Just in case you haven’t noticed, some of my favorite places got a mention on the Learn & Discover pages of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) website last week, in the form of an article by well-respected beer writer Ruvani de Silva, on the first ever “Pinvitational” cask ale festival held in Austin TX earlier this year.
You will need to join CAMRA to get past the paywall and read all of the exciting things that Ruvani has written about the cask scene, in Texas but also up here in New York and the Northeast.
For those folks who are not yet members of CAMRA, get your fingers out already – I did.
I finally rejoined after an absence of over forty years.
Apparently, there are all kinds of other member benefits should you sign up, but some of them are probably only going to be of much use if you decide to hop over the pond for a day or two, or a week or two, or a month or two, or to escape political persecution.
I can see you now, wondering if you really need a subscription to CAMRA.
Well, ask yourself these questions:
- Do you need a bolt-hole to escape to, should this upcoming election not turn out to your satisfaction?
- Would you like to learn about the cask beer and pub culture of said bolt-hole?
- Would you like access to exclusive content regarding said beer and pub culture?
- Are you just curious to see what is hiding behind the paywall?
- Do you just want to read the article? All the way to the end?
One of my favorite member benefits was the reading material.
I used to get all excited when my monthly What’s Brewing newspaper got shoved into my mailbox in Queens, even though much of it wasn’t immediately relevant to me, although at that time, I was still just here on an inter-company visa with a medium-term plan to return to the country of my birth.
I also got really excited a couple of years back when I was down in Texas, heading up from San Antonio, where my boys live, to Dripping Springs to visit Jester King and I stumbled upon Acopon Brewing and came across a bunch of current, at that time, physical copies of What’s Brewing.
We spent a good hour or so in the brewery, reading the newspapers and drinking the cask dark mild; I was ready to rejoin CAMRA right then, but … distractions.
It was good to read in Ruvani’s article that Acopon were one of the founders of the “Pinvitational” cask festival.
As for that medium-term plan to go back “home”, we all know what happened to that, or if we don’t, just read ahead …
Ruvani contacted me a few months ago when researching the article and asked a handful of short questions about the NYC/NE cask scene, past and present, and about the Cask Whisperer blog.
I of course responded with my usual long-winded replies, just trying to provide a little bit of color you know, and ended up with a posting-sized document, that I realized I could use at a future date.
Well, with the publication of Ruvani’s article on the CAMRA website, that future time has come to pass, and so I will now subject you all to that Q/A session in all of its prattling glory.
You knew I was going to do that …
Can you tell me a bit about what the cask ale scene was like when you first moved to the US and how you’ve seen it change in the time you’ve been here?
I arrived in NYC a week before Thanksgiving in 1979 and the cask scene here was totally non-existent, which I kind of expected, but it was still a bit of a shock to the system, especially as I was a real enthusiast even then in my early twenties.
Even though craft beer, or whatever it was called then, was starting to appear on the West Coast (Anchor and Sierra Nevada) by the late seventies, there was nothing here in the Northeast. It would be another ten years before they started appearing in bars and on shelves in NYC.
The usual choices when I first arrived here were Bud, Miller, Michelob and Busch, with Becks and Heineken thrown in as European exotics, and the occasional sighting of Bass and Whitbread on draft and McEwans Export in bottle.
Local to the area on draft, bottle and can were Schaefer, Schmidt’s, Rheingold and Genesee (cream ale), they were pretty much the same as the nationals in terms of taste, although the Rheingold was semi-pleasantly semi-dry.
More interesting were Ballantine and shortly New Amsterdam which were to be found in the best bottle-shops (glorified delis), and actually had some hop profile and were sought out by those desperate for some flavor.
Draft and bottled Guinness (still a living beer then) were fairly widely available, but the draft version was not of a particularly high standard with the exception of some delightfully dodgy Irish bars in Queens and the Bronx.
Finally, you could find Mexican lagers in the form of Dos Equis in the better Mexican cantinas in NYC and surrounding areas.
Cask ale finally arrived in the mid-eighties when the Manhattan Brewing Company opened up business in Soho in NYC, and disappeared again a few years later when they struggled and went out of business.
It came back for good around 2005/2006 but that went mostly unnoticed by me, so there isn’t much that I can tell you about how that all occurred, but I am pretty certain that Alex Hall had a big hand in that.
How did you get involved in the US cask scene?
Slowly, bit by bit, until I ended up working in DC fifteen years ago and found myself living just three blocks from Churchkey, which had five beer engines and a very cask-enthusiastic beer director in Greg Engert.
Prior to that, through the nineties and noughties, I would stumble over a cask ale outlet sporadically, usually at what used to be termed a micro-brewery and was usually a brewpub.
None of these accidental encounters were in the Northeast, they were lucky finds when I had to travel for business or other purposes; think Little Rock AR or Clarksville TN or even Jackson WY.
DC was different though, I was fortunate to arrive just when DC decided that it wanted to be known as a craft beer town, with breweries, brewpubs, and craft beer bars opening up almost monthly in the greater DMV (Del-Mar-Va) area, and cask was part of that scene.
For a good five years, I had a choice of over fifteen handpumps to sample, mostly in the beer bars, but with a handful in Bluejacket brewery and another handful out at Mad Fox brewpub a short metro ride away.
This really reawakened my own enthusiasm for cask ale.
This is also where and when I attended my first cask ale festivals in the U.S.
Mad Fox held an annual event out at Falls Church VA, usually featuring casks from all over Northern Virginia.
Meridian Pint, a beer bar in Columbia Heights DC, held three or four cask events on a random schedule, featuring casks from breweries in DC, its suburbs, and as far north as Baltimore MD.
District Chophouse in DC held a wonderful annual Cask Night/Day event for several years, as a prelude to the respective DC Beer Week.
And the first three Snallygasters also included a cask/cider/gravity keg section, where you would usually find me lurking.
While all this was happening, Alex Hall and Paul Pendyck were working their magic installing beer engines all over the Northeast, and I was able to experience the growing cask scene in NYC when I came home on the weekends; mostly beer bars in Manhattan, but occasionally a cask festival, usually overseen by Alex.
I had no idea there were so many small, local cask festivals in the Northeast – is this a relatively new development or have they been going for a while under the radar? How do you find out about them all?
In New York State and New England we have all ages of cask festivals, from the relative newcomers like Nod Hill Brewery CT which just held its third annual “Afternoon of Casks” and the “Cask.On” event in Derry NH which I believe is on its fourth or fifth incarnation, to some old hands such as Woodland Farm in Utica NY (8 years), Seneca Lake Brewing NY (also 8 years), Noah Webster House CT (another 8 years), and Strong Rope in Brooklyn (yep 8 years), to the two venerable institutions of Blue Point (19 years and counting) and NERAX which just chalked up its 25th anniversary.
Many are under the radar for the regular beer-drinking public and craft beer-drinking public (although you do get a lot of bros at the Blue Point fest), but the cask ale enthusiasts seem to find them; I am guessing that they rely on the same tools that I use.
I proactively search for events, basically using Google Search; with the localized search results that you get these days, just typing in “Cask Ale Fest” into Google will bring useful results; “Firkin Friday” has also brought up good leads, the trick is to investigate those leads.
Even if those results are for long-past events, they work as starting points to dig deeper, and I do circle back to see if any of them have been resurrected.
Once I have tracked down a potential event or even just an outlet/sponsor, it goes into my little black book (database on my phone) and I will continue to track it in future, usually by following the brewery or pub on Instagram and letting the algorithm find me other potential outlets.
I will also go straight to the source whenever the opportunity arises; if I happen to meet owners/brewers/reps of breweries that I know to be producing casks, I will ask them about any upcoming events that I should be aware of, or any other venues that I may not know about. I ask the same of other enthusiasts that I get to talking to at cask events.
If an event does happen to be coming up, I will add it to my page at JWF and maintain it there until it passes.
So, at this point I believe that my page is probably the best resource for non-New England events in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states (VA to NY), and I would say that following NERAX on Instagram is probably the best way to find upcoming events anywhere in New England.
Why do you think cask is so popular in the Northeast?
I think that tradition plays into it, there are still a lot of folks up this way that have strong British roots and that has some influence on the types of beers that they enjoy.
If you read the testimonies of the NERAX originators, you will find folks that had regularly visited the UK, sampled the real ale there, fell in love with it, and worked to either bring it here or brew it here.
I hear the same sentiments when I talk to some of the brewer/owners in NYC; Jason Sahler of Strong Rope, Chris Cuzme of Fifth Hammer, and Brett Taylor of Wild East are all big fans of real ale, Strong Rope was originally conceived as a cask brewery and Brett is a great lover of Northern English beers, particularly Landlord.
I also think that the shared homebrewing origin of many of the NYC brewers at least, has contributed to their desire to brew low-alcohol complex but subtle beers, and to serve those beers in the best way to bring out those subtle complexities – Cuzme would chew your ears off on that angle.
And it can get pretty cool up here, we do not need our beer to be frozen to be palatable.
Why do you think that cask is taking off nationally across the US now? What do you think is spurring the trend?
Jeez, I really hate that word “trend”.
It is nice that cask is having a moment, and even nicer that it appears to be brewer-driven not venue-driven or consumer-driven, because then it may survive being the latest thing and go on to become a more permanent thing.
For the brewers that I talk to, it is all about their desire to brew it and serve it correctly, and for the brewers and bar owners that I talk to, it is all about educating the consumer to appreciate it.
We really need everybody to keep promoting it.
I am trying, in my own lowkey way, to do my bit.
Can you tell me a bit about the New England Real Ale Exhibition and how it compares to GBBF?
It is a hell of a lot closer to start with, but probably not much cheaper, those hotels in Boston cost a fortune for this poor worker drone.
I only ever got to go to the one GBBF before being banished overseas and that was in the Alexandra Palace in 1978, so my recollections were somewhat hazy for several reasons, I guess.
In terms of the size of the venue as compared to NERAX, there really is no comparison; NERAX is run from a hall that is barely the size of a high-school gymnasium – well run mind you.
In terms of the quantity of beers and breweries represented, I would think that they were pretty even; NERAX had about 100 beers at each of the last two instances, with 50 of those coming over from the UK; there can’t have been many more casks at the 1978 GBBF.
In terms of the quality and condition of the beer available, I would say that they are certainly on par with each other; NERAX does an incredible job shipping these volatile products over here in the first place, and then an equally incredible job maintaining the condition of the beers over the four-day period of the event itself. The cellarmanship is amazing.
What is your connection to Jones Wood Foundry and how and why did you start the Cask Whisperer blog?
It is my local, I can walk there from my apartment in about 15 minutes, walk home again in 20 minutes, and have a great time while I am there, regardless of whether it is quiet or crammed; I can be found propping up the bar in there at least once a week during the week (random day of the week), and will sometimes pop in again on the weekend for the footy or rugby.
My son had originally pointed it out to me when I was still doing the long-distance commute from DC to/from NYC, and I would pop in on the occasional weekend when I would be in the neighborhood.
It became my local when I moved back permanently to NYC in 2019, but COVID put a stop to that for a while.
Post-COVID in 2021, Jason initiated a summer-long cask fest of sorts, by contacting local NYC (and beyond) breweries and setting up a weekly scheduled tapping of individual casks to showcase those breweries.
I, of course, was there every Monday (tapping day) for the two/three months that the event ran, and became a good drinking buddy with Jason over that period.
I had noticed that there was a two-week gap towards the end of the event where there were no breweries scheduled, and when I next visited Seneca Lake Brewing (SLB) way upstate NY and one of my favorite places anywhere, I asked them if they were interested in filling one or more of those spots, and when I got back into the city, I asked the beer director at JWF if they were interested in bringing in beer from the boonies, and then I put them in touch with each other.
Long story short, they connected, both weeks were filled with Seneca Lake casks, JWF and SLB started an ongoing long-term relationship, Jason and Bradley Gillett (SLB owner) became good buddies, and folks started referring to me as the Cask Whisperer.
Somewhere down the line, Bradley had also hooked up with several other NYC breweries, I can’t take credit for that, and the next time that he held his cask ale festival upstate (June 2022) we had a sizeable contingent from NYC making the trip up north, with Fifth Hammer, Wild East and Strong Rope all bringing casks and Big Alice just missing out due to an over-exuberant cask, and then Jason and myself making the trip as enthusiastic consumers.
It was at that event that he started nagging me about starting a Cask Whisperer blog.
After a year of nagging, at the subsequent Seneca Lake cask ale festival (May 2023) I finally relented, but I decided to do it primarily to challenge myself.
Writing a blog, or anything really, was way outside my comfort zone, but I wasn’t getting any younger and had a lot of stories to tell, and I had a lot of information to get out to like-minded souls.
I pretty much decided on the format as soon as I had mentally consigned myself to the task:
- There would need to be a weekly post, to be current and useful, and to keep me in practice and keep me committed.
- It would have be in my voice, the stream-of-conscience thing was the only way I was going to be able to write at all at least initially, and to make sure that I was not subject to outside influences, I decided to stop reading all of the other UK-based beer blogs that I had been following for several years – sorry folks.
- Although it was to be hosted on the JWF website, Jason had given me free hand to write about anything that I chose, so I was going to do that.
- It would include a scorecard so that other folks who happened to stumble over it would know what casks were available wherever the Whisperer happened to tread that week, and it would highlight upcoming festivals and other events; somebody had to do it so it might just as well be me.
The original thought was to run the blog weekly for a year, and then either cut it back a little if the workload was too great or I was running out of ideas, or gradually expand the online presence of the Cask Whisperer by opening up my existing but passive Untappd and Instagram (and Pokemon Go avatar?) accounts to provide more timely updates.
We are coming up to a year shortly and I am not running out of content or courage, in fact I have been enjoying this weekly exercise immensely, so the Cask Whisperer will continue in its current form for the immediate future at least.
Expansion will be controlled and contained – I already have a full-time job and I don’t need another one, I should be retired by now …
The blog is a tremendous resource for anyone looking to find cask in the Northeast – are there any resources that you draw on? How do you find out where to find beer on cask?
It is all there online if you have the patience and persistence to search for it.
I used to use Beer Menus when there were enough cask venues in DC and NYC and they updated in a timely manner, but it hasn’t really been useful for the past five years.
Chris O’Leary’s Brew York pages and calendar is very useful for finding local NYC events; cask or otherwise.
Likewise, DCBeer.com has a great events calendar for the DMV area that I used extensively when I lived there.
Untappd would be an awesome resource, if only they implemented a search or filter by dispense method, but for now I only use it after the fact, when researching for my posts.
Instagram has been a great asset so far, often bringing relevant information right to my phone; it does a much better job of feeding me relevant breadcrumbs than Twatter/X ever did.
Do you think cask is here to stay in the US?
I do, but it will need a lot more work from the bar owners.
The brewers are excited to brew classic British styles of beer and to present them in their best light.
The drinkers, and not just the expats, seem to have developed a taste for the beers and their characteristics of gentle carbonation and cool temperature.
The folks who have installed beer engines need to keep up the commitment to maintain those engines and lines correctly, and they and their bar staff need to persistently, accurately, and enthusiastically promote the beer to their customers.
It is not just another me-too fancy gadget to go along with the nitro-taps and lukrs.
It needs to be nurtured.
A lot of folks just gave up post-COVID and we need to win them back.
What are some of your favorite US cask beers, breweries and events?
Favorite NYC breweries; Fifth Hammer, Strong Rope, Wild East, Old Glenham (not NYC but close), Threes and KCBC.
Favorite Northeast/mid-Atlantic breweries; Seneca Lake NY, Woodland Farm NY, Big Alice NY, Nod Hill CT, Bluejacket DC, The Seed NJ, Human Robot PA, Backbeat MA and Forest & Main PA.
Nationally, I have a real soft spot for Sierra Nevada.
Favorite US cask ales or ales on cask; Seneca Lake Beerocracy Bitter, Old Glenham anything, but especially Loom and Ambleside, Fifth Hammer Fugget Nuggle, Strong Rope Pub Ale, Wild East Prudence and Radiance, Threes Tiny Montgomery.
Favorite events; whichever one I went to last, and whichever one is coming up next.
… come on, that wasn’t so bad, was it?
Now, it has come to my attention that there may actually be folks who live in the UK who are members of CAMRA.
I hope that you all enjoyed Ruvani’s article, and I hope that if your travels happen to take you to Texas, or New York, or Connecticut, or DC, that you drop by and visit us and see firsthand what is happening in our cask ale scene.
I do my best to keep an up-to-date venue list and calendar for the greater NYC area, and there are other like-minded souls that provide the same information for New York State and New England, so swing on by and see what we all have to offer here.
It is not just fruity hazy IPAs here anymore (not that there is anything wrong with that), and it is not just Bud and Bud-wannabes (thankfully), we do actually, finally, on a reliable basis, have proper beer in the USA.
We are all pretty friendly as well.
Scorecard w/e 09/17/24
In the past week, The Cask Whisperer has enjoyed the following casks:
- Old Glenham Winders ESB @ Jones Wood Foundry
- Old Glenham Session Bitter @ Jones Wood Foundry
And had a full chewy pour of the Aventinus from Weissbierbrauerie G. Schneider & Sohn, dispensed from a wooden gravity keg at Greenpoint Beer & Ale Oktoberfest kickoff.
Upcoming Cask Events (Festivals and Otherwise)
9/19/24 – 9/21/24: Casks On Park: Fall Edition will be held on Park Street, Beverly MA and will be hosted by Backbeat Brewing and Gentile Brewing, close neighbors who run several of these combined mini cask festivals each year.
10/11/24-10/13/24: 18th Annual Cask Days at Bar Volo, Toronto ON
Yep, I know it is a long way away, but it can be reached by public transportation (well, Amtrak). I was just about to put it into my calendar but a whole bunch of conflicting events came up, so for me, next year.
10/26/24: 9th Annual NYC Cask Fest at Woodland Farm Brewery, Utica NY
Dang, it looks like I am going to miss it this year, I will be down in Virginia for a family event the night before, and it will be a long haul and big ask to go back to NYC via Utica!
11/2/24: 20th Annual Blue Point Cask Ale Festival, Patchogue NY
11/8/24: Two Roads Cask Fest at Area 2, Stratford CT
4/2/25 – 4/5/25: 26th Annual NERAX will be held in Boston MA. Save the dates!
Upcoming Random NYC Casks
- KCBC are planning on having a cask of their oak-aged Marzen at their Zoktoberfest party this Saturday, September 21st.
NYC Cask Venues
Known Operational/Active Beer Engines
- Jones Wood Foundry (x2)
- Fifth Hammer
- Wild East
- The Shakespeare (x3)
- Cask Bar & Kitchen
- Drop-off Service
Occasional Pins (worth a follow on Instagram)
- Strong Rope
- KCBC
- Tørst
- Blind Tiger Ale House
- Threes Brewing
- Brouwerij Lane (They will be starting up their First Friday Firkins again in October)
