, 9.5% ABV: it was a bellwether of where consumer tastes were headed. Both the second place IIPA and third place APA came from the now-defunct Buckhead Colorado Steakhouse chain and exemplify another trend: less than half of the breweries at ACAT 2005 survived the decade.
For attendees, ACAT’s appeal is straightforward. Ogletree observes that “due to the secondary fermentation that takes place in the cask, each cask ale is quite unique. The soft carbonation and presence of living yeast make for impressive flavors in the cask ales.” Of course, the allure of sampling dozens of unique brews in a single afternoon cannot be overlooked — especially in an age of online beer logging.
Cask ale casts a different spell over brewers. Most are drawn to the technical challenge of brewing and packaging a beer to be served alive and unfiltered. Achieving proper “condition” (clarity + carbonation) is notoriously difficult. “Getting carbonation just right without overdoing it can be tricky,” confesses Todd di Matteo of Good Word Brewing, who describes some early casks dosed “with lots of fruit. Within a couple of days you weren’t safe in the brewery! Often they would pop and send the 5 gallon cask shooting across the brewery floor.”
Brewers often are unable to resist the creative potential of a 10.8 gallon package seemingly built for easy experimentation. Max Mason, brewer at Hi-Wire Brewing, speaks for many when he declares, “We love making casks because it allows unlimited creativity on a small scale…. It’s fun to get creative with a successful base recipe and push the limits. If it goes wrong, so be it.”
Others, like Malcolm Downie of Scotland’s Fyne Ales, are traditionalists. Downie credits his love of cask ale to a time “around age 16” when he was “met off a train by an uncle, taken to the pub, handed a pint and told ‘Sit there, drink that and behave yourself!’” Downie’s philosophy is as old school as his initiation: “What works well? For us, it’s pale, sessionable beers. . . 3.8% ABV, not hugely hoppy, enough bitterness, a tiny bit of malt character. . . and that works.” Casking esoteric, American-style brews is not for him: “Personally, I think very strong hoppy beers don’t work so well.… We have been asked about putting some sour beers in cask, which I would never do. It’s just wrong.”
By 2008 ACAT had grown to 20 casks, and non-traditional brews were ascendant. Though most brews were dark — typical at winter festivals — half of all entries clocked in at 7% ABV or above, and a third were wood- or barrel-aged. And Savannah, GA’s Moon River Brewing accidentally legitimized the pastry stout trend with, as brewmaster John Pinkerton recalls, “kind of a joke. . . this ridiculous, Krispy Kreme-infused version of our Captain’s Porter [that] we said we ‘dry-doughnut-ed.’” Little Chocolate Doughnuts was unexpectedly delicious, and it would be hard to say who was more surprised when the pastry prank took first prize: Pinkerton or the judges.
Perhaps because commercial brewing is mostly factory work with a side of never-ending cleaning, professional brewers are always looking for an excuse to cut loose. Zach Brenner of Eagle Creek Brewing explains, “Cask ales are fun because you are usually attempting something off the wall and you don’t get to taste the final product until the cask is tapped.” Brewers don’t normally surrender to the impulse to cram whatever they see sitting on the break room table into a cask, but that doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about it.
Bobby Thomas of Red Hare Brewing cautions, “Cask beers have always been fun for us as they provide a chance to really morph a base beer into something completely different. That being said, it’s usually the simpler casks that stand a better chance of turning out well. Simple additions of normal type ingredients like coffee, chocolate, or fruits usually end up pretty good.”
Wayne Wambles, founding brewer at Cigar City Brewing, must have been thinking along the same lines when he was formulating Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout. Now legendary, Hunahpu was born as a one-off cask for ACAT 2009. Though wary of falling for an offbeat brew two years in a row, smitten judges pinned a blue ribbon on Wambles’s 12% ABV stout spiced with ancho and pasilla chile peppers, vanilla, cacao, and cinnamon.
2009 was ACAT’s last year at a production brewery. Explosive growth at SweetWater forced a relocation to Atlanta Brewing in 2009, and uncertainty surrounding state liquor law prompted a move again the next year. ACAT 2010 was held at 5 Seasons Prado, where 13 of 21 casks had ABVs of 8% or above, five were dosed with cherries or cherry juice, and one, the second-place-winning brown ale from Twain’s Billiard & Tap featured both cherries and Brettanomyces — ACAT’s first “intentionally funky” entry. Big, weird, and wild was the trend.
With more than 30 casks, ACAT 2011 spilled onto the patio of neighboring Taco Mac. UK ales from JW Lees and Thornbridge debuted as a gentle reminder of cask ale’s native form in a year when the People’s Choice award went to an 8% ABV bacon-infused Scotch ale. ACAT’s casks have continued increasing in number and variety so that mixed-culture brews now are commonplace, and adjuncts such as chocolate, coconut, peanut butter, and vanilla are almost passé. Average alcohol content actually fell recently as lower-ABV sour beers have taken off and the number of casks from the UK has risen.
When ACAT moved to its current home at 5 Seasons Westside in 2018 fewer than one-third of its 52 entries were unadulterated, and most of those were imports from the UK. Cask ale’s American evolution from sessionable beer-flavored beer to free-form canvas for unbridled creativity seemed complete.
Then things took a different turn. More than two-thirds of 2019's entries were dark ales: porters, stouts, browns, even a dunkelweizen. Most were still nontraditional, but the trend toward ever hoppier, ever more sweet-sour candy-like brews seemed to have exhausted itself. Even Creature Comforts, best known for Tropicália IPA, brewed its first English-style mild ale for ACAT this year. Blake Tyers explains, “Making low alcohol, yet fine-tuned cask ales is quite an art form. One that would likely take a lifetime to properly master. We’re no masters, but we appreciate the annual exercise in making a refined cask ale.”
Does this portend a more general return to tradition? Perhaps, having taken cask ale in unimaginable directions, we are at last about to arrive where we started and know cask for the first time.
A version of this article appears in the Feb–March 2019 issue of Southern Brew News.
