Even though cask ales make up a minority of the beers in England, they still exist, and those that are CAMRA approved were made using a centuries-old process of fermentation and service. (The cask ales at the Oakridge brewpub are CAMRA approved.) After a beer is fermented, it goes into a cask along with some sugar or wort, which spurs the yeast into action for a secondary fermentation that creates carbonation and flavor. When it’s almost time to serve the beer, someone called a cellarman—a person I hope to meet when I go to England for the first time—taps a porous peg into the bung, the plug or stopper in the hole in the top of the cask, which releases some of the pressure built up inside. At that point, the cellarman might add finings, such as isinglass (the nonvegan ingredient in beer that’s made of the dried swim bladders of fish), to help the yeast drop and thereby clarify the beer. Or the cellarman might add dry hops to infuse the beer with more hop aromas and flavors. When the publican decides the beer is properly carbonated, a nonporous peg, called a spile, replaces the porous version, and the beer is ready to be served. Using a rubber mallet, the cellarman drives a tap into a hole on the side, hopefully without producing an unbecoming and unprofessional spray of beer. If the beer isn’t poured directly from the cask, a hand pump at the bar pulls the beer from the cask through beer lines without the use of any carbon dioxide, the common means of pressurizing a keg. Since cask beer is exposed to oxygen once it’s tapped, it’s more fragile and starts to go bad within a day or two. It’s the job of pub goers to drink the beer quickly enough to keep the ales fresh.
Cask ales are usually served at room temperature or, more accurately, cellar temperature, which is about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, warm for Americans’ tastes. And since the beer is naturally carbonated by the yeast, cask beers usually have less carbonation than their counterparts in kegs and bottles, the essence of the flat beer reputation. Aficionados argue that because the beer is slightly warmer and less carbonated, it’s easier to taste all the flavors the beer holds, which means brewers can’t hide behind bold hop flavors or fizziness. Science supports their claims; the tongue perceives fewer flavors at colder temperatures. That means it’s hard to brew a good cask ale, which reveals flaws like a magnifying mirror under fluorescent lights.
It’s likely that by the sixteenth century, beers were being forced into a fresh human invention: the glass bottle. Early bottles were made of handblown glass, which was extremely fragile. That made storing beer inside a risky proposition, especially since most bottled beers were undergoing secondary fermentation in the bottle, which creates potentially explosive levels of carbon dioxide. In The English Housewife, a book from 1615, the author Gervase Markham gave housewives advice on how to do everything from preventing bad breath to growing flax and brewing beer, a pedestrian activity for many women of the day. Markham wrote that, when bottling ale, “You shall put it into round bottles with narrow mouths, and then stopping them close with corks, set them in a cold cellar up to the waist in sand, and be sure that the corks be fast tied in with strong pack-thread, for fear of rising out, or taking vent, which is the utter spoil of the ale.” In other words, take precautions to keep those bottles from blowing, or bad breath will be the least of your worries.
Glassware came in various shapes: squat with embossing; cobalt, aqua, and green; smooth necks, tall necks, wide necks. At the time, commercial bottling was expensive, which made bottled beer something for the wealthy; drinking beer at home instead of at the pub was considered a luxury. The pattern of poor people drinking in public while the rich stored and consumed beer in the privacy of their homes continued into the twentieth century. One of the earliest commercial bottlers was a London brewer named Whitbread. In 1868 the brewer was using corks to seal bottles of beer, including a London stout called a “Family Ale,” a feat executed by a workforce of more than one hundred “corkers,” who were paid to hammer corks into bottles. That human labor was a selling point. WHITBREAD & CO. ARE THE ONLY LARGE BREWERS WHO BOTTLE THEIR OWN BEER, reads an advertisement.
Screw-top bottles and caps came next, before the creation of the game-changing crown top—the reason many of us have bottle openers attached to our keychains. The crown top was invented by the American mechanical engineer William Painter, who filed eighty-five patents during his lifetime, including one for a safety ejection seat for passenger trains. “I have devised metallic sealing-caps embodying certain novel characteristics which render them highly effective and so inexpensive as to warrant throwing them away after a single use thereof, even when forcible displacement, as in opening bottles, has resulted in no material injury to the caps,” reads the patent for the crown top, which was filed in 1889.
Pasteurization helped brewers increase the shelf life of beer, which also pushed bottled beers to become the norm after World War I. While stronger, nonexploding glass bottles and well-preserved beers helped delay the need for kegs, the American public’s thirst for highly carbonated lagers created a demand for the metal keg, which kept the beers in better condition for longer. In the 1950s, steel kegs began to replace wooden casks, and just ten years later, lighter weight aluminum alloys became the standard keg material. These days, homebrew forums are filled with people trying to figure out if their kegs are made of aluminum or stainless steel, because keg manufacturers use both materials. Supposedly, aluminum kegs scratch easily, weigh less, and make a “dong” sound when you bang on them (as opposed to steel’s “ding”).
Because kegs kill the need for bottles, which require washing and sterilization, more experienced and environmentally sensitive homebrewers keg their beers. But what kind of holiday beer fairy lugs a keg from party to party? Not this one. On another Saturday afternoon, while Oscar napped, Tony and I sterilized the bottles, caps, and a siphon. We added a priming sugar, which the yeast would consume to produce carbonation, then we put the oatmeal stout into bottles. I placed a cap on the top of each beer and squeezed the capper that seals the crimped edges around the bottle. We put the bottled beer back into the basement and waited.
After our oatmeal stout had been in the bottles for a week, I couldn’t wait any longer. I put one in the fridge for an hour or so and then popped the top. It was inky black in the glass, and a gorgeous tan head appeared on top. The beer tasted like dark chocolate or good coffee, with a strong and dry bitterness and a creamy softness, the perfect blend of substance and lightness. If I’d been filling out a beer sheet, I’d have gone with “Balance.” In effect, I’d made what I set out to create, a first for this homebrewer. The beer was so good, it deserved a name, so I called it Short Days Stout, in honor of the dark days of winter, and made some pen drawings on white mailing labels and stuck one to every bottle that went out the door. We took the beer to holiday parties and gave some to Oscar’s preschool teachers and friends. I even mailed one to Tony’s brother, back east. It was official: I’d made the first batch of homebrew I’d ever felt proud to share.
I’d learned the basic mechanics of bottling beer in my kitchen, but how to serve beer on a larger scale, more specifically, from multiple kegs in a draft system, would require some research. To pass the Cicerone exam, I would need to know how to store kegs, clean draft lines, and troubleshoot problems, like taps that only pour foam—things I wanted to learn through hands-on experience.
One damp Sunday evening, inside a walk-in cooler chilled to a bracing 38 degrees, I stood between a metal tray filled with bloody flank steaks and eight squat kegs of beer. Denver Bon, a wiry thirty-nine-year-old, gently tugged and examined a mass of black, red, and beige tubes protruding from the kegs, like the protagonist of a dystopian science fiction novel. Denver was the brewer at Hair of the Dog Brewing in Portland, and he’d invited me to learn about draft systems by helping him clean the brewery’s tap lines, something he did every two weeks. I’d asked Adrienne So to join me, which meant our study group was on a field trip.
I quickly calculated that I’d watched hundreds of people pull tap handles, made of everything from corrugated steel to chainsaw carvings, in ord
er to serve me beer. Like magic, the beer arrived in my glass cold and carbonated, but I’d never thought about why. I was looking forward to replacing that ignorance with a new language, one that included references to pressure, gas blending, vinyl lines, jumpers, couplers, and ball lifters.
Hair of the Dog was an unlikely place for a lesson on draft systems, since the brewery’s most famous beers are bottled. In 2013 twelve twelve-ounce bottles of Hair of the Dog Dave, a barley wine brewed nineteen years earlier, sold for two thousand dollars each at a charity event. But the brewery also kegs beer, much of which is served on tap in its pub.
Earlier, Denver told me he went through bankruptcy to work in the beer industry. When he moved to Portland from Pasadena, California, in 2009, he figured he’d quickly find a job serving beer or brewing. After all, he was a Certified Cicerone. But no one knew what the title meant. He finally landed at Hair of the Dog, and was promoted from server to brewer. These days, he does both jobs. Once he told me he gets annoyed when people ask for samples of beer before ordering one.
“It’s not like you’re shopping for shoes,” he said. “Just order a beer. If you drink an entire beer you don’t like, that’s how you learn.”
“But what if you love shopping?” I replied.
Most of my experience with draft systems was limited to the kind of keg-plugged-with-a-vertical-hand-pump setup commonly found at college parties. Those “temporary” systems can easily be operated by anyone capable of opening a tube of Solo cups. One of the main differences between those temporary systems and the one at Hair of the Dog is that the beer comes into contact with oxygen, an enemy of beer because it degrades flavors, and CO2 is allowed to escape, which can result in flat, bad-tasting beer. While the hand pump pressurizes the beer with air, and therefore oxygen, the Hair of the Dog setup uses carbon dioxide to accomplish the same task.
“CO2 in, beer out,” Denver said, tapping a gauge that showed how much CO2 pressure was being applied to a single keg. Eight beers on tap meant eight beer lines snaking from the wall to each keg, and eight CO2 lines running from a vertical metal tank in the corner. He tapped another gauge and explained how he adjusted CO2 pressure depending on the beer.
“Since you’re trying to deliver the beer exactly as the brewer intended, right down to the serving temperature, you don’t want to add or take away carbonation.”
If there’s not enough CO2 filling the headspace of the keg, the beer’s CO2 will dissolve into the oxygen, which means a loss of carbonation. If there’s too much CO2 in the headspace, the beer will be pushed out too fast and pour foamy.
Draft systems are like closed ecosystems. Changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure can throw them out of balance, which is bad for the beer inside. At Hair of the Dog, beer travels from the kegs to the faucets through chilled tubes fifty feet long, an inefficient distance that’s fairly common at commercial breweries. Ideally, beer in a long-draw system travels at a rate of seven feet per second, Denver said, the same number I’d read in the Draught Beer Quality Manual. The publication is put out by the Brewers Association, and despite having the soporific qualities of the Bible, is recommended reading material for aspiring Certified Cicerones. As Denver spouted more numbers—including the diameter of the coupler that attaches the beer lines to the keg—I had a momentary flashback to family road trips of my childhood, when my father, a former high school math teacher, would ask me to calculate the car’s tire rotations at various speeds. Science, not poetry, I wrote in my notebook.
Before Adrienne and I had arrived at Hair of the Dog, I was worrying about her safety. Once I’d been told how a single drop of line-cleaning chemicals will eat an eyeball, which made them seem like something a pregnant woman shouldn’t be handling.
“Should we be wearing safety goggles?” I asked Denver, who was filling a keg with warm water and the cleaning solution we’d eventually pump through the beer lines. Adrienne seemed too busy taking notes to hear what I’d said.
“Nah,” he said, “we use an environmentally friendly cleaner.” The cleaner was called PBW (Powdered Brewery Wash), a nontoxic alkali solution that’s biodegradable and “user-friendly.” I was relieved.
To prove I didn’t need to worry, Denver suggested I touch and smell the solution. Between my fingers, the clear, warm liquid felt slippery and smelled faintly tangy, like artificial strawberries.
“If it feels slimy and smells like fruity yogurt, you know it’s PBW,” he said.
The exercise reminded him of a bigger idea.
“You have to use all your senses while brewing,” he mused.
Technically, line cleaning isn’t part of the brewing process, but for Denver, making beer and delivering it to the customers on the other side of the wall were part of the same continuum. Not only did he brew the beer that filled the kegs, Denver emptied and cleaned those containers, forming a complete cycle. I liked the idea of brewing as a full sensory experience, which includes the sound of roiling liquid and the feel of hot metal. I was trying to cultivate a similar awareness while drinking beer.
Denver cleaned the lines every two weeks—sometimes three, he admitted, if he was really busy. He told us the beer tastes different toward the end of the two weeks, which made sense to me.
Draft systems introduce flavors into beer, a concept I first encountered inside the bar of a classy bowling alley in Portland, where Jeff Bell, an “on-premise quality specialist” for MillerCoors, was teaching a class about how to properly clean draft lines. He was the one who told me about the dangers of the line-cleaning chemicals, which he illustrated with the unforgettable story of a guy who failed to wear safety goggles while cleaning beer lines and lost vision in one eye.
At the line-cleaning class, I sat with Megan Flynn and a lot of men who cleaned lines for a living. The sun gleamed off our table, which made me wish I were doing something outside instead of being stuck inside a bar. Jeff asked us to pretend we’d gone to a bar to celebrate meeting each other in class. We each had three beer samples in numbered cups in front of us. “Pretend you were served your first pint of beer, and try beer number one,” he directed. “Cheers.” We all took a sip. The beer was wrong, very wrong, with a buttery aroma and sharp tang. It also seemed watered down, just one of the factors that made it disgusting. We continued with our imaginary night on the town. “Let’s go down the street to another bar, since no one was excited about their pints at the last place, and try beer number two,” Jeff continued. “Cheers.” The second beer was even more offensive than the first, with a strong odor of vinegar. “It’s like a cider,” one of the professional line cleaners said loudly. Beer three—our control beer—put it all in perspective, with its refreshing and slightly grainy quality. Beer three tasted like beer. It was Coors Light.
The sensory lesson, the result of chemical spikes added to Coors Light, revealed the pitfalls of not properly cleaning beer lines. The rest of the presentation felt like a driver’s education course. Instead of bloody heads stuck through windshields, we saw pictures of kegs oozing brown and yellow goo where the lines attached. Then there was a video of brown chunks of bacterial muck being flushed from a tap system the owner thought was clean. Unfortunately, no one has ever come down with an illness as a result of dirty tap lines, which places the issue outside the purview of health inspectors. That gives bar and restaurant owners little incentive to keep their tap lines clean; it costs money to hire a line cleaner or have staff members do it properly. In most cases, unless beer sales decline as a result of dirty tap lines, the beer still flows. One of the only ways to encourage better and more frequent draft line cleanings is for consumers to point out when beer tastes off, something I’d never seen anyone do in public. At that moment, I vowed to become, not only someone who knew what dirty-line beer tasted like, but someone who’d alert a server about the problem—a member of the undercover draft police.
Adrienne and I tried to keep up with Denver, who sprinted from the bar, around tables and chairs in the dining room, past a s
erver mopping the floor, through swinging doors into the brewery, and then into the cooler—at least five times. We created two closed loops of four taps each, which meant we’d run the cleaning solution through the system twice. Denver let us take turns unhooking the beer lines from the kegs, a motion that required a swift turn of a handle, then a quick twist and pull, and, if done right, prevented beer from spewing onto the floor. Wasted beer translates to money down the drain. We had flushed the beer from the system and filled it with cleaning solution that we were letting sit, then we’d flush out the cleaning solution with cold water. The water would stay in the lines until morning, when the first person in the brewery would reintroduce the beer.
While we waited for the cleaning solution to do its job, Adrienne and I sat at the bar, across from the taps. Denver unscrewed the faucets and handed one to me and one to Adrienne. I immediately felt disdain for the faucet, with its gaskets, mysterious openings, and singular ball bearing. It felt as foreign as my Honda’s engine the one time I tried to change its oil.
“You pop the ball out, like this,” Denver said, his hands moving with sureness. He used his fingernail to pop off a black rubber washer that was lodged between the ball bearing and the faucet’s body.
“Examine the washer,” he instructed. “If it’s gross or torn up, we need to replace it.”
Any scratched or uneven surface is a place where bacteria could colonize and create off-flavors. Cleaning the faucets is like flossing the teeth of the draft system. We plopped each part into a bucket of hot water and cleaning solution. After the pieces soaked, we put them back together. As we worked, I thought about the thousands of draft beers I’d consumed over the years—at movie theaters, in restaurants, and at dive bars. There was no way every one of those beers traveled through lines and faucets that had been cleaned every two weeks. Jeff Bell had said regular line cleaning was a rarity, even in beer-centric Portland. That meant the world was awash in mishandled beer, and sadly, most consumers didn’t know any better.
My Beer Year Page 11