The 14th Annual San Diego Real Ale Festival kicked off Friday at Pizza Port Carlsbad with 49 beers on cask. For an extra $10 you could attend the VIP session where eight more beers were on until 4pm when general admission was allowed to enter. The festival went on a second day with a twelve hour session giving one plenty of time to go through eight 4 oz. tasters with additional tasters available for purchase for $1.
What is real ale? Well, it’s the traditional English way of packaging and serving beer. The beer inside the firkin (the common size of a cask holding 72 pints of beer) is alive, with the yeast remaining in the beer to produce just enough carbonation to cleanse the palate. This unfiltered ale (although the festival did have on lager) is drawn from firkin via a hand-pumped beer engine that produces a very soft and creamy head on the beer. Serving the beer at cellar temperatures (typically around 45 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit), was as cold as you could get in pre-refrigeration era England but it also happens to be the best temperature (or even warmer for big stouts) to drink an ale. The serving process introduces oxygen to the beer and thus decreases the lifespan of cask ale but the results are a fantastic way to drink beer in its most natural form.
A majority of the breweries represented at the festival are local to San Diego (Stone, AleSmith, Coronado, Ballast Point, Alpine, Green Flash, Port/Lost Abbey, etc.) and the west coast (Deschutes, Lagunitas, Sierra Nevada, Firestone Walker, The Bruery, etc) with the biggest surprise being Three Floyds, hailing all the way from Indiana. The VIP beer list included AleSmith’s Old Numbskull, Alpine’s Odin’s Raven, Ballast Point’s Tongue Buckler, Firestone Walker Double Jack, Green Flash Le Freak, Pizza Port Carlsbad’s own Bourbon Barrel Night Rider, Port Brewing’s 100% bourbon barrel aged Older Viscosity and Three Floyds’ Zombie Dust. Dry hopping (adding hops directly to the cask) was used by some of the breweries while Ballast Point took that method even further by actually putting peppers into their firkin of Habanero Sculpin IPA.
A big thanks to organizers Jeff Bagby and Tom Nickel for continuing the yearly festival and for allowing San Diegans to drink American beers served in the traditional, “real” English way – unfiltered and naturally carbonated.
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