Our normal procedure for keg beers involves bunging the fermentor 4-5 points (specific gravity) before terminal gravity and then chilling for two days before transfer to cold conditioning. When casking we would simply draw off and dry hop the required number of kegs just before bunging. The advantage was ease; we could rack from any fermentor at the proper stage of fermentation and not bother about it again. The disadvantages were that a great deal of yeast remained in suspension, not all of which could be drawn off after settling. As a result, flavor consistency was a problem.

Thus began our experiments with priming warm finished beer, beginning with dried malt, moving on to gyle (unfermented wort), and finally settling on a sort of krusening method of adding ~1 L of actively fermenting beer (specific gravity = 1.040) per quarter-barrel of beer at terminal gravity. We have found that with seven days of undisturbed warm conditioning (our yeast is most comfortable in all active stages at 70 degrees F), this amount and method of priming yields a beer with something like the fine, soft condition to which we aspired.

A word should also be said about dry hopping, a technique very often practiced with a less than even hand. When beer is packaged for immediate sale, even an enormous handful of hops stuffed into a bag and attached to the bung (we use both Hoff-Stevens and Golden Gate kegs) will impart a very pleasant grassy or floral aroma to the beer. When a week or more of conditioning is added to the life cycle of the beer, however, that large handful has developed a tinny or oxidized tang, especially when a fragile hop such as East Kent Goldings is used. It is therefore advisable to go easy -- we use 1/6 oz hops/quarter barrel of beer for our pale ale, a small amount that wears well over time.

Hardware and dispensing are obvious points of departure from the traditional English standard, and while we at Pike Place have had very good success casking and serving firkins procured from a Canadian brewery, we have until recently been confined by law to the containers recognized for sale in the State of Washington. Also, in the United States professional brewers are at the mercy of the publican's treatment of the beer once it has reached his or her establishment. Whereas in England a cellarman can be counted upon to monitor the beer as it conditions and goes on sale, America is the land of cold storage and high-pressure carbon dioxide delivery systems. For this reason we mature our cask beers in the brewery, monitor their sediment and condition ourselves, and deliver them as carefully as possible to the establishments that serve them.

In the Puget Sound area we are fortunate to have a number of publicans whose hearts are in the right place where cask ales are concerned and who will make the effort to treat them properly. This can involve beer engines or gravity serving, keeping the beer cool overnight, and having the confidence to allow air -- anathema under other circumstances -- to enter the keg to work the finely balanced wonders with which drinkers of true cask-conditioned ales are happily familiar.

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