Kai Adams has developed a pretty reliable and effective formula for this series, and it seems to be working. The house has been packed every time I attended. Sebago simply chocks up five Pins (about 5 gallons) behind the bar and serves with a gravity tap in each. They put one of their own beers on the hand pump. With about 30 gallons of beer in play the beer generally sells out in the one night, so spoilage is not a problem.

The concept is to run a Cask Night every month, on the night of the full moon. That’s easy enough to remember!

January’s event featured New Hampshire brewers. The lineup included an IPA from Smuttynose (6.9%) and another from Portsmouth Brewing (6.5%), a stout from Red Hook 5.6%), a German Rauchfest from Moat Mountain (6.2%), and from Sebago the Full Throttle Double IPA (8.2%)and the Runabout Red Ale (5.0%).

All the beers were in great shape and showed well, with just a bit of cloudiness here and there. My favorite was the Bottle Rocket IPA from Portsmouth, a real treat in the cask version.

Watch for Cask at Sebago!

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Cask Ale At Sebago Brewing

Our opening last night was a great success, with attendance up 50% over the same night last year. More important, the beers are terrific – just two of the 30 cask ales on the stillage needed another day to settle, and we expect them to be ready today.

We have fifteen British beers presenting the range of traditional cask ale styles, and we have fifteen American interpretations of the same styles. Comparisons are fascinating. One cool trend to watch is the way British brewers are picking up American hopping styles and adapting them to their own beers.

I’ll get back tomorrow with some tasting notes…

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NERAX North Is In Full Swing

Weather of course will play a part this weekend, but everything looks great for the festival.  Part of my job is to worry about what might go wrong, but to be honest I’m down to worrying about details. HAH, this could be famous last words…

We have no idea how popular this event will be. We know the cask ales will be great, but how will Portland respond?  We’ll see. Novare Res is ready…

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NERAX at Novare Res Update

This is the first NERAX festival in Maine, and quite possibly the first cask  ale festival ever in Maine. We will have 30 cask ales, 10 British, 10 German, and 10 American. Well, maybe a few more American…

We’ve been a long time putting this together, not without challenges, but we think this will be a spectacular experience and perhaps the beginning of a long term relationship between cask ale and beer lovers in Maine. Sorry for the pomposity, but we’re really excited about this event.

Novare Res opens at 3:00pm on Friday. Entry is $10 which buys a festival pint glass and your first pint.

The bounty of cask ale doesn’t end there. Sebago Brewing is launching a cask program at their Portland pub on November 2. They plan to offer 5 cask ales. Their intent is to offer cask ale on an ongoing basis at their pubs. This is good news indeed!

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Cask Ale In Portland

Yesterday, Saturday night, October 17 was the time to be in Belfast, Maine. On offer was the second annual Marshall Wharf Beer and Pemaquid Mussel Festival. They served Mussels prepared four different ways, Morse’s of Maine’s sausage and sauerkraut, and 22 Marshall Wharf beers on tap. It might get different, but it can’t get better.

Of special interest were the three bourbon barrel aged beers…  MacFindlay Scotch, Old #55, and Cant Dog IPA. In my opinion these beers saw too much whisky barrel, and the beer characteristics faded from the picture. This was a first try, and I have no doubt the next will be well worth considering.

The regular range of Marshall Wharf beers was superb as always. It’s very special, but also very dangerous, to be able to enjoy all of them in the same night. It was fun to taste 40 Cream Ale again, but the old favorites were spectacular as always.

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Marshall Wharf Mussel Fest

The Master Brewers Association of the Americas (MBAA) held their national Craft Brewers Conference in Boston during the last week in April. On Thursday evening, April 23, Harpoon Brewery hosted a cask ale night open only to conference attendees and guests. This was organized by the District New England chapter of MBAA and was staffed by folks from NERAX.

The Craft Brewers Conference is a meeting of brewers from across America. The objectives of Cask Night were to promote cask ale, and to give New England brewers a chance to strut their stuff. Using the NERAX festival equipment, the District New England offered 62 cask ales from brewers in every state of New England.

The beers were superb, in great shape, and the event was an enormous success. Many attending brewers had never seen so many cask ales in one place, and there was a lot of photographing of the bar and stillage. We ended up serving about 1200 brewers and guests from across the country. It was a triumph for New England brewers!

The NERAX guys were pleased with how easily this event went together, and then how easily it broke down. The event was in the (big) tent Harpoon uses for events, in their parking lot.  Set-up of the beers took about four hours. We’re getting better at set-up, but our equipment is also getting better after years of investment and volunteer work to construct lines and related gear. The cooling system now goes together quickly and requires a lot less de-bugging. Breakdown the morning after took about two hours, a new record. Put that down to having a lot of volunteer labor on hand.

Tending bar at this event was easy.  Everything was free, so there was no money to handle.  At that price no-one was too fussed about exact measures,  so pouring was easy.  We moved a lot of beer very fast!

Maine was very well represented by Sebago Brewing, Gritty’s Portland and Freeport, Allagash, Shipyard and Kennebunk Brewing.  Maine beers remain something we can be proud of in any gathering or context.

My favorite of the night was an IPA from Cambridge House Brewpub in Torrington, Ct.  Who are these guys, anyway?

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Cask Ale At The Craft Brewers’ Conference

We’re presenting a plaque to Redbones commemorating the first NERAX festival, held in Redbones on June 28, 1997. Redbones is offering free appetizers to all comers. We are offering two free pints to all volunteers at NERAX 2009. This should be a fun event.

Redbones will have two cask ales on offer: Spring Training IPA from CBC, and Golden Ale from Mayflower Brewing. Of course their legendary beer list will also be available.

NERAX opens on Wednesday night. Our real work begins Monday morning, when we set up the scaffolding to support the casks, and begin taking delivery of beer. Monday evening will be a fun break.

Unfortunately, I may not be there. It looks like I and a colleague may need to travel to NJ on Monday to collect some British firkins. Perhaps we’ll return in time.

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NERAX Night At Redbones

In an article in Brewing Techniques magazine Randy Mosher said this about parti-gyle brewing:

“One technique that has almost disappeared from modern practice is parti-gyle brewing. This technique involved drawing off the first part of the mash and using it to make strong ale or barley wine, then remashing the grain and drawing off the second runnings for a more ordinary, weak and watery concoction called small beer, the light beer of its day.

The fabrication possibilities of the time made it relatively easy to construct large wooden mash tuns, but the technology required to construct equally large kettles had yet to be developed. Consequently, English ale breweries often made three brews from a single mash – strong (XXX), common (XX) and small (X) beer. In fact, this is the historical basis of the categories of Belgian Trappist beers: triple was made from the undiluted wort from the mash, double was made from the runoff from reflooding the first mash, and single was made from a subsequent infusion.”

The first of our beers is from the John Harvard brewpub in Connecticut, and the second is from our very own Marshall Wharf Brewing Company in Belfast.

The folks at Marshall Wharf initially set out to make a Barley Wine. That beer reportedly finished off in the 12% range. We’re not getting that beer at NERAX, but I’m sure looking forward to trying it somewhere here in Maine. The small beer, Little Toot, was a natural part of the Barley Wine project. It’s not finished yet, but it seems to be headed for a range of 4.1%-4.5%  This one on cask should be a lot of fun.

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Small Beers at NERAX

I’ve already reported on the brouhaha regarding Greene King, the growing regional brewer in the UK. They seem to have a business plan calling for acquiring cherished breweries and closing them, absorbing the production in their larger facilities.

We’ve been offered the opportunity to acquire Greene King beers for NERAX 2009

The NERAX working party was of a mixed mind in this regard. The CAMRA traditionalists opposed the inclusion of Greene King. The majority concluded that NERAX is a beer venture, not a political entity. CAMRA in the UK is a political advocacy organization; here in the US NERAX is strictly about the beer.

So we expect to have Greene King IPA and Old Speckeled Hen at the festival. I personally favored including the beers. NERAX is too small to play politics; we’re about the beer. Still, not an easy call.

On a more practical note, I had a pint of the cask version of Old Speckled Hen in Boston at Bukowski Boston last Friday. Bukowski Boston continues to be a fabulous source of cask ale in the Boston area, more power to them. They are a reliable source of cask ale in Boston, and more power to them!

Alas, the pint of Speckeled Hen I had was a bit tired. Nothing dramatically wrong with it, pleasant really, but tired nonetheless. It still was better than the alternatives.

Well, come on down to NERAX and test politics vs beer. I’ve enjoyed some pretty acceptable pints of Greene King Cask IPA. Some of my colleagues would disagree. Come see what you think.

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Beer, Politics, Or Both?

As one of the people who help run the NERAX cask ale festival in Boston, I enjoy the opportunity to learn at the Manchester festival. Manchester seems to attract experienced festival managers from across the UK. Most of the volunteers I met either run a local festival or have a significant position running the Great British Beer Festival in London in August. The opportunity to talk about running festivals is unique, and I inevitably return with new ideas and insights.

There’s far more benefit than just the intricacies of festival management. In my experience volunteering at a festival offers an intensity and breadth of interaction with beer culture that is unavailable in any other way. Just attending a festival offers a unique chance to sample an incredible variety of beers side by side. A volunteer however has a much richer experience.

I particularly like working at the trade session of the festival, wherein brewers and industry people gather. Nowhere else do I get to chat with so many industry people at one time. Putting my NERAX hat on, it’s a great place to recruit speakers and source beer for our festival.

Interacting with fellow volunteers is equally enjoyable. Taken as a group these people know beer as well as any collection of individuals in the world. This is a terrific place to talk about beer! Add in the experience of setting up the beer, caring for it, maintaining cooling systems, and organizing service at the bar, and you begin to see the attractions for a beer lover.

There is another compelling reason for volunteering: without volunteers these beer festivals simply would not exist.

If any of this sounds attractive, we always are looking for new volunteers at NERAX. The festival runs 25 March through 28 March, and we set up Mon and Tues, the 23rd and 24th. You can volunteer for setup, one session, or multiple sessions. We have jobs of every description and skills level; all are welcome. For every session you work you get free admission to another session, a couple of pints of beer, and a Redbones sandwich.

You can sign up at our website, www.NERAX.org

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Why Volunteer at a Beer Festival?