Beer nuts

Real ale is warm, flat, and barely available in the US. It's also the object of a virtual religion among its drinkers.

by Chris Wright

"Ah yes," says a slightly portly bespectacled man, his face creased in satisfaction. "This is it."

The it to which he refers is beer, and, despite the lure of a sunny afternoon outside, he and about 50 others have ensconced themselves in the Davis Square VFW Hall to get it.

This scenario might invite some fairly predictable snap judgments (Somerville, veterans, booze). But despite a few telltale orbicular stomachs and gravelly complexions, a quick survey of the room reveals that this isn't your typical sunlight-forsaking, elbows-fused-to-the-bar crowd. For one thing, no self-respecting dive has ever seen so few Heralds tucked under so many arms. But the dead giveaway is the crowd's demeanor, mumbling and milling around, sipping intently, taking notes. As a rule, your average barfly does not turn to his neighbor and say, brandishing a little handbook, "Hmmm, the Old Thumper has a surprisingly high OG."

But this isn't any old beer they're drinking, and these aren't any old beer drinkers. These are real-ale enthusiasts, here to attend the third annual New England Real Ale Exhibition -- NERAX '99, a five-day festival featuring dozens of British and American cask-conditioned ales. Spring weather be damned: when you're presented with the opportunity to get your gums around the likes of a Norfolk Nog, Owd Tup, or Workie Ticket, you seize it.

These might sound a bit like your garden-variety microbrews, but they're not. Real ale is cask-conditioned, meaning it matures in the barrel like a wine or a whiskey. It's flat, it's warm, it's teeming with live organisms -- and it's a very big deal among a very small group of people, a good number of whom live in New England. Though only a handful of breweries in the Boston area make the stuff, the region is home to its own real-ale advocacy group -- CASK, the Cask-conditioned Ale Support Campaign, the only outreach and education program of its kind in the country.

The real-ale buffs here at NERAX take beer seriously. They don't just consume their beer -- they are consumed by it, enthralled by the arcane process whence it came, thrilled by their own sensitivity to subtle changes in the ale's temperature, texture, and flavor. They exchange opinions in newsletters and travel to worldwide exhibitions. Devotees base their devotion on a single, and significant, dogma: this is real ale, implying, of course, that other beers must be somehow less than genuine. They don't view real ale just as a drink, but as a cause -- even a crusade.

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Jonathan Tuttle didn't mean to start a movement. It just sort of came to him. "For years I had been a home brewer," he says, "because I couldn't find a beer I wanted to drink." Then one fateful day he traveled to England, where he tried a pint of a cask-conditioned ale called Fuller's ESB. "It was everything I wanted in a beer," he says, allowing a lyrical note to enter his voice. "It looked right, smelled right, and tasted absolutely brilliant -- with a fringe benefit that it had a little alcohol in it, too." Tuttle was hooked, and 13 years later he helped launch CASK.

Long-haired and abundantly bearded, the head honcho of the New England real-ale movement looks, quite honestly, a bit intimidating -- something between a biker and a rabbi. And he does preside over the NERAX event with the serene authority of a holy man, albeit one you wouldn't want to mess with. In conversation, though, Tuttle turns out to be gentle, thoughtful, and given to wry understatement. For instance, he insists he formed CASK for reasons more selfish than evangelical: "I wanted to be able to find a beer that I wanted to drink, so I thought, 'Well, I'll build a market for it.' "

As well as organizing events such as NERAX (which is co-sponsored by Redbones), CASK, says Tuttle, is intended to "provide expertise to the brewing community, and create a consumer base." How exactly the group will go about this is not quite clear just yet. "We're still formulating, instituting bylaws, tweaking and amending our constitution," he says, "though none of this is as exciting as drinking."

If it succeeds, CASK will not be the world's first real-ale advocacy group, nor anywhere near the largest. In England, the ancestral home of real ale, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) has established itself as one of the most effective consumer campaigns in history. CAMRA was founded in 1971 by a trio of agitated beer lovers who sought to arrest the flood of "cold, tasteless, processed beers" put out by England's "Big Six" breweries.

At the time, the Big Six, which include Bass, Courage, and Whitbread, were snapping up independent breweries by the dozen, buying pubs by the hundred, and stocking the pubs' cellars with their own beers: mass-market British ale, instead of the cask-conditioned products of the dwindling smaller breweries. Real ale became an endangered species, and the chances of saving a brewing tradition that dated back centuries seemed slim to none. It would have taken a visionary, or a fool, to predict the sweep of the campaign's success.

Perhaps only in England could a grassroots beer movement enjoy the kind of clout that CAMRA does today. Among the bills CAMRA has muscled through Parliament are an extension of pub hours, lower duties on beer, and strict enforcement of what constitutes a full pint. CAMRA's crowning achievement, though, is the "guest law," which allows pubs (most of which are owned by Britain's mega-breweries) to serve at least one beer -- commonly a real ale -- that isn't a product of the parent company. CAMRA currently boasts 180 branches and more than 50,000 members. As a result of its work in England, the CAMRA people say, "just about every brewer has to brew real ale to survive."

Where you can get it (and why you'd want to) Cask-conditioned ales are notoriously temperamental -- they go cloudy, they go cold, and they go off after a few days. In short, they are a pain in the neck for bars to serve. Still, a number of bars do take the trouble, and pretty much all of them do it well. A recent tour of local brewpubs and beer bars turned up the following real ales on tap. (Note that some establishments rotate their selections. Call for details.) Back Bay Brewing Company, 755 Boylston Street, Boston, (617) 424-8300. IPA, brewed on site. A nice balance between its fruity, malty flavor and the bitterness of the hops, which lingered in the aftertaste. Big City, 138 Brighton Avenue, Allston, (617) 782-2020. Tremont IPA. Complex flavor in which, ultimately, the hops come out on top. Boston Beer Works, 61 Brookline Avenue, Boston, (617) 536-2337. Red Ale, brewed on site. A bit of a bite to this one, with the hops quickly coming to the forefront. Brew Moon, 50 Church Street, Cambridge, (617) 499-2739. IPA, brewed on site. Served a tad cold for my liking. Not at all sweet, but then again, not that bitter. A good beer for real-ale first timers. British Beer Company, 6 Middle Street, Plymouth, (508) 747-1776. Tremont IPA. Commonwealth Brewing Co., 138 Portland Street, Boston, (617) 523-8383. Stout, Burton Bitter, brewed on site. A far cry from Guinness, the full-bodied stout had a rich, roasted, coffee-like flavor and a thick, chocolatey head. The Burton Bitter had a strong hop presence, intermittently joined by a malty sweetness. Cornwall's, 510 Comm Ave, Boston, (617) 262-3749. Tremont IPA, Tremont Best Bitter. Tremont Bitter captures nicely the competition between hops and malt, with a winning to-and-fro motion between the two flavors. Doyle's, 3484 Washington Street, Jamaica Plain, (617) 524-2345. Tremont IPA, Tremont Best Bitter. Doyle's has been pouring Tremont ales for longer than any other bar, and it shows. The IPA was enough to make my companion cry out, "Oh hoppy day!" John Harvard's Brewhouse, 33 Dunster Street, Cambridge, (617) 868-3585. Scotch Ale, brewed on site. Thick and malty, a nice counterpoint to some of the hoppier ales around town. Felt like food. The Hill Tavern, 228 Cambridge Street, Boston, (617) 742-6192. Tremont IPA, Tremont Bitter. Horseshoe Pub, 291 South Street, Hudson, (978) 568-1265. Tremont IPA. North East Brewing Co., 1314 Comm Ave, Allston, (617) 566-6699. Whiskey Porter, brewed on site. Conditioned in oak whiskey barrels, this sweet and hearty ale has an unusual flavor, supplementing the malt and hops with a whiff of whiskey. Redbones, 55 Chester Street, Somerville, (617) 628-2200. Tremont Best Bitter, Gritty McDuff's Best Brown. The Gritty Brown is thick and rich, slightly sweet, less hop-infused than the equally delicious Best Bitter. Salem Beer Works, 278 Derby Street, Salem, (978) 745-2337. Salem Pale Ale, brewed on site. An American-style pale ale, this one has a citrus hop character and, because it's aged over Jim Beam chips, a slightly bourbony fruitiness. Sunset Grill & Tap, 130 Brighton Avenue, Allston, (617) 245-1331. Tremont IPA, Emerald Isle Bank Street Ale. The Emerald Isle is nice and fruity, the hops eventually overrun by a malty sweetness.

Of course, that's old England. Here in New England, almost no one even knew what real ale was until a few years ago. Even today, CASK has its hands full simply telling people it exists. And Tuttle has no illusions as to the potential clout of his organization. For one thing, there are only 11 full-time members. "I don't expect Congress to come calling," he says.

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In a sense, the American brewing industry has already seen its own grassroots uprising: the growth of microbrewing from a cottage craft to a $3 billion-a-year industry. In 1998, American beer drinkers quaffed 5.6 million barrels of craft beer. According to a survey by the Colorado-based Institute for Brewing Studies, 24 percent of American adults, and 47 percent of beer drinkers, tried a microbrew last year.

Recently, though, the microbrew market has become somewhat saturated, and growth figures for microbrews have plateaued. Abiding by the irresistible laws of the marketplace, many microbreweries have diversified, consolidated, expanded. The age of the mega-micro is firmly upon us. Real-ale production, meanwhile, remains doggedly small. But though real ale represents a mere fraction of the craft-brewing industry -- a "niche within a niche," as Tuttle puts it -- its popularity is very much on the upswing.

In Boston, real ale is produced at seven of the city's brewpubs (see "Where you can Get It," right) and one of its breweries: Atlantic Coast Brewing Company, in Charlestown, which brews cask-conditioned versions of its Tremont Best Bitter, Tremont IPA, and seasonal beers.

Atlantic Coast co-owner Chris Lohring says real-ale sales are enjoying a mini-boom. Easygoing and handsome in an Eric Stoltz kind of way, the 34-year-old Lohring positively purrs about the success of Tremont's cask-conditioned ales as he reclines in a small conference room at his brewery. "For the first four years we had four accounts," he says. "Then last year, out of the blue, we saw a real increase in sales."

Today, you can get Tremont's real ales in seven area bars. And many of those accounts, says Lohring, have doubled their weekly orders from one barrel to two. Relatively speaking, of course, these are piddling figures, and Atlantic's real-ale enterprise boosts its annual profits by roughly zero percent. Nonetheless, a nearly 200 percent increase in production in the space of a few years is not to be sniffed at.

But to talk statistics is to miss the point of the real-ale movement. Its impressiveness has less to do with the numbers of its devotees than with the degree of their devotion, which at times reaches the kind of fervor one usually associates with religious movements.

"Every year I go on a pilgrimage to England to get this stuff," says one enthusiast. "There's nothing like it on earth." Later, the same man refers to a pint of Duck's Breath Bitter as "a little drop of heaven."

Don't laugh.

As Stephen Buhner, author of Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers (Siris Books), puts it, "Human beings have a deeply religious connection with fermentation." Since prehistoric times, he says, cultures all over the world have viewed fermentation as "a gift to humankind from the sacred." By Buhner's reckoning, the over-the-top devotion of modern-day real-ale enthusiasts is merely a historical extension of the benedictions to beer given by Aztec tribes 11,000 years ago. These people aren't kidding when they talk about "tradition."

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It all goes back to how real ale is produced -- which is very, very traditionally. If large-scale brewing is a kind of mass production, and microbrewing is a craft, then brewing real ale can be seen as a sort of alchemy. Or think of it in terms of cheese: if mass-market lager is the American cheese of the beer world, and microbrew is the aged cheddar, then real ale is the gorgonzola.

If any word gets thrown about more by the real-ale community than traditional, it's natural. Unlike a lot of products that lay claim to this word, however, real ale actually lives up to it. In fact, the process may be a little too natural for some. Real ale is, as enthusiasts never tire of telling you, "alive."

More precisely, the yeast within it is alive. Yeast is required to brew all beer, but by the time you drink your average mass-produced beer, or even craft beer, the yeast has been chilled, filtered, and pasteurized into submission. In real ale, it's not. The yeast is alive when the beer is put into the cask, alive when it's trucked to the bar, alive in the cellar, alive in the glass. In fact, right up to the point when a pint of real ale is swallowed, the yeast is still at work, munching away on sugar, generating carbon dioxide and -- more important -- alcohol. For this reason, a cask-conditioned ale evolves as it sits in the basement of the bar -- growing increasingly less sweet, less carbonated, and more alcoholic.

As Lohring says, "The first pint in a barrel is going to be different from the last pint." Jeffrey Charnick, head brewer at the Commonwealth Brewing Company, says with characteristic zeal, "A cask-conditioned ale can surprise you. It's a real thrill."

Real-ale buffs tend to be obsessive about yeast, and have been for as long as real ale has been around. Jeff Biegert, head brewer at Atlantic Coast, says that before people really knew what yeast was, they called it "God is good." He remembers encountering a 19th-century text that envisioned the form yeast might take. "They described the yeast as a little animal with a trunk, which it uses to eat sugar, after which it emits carbon dioxide from enormous genitals." Actually, says Biegert, backed by the dull certainty of science, yeast are "microscopic, unicellular fungi."

If yeast is vital to making beer, it is even more so for a cask-conditioned ale, in which the carbon dioxide produced by the living yeast creates a natural carbonation much milder than the fizz in regular, C02-infused beers. Also, real ale is served at a balmy 55 degrees Fahrenheit -- much higher than regular beer. These factors, plus carefully selected ingredients, make for rich and complex flavors -- thus the predominance of terms like fruity, rounded, and clovian among real-ale drinkers.

It's not that these flavors aren't present in regular beer, says Charnick, it's just that we can't get at them: "They're masked by too much carbon dioxide." Temperature poses the same problems. "You don't serve red wine ice-cold," Charnick explains. "Temperature benefits beer like it benefits wine."

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Even proponents, however, admit that real ale is not for everybody. There are, after all, always going to be people who prefer American cheese to gorgonzola. As a bartender at a local brewpub says, "A lot of people order [cask-conditioned ale] and then they're like, 'Blech!' "

Atlantic Coast's Chris Lohring agrees: "A lot of people are turned off by cask-conditioned beer. It's not carbonated, it's not cold, and there's a lot of flavor in it."

Perhaps the greatest obstacle the fledgling campaign for real ale faces, however, arises from the difficulty of storing and serving the beer.

Anyone who has been to a keg party knows that getting the beer from keg to cup is as easy as pie: attach a rubber hose and start pumping. Serving cask-conditioned ale is absolutely nothing like this. Commonwealth Brewing's Jeffrey Charnick, who served as cellarman (or "beer quality manager") at the NERAX event, explains.

"Generally," he says, "the biggest challenge is that you don't want to let the beer get too cold," which would result in something called "a permanent chill haze." Once in the cellar, the cask must be rolled around on the floor and then placed onto a stillage, where "it has to sit very still and not be disturbed." Once a cask has been set in place, you wait for up to three days for the beer to settle. "Clarity," says Charnick, "is very important." Then you vent the cask by poking a hole in it -- carefully. Overventilation can deplete an ale's carbon dioxide content, and underventilation can leave the beer too fizzy.

Worst-taste scenarios Real ales have a much shorter shelf life than regular beers (between 48 and 72 hours), and so they're much more inclined to spoil. Here are some signs that a beer might not be up to par. Flavor. If a real ale tastes vinegary, has a metallic flavor, or seems excessively sharp or tart, it may have been infected with bacteria. If it has a cardboard flavor, it has probably been oxidized. Odor. In advanced cases, an oxidized beer will have what a local brewer describes as "a wet-dog aroma." If this is the case, he says, "it's time to put your glass down and ask for something else." Carbonation. A real ale should not be as fizzy as a regular beer, but neither should it be completely flat. When you swirl a glass of real ale, you should see a breakout of carbon dioxide. Clarity. In most cases, if a real ale is cloudy, it contains too much unflocculated yeast. This is not a good thing.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, clarity doesn't occur, and you've got a dud barrel on your hands. Even if everything goes well, the cellarman must maintain vigilance. If a cask isn't properly cleaned, the beer can get an "infection," or, as Charnick puts it, "Bacteria can get a foothold and make its presence known." Finally, if a cask of beer has achieved clarity, remains infection-free, and has the perfect amount of carbonation, you can begin serving. If you don't serve the entire cask within its maximum life span of 72 hours, however, it goes bad. If this happens, says Charnick, "You condemn it." In other words, you throw the beer away.

There is a real risk that bartenders will lack the training or motivation to uphold the obsessive care that cask-conditioned beers -- and their drinkers -- demand. "There's a lot of futzing about," says Tuttle. "Some bartenders don't like it because they have to work harder."

Sure enough, on a recent visit to a local beer bar, a bartender pleads utter ignorance of the real ales on tap before fleeing entirely. His replacement is only slightly more helpful, rolling her eyes and sighing with long-suffering patience as she hand-pumps a pint of IPA. But it can get worse than being on the wrong end of a bar employee's funk. "If the cellarman doesn't know how to handle it," says one brewer, "real ale can turn out fairly wretched."

Tremont's Chris Lohring is aware of this risk, and says that he's very careful about whom he allows to serve Tremont real ale. In fact, he says, Tremont sometimes turns potential clients away, and subjects all of its accounts to spot checks.

"You have to understand, this is a living thing being served," Lohring says. "This is not a gimmick. This is a lot of work." He recalls the efforts of Sam Adams to introduce a real ale of its own a couple of years back. "After they got into it, they said, 'Wow, this is a pain in the ass,' and backed off."

Jim DeBoer, production manager at the Boston Beer Company, which brews Sam Adams, acknowledges that the company stopped brewing real ale because it was, well, a pain in the ass. Part of Sam Adams's problem arose from the fact that it wanted to take the product nationwide, which -- real ale being the fussy beverage it is -- created all sorts of logistical nightmares. "There's a lot of attention that has to be paid to it," DeBoer says. "In the UK there are generations of pub owners who know how to care for it. That was something we couldn't create here.

"It's nice to have one when everything has gone right," says DeBoer. "If you should find one in good condition, you should have more than one." Nevertheless, because of all the headaches involved, "we decided to stop making the beer."

But "we love real ale far too much to quit," says Lohring. "This has to be a labor of love."

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They don't get much more amorous than Garrett T. Oliver, real-ale raconteur and brewmaster for the Brooklyn Brewery, in New York City. At the NERAX festival, the dapper Oliver leads a real-ale tasting, talking in great detail and at great length about such topics as American real ale's greater "effusiveness" than English. The crowd responds with nodding heads and grunts of accordance.

Oliver is not the only real-ale buff to venture into the rhetorical territory of the oenophile. Many of those at the NERAX festival display a kind of studied sophistication more suited to a wine tasting than a beer bash. They swoosh and swish the beer around their mouths, they sniff and scrutinize. They throw about terms such as aggressive, bready, and crunchy. Beers are praised for the "structure of the roast," their "orange marmalade character," and "exaggerated biscuit presence." One man, gazing intently into the depths of a Gritty McDuff's, speaks of "the evolution of the palate."

For Jonathan Tuttle, that's what the NERAX festival is all about. "People were smelling and tasting the beer," he says. "Not just hammering it back."

True. But for all their evaluating and annotating, appreciating and pontificating, many attendees of the festival did, as the event wore on, get a little sozzled. And that was half the fun.

There's an old English song -- wildly popular in the darkest days of World War II -- that begins: "Roll out the barrel/We'll have a barrel of fun." And that's not a barrel of lemonade they're talking about. In this sense, says Stephen Buhner, alcohol serves a vital human function. Booze doesn't offer us release just from our daily tribulations, but from the human condition. Fermented beverages, he says without a hint of irony, "allow us to forget our mortality."

In addition to acting as an existential anesthetic, beer can help us reach a heightened form of consciousness, Buhner believes. "When human beings began to use fermentation," he says, "it changed the ways their brains functioned, allowed them for the first time to create art and poetry."

Works for me. At least it did on a recent sunny afternoon when -- immersed in "research" for this story, a little the worse for wear -- I swallowed the last sip of my Best Bitter, screwed up my face in satisfaction, and began to reflect on Buhner's theories. Suddenly, a thought presented itself to me: beer is nature's cure for itself.

Then, spellbound by the poetry of it all, I went to get another pint.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.