Cask Lager

There have been a lot of these. Schiehallion comes to mind, Oldershaw Regal Blonde has been round for years and is routinely purchases in these parts for beer festivals where it sells well.
No reason why lagers should be highly carbonated; that's a recent thing really connected with pseudo Pils.

 

Never had a decent cask lager. But I have a funny feeling there could be a good one coming at any minute.

 

Serving lager at cellar temperature ??? Please forgive me if I don't see it ever working...

 

Works very well.When it's on at festivals it goes very quickly.Often, as at many festivals, even warmer than cellar temp! One of the pubs in my village held a small festival and sold 5 firkins of Regal Blonde.Cask lagers went pretty well too at the Melton festival last time I was there.

 

This shoddy practice is rife in the UK. Warm fermentation, no 'lagering' involved. It's a piss-poor attempt at turning lager drinkers which is never going to work.

 

You'd be surprised (or maybe not) how warm many mass-market lager brands are fermented.

 

Worth a shot I reckon, served at a nice cool temperature it would be quite nice. Having them less fizzy would probably make them more thirst quenching too.

 

But wouldn't it pour out flat? It needs gas for the end product served to resemble and taste anything like a normal lager...cask should stick to ale only.

 

I'm not sure about this - I highly doubt that the original German lagers were force carbonated. High carbonation in many lagers is probably a modern feature of the (mass-produced) style, rather than a definitive requirement.

A lager is a beer is that it is fermented with bottom-fermenting yeast at a cool temperature and matured for a good length of time. I can't see how the method of dispense would detract from a quality product. I suspect that a cask lager could be good provided that the brewer knows what they're doing and does it properly.

(I agree with the comments above about maturation temp/time, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that big brewers cut corners - that's why their products taste like shit as soon as they get warmer than freezing).

 

Exactly, I don't really see why not being fizzy like a soft drink is a problem here.

One thing is that Brains are a quite a large brewery so Scoop is probably right saying it's mostly an attempt to attract lager loving people in to the company.

 

Actually there are some top fermented lagers.Kolsch is legally described as "obergäriges Lagerbier" as it has been -guess what-lagered.Division of beer between ales and lagers on the basis of fermentation is a recent aberration.

 

You are correct. All you need to do is go to Franconia and drink some Kellerbier served by gravity from the wooden barrel to see what a low-carbonated lager tastes like -- in a word: delicious. A good starting point would be Mahr's in Bamberg with their Ungespundetes Lagerbier; it's lagered in unbunged vessels, which lets much of the CO2 escape, then generously hopped. I think Ron Pattinson considered calling it "Real Lager" to draw a comparison to Real Ale.

 

Bayerischer Anstich is a bit of a mouthful to most native English speaker. I wouldn't call it Real Lager because I never use the term Real Ale, preferring cask-conditioned or cask. Cask Lager is probably what I called it, though obviously I'm aware that it isn't the same thing as British cask-conditioned beer. Lovely stuff, nonetheless.

 

Good stuff indeed. Was referring to your post about Augustiner where you considered the term but settled on something else.

 

I saw it alot but it was always a case of something else catching my eye which i wanted more. Same with Tiny Rebel actually, though I ordered the lot of those (the not available in shops ones) the other day.

 

Apparantly one of the next projects of the Brains craft brewery is a beer containing chocolate and coconut

 

I suspect they're trying to copy maui coconut porter, or the head brewer likes bounties.

Apparantly the cask lager is quite nice, but the person who told me that said it tasted nothing like a "larger". I'm suspecting more and more that my uni's real ale society is just hobgoblin style anything but bitter bashers. There were a depressing number of people saying Hobgoblin was their choice if they only had one beer to drink for the rest f their lives.