The Bar Towel

By the way I have always wondered why there is no cask English ale available in Toronto. Regularly one can find it, in excellent condition frequently, at the Toad in Rochester, NY and DBA's in New York City and elsewhere in the States. My understanding is real ale, until it is tapped, will last in the cask for 2-3 months, so why can it not be shipped over within, say, one month (being conservative as a safety margin)? If kept cool on the trip it should be fine (no pun intended). Or fly it over if that is feasible, all the better. I am all for supporting (and I do) our local real ales but the more the better, and the English cask beers would offer an interesting contrast. Fuller already sells beer here, so why not its cask London Pride or ESB? Sure this would be a special thing and it would cost more but I think it would be of interest to many. At the Real Ale Festival held in Chicago in the last few years English real beers are usually available. It is very interesting to compare them to U.S. micro cask ales. Generally I found the U.S. beers different because of the piny Cascade or Cascade-like hop taste but some were very close to the English beers, e.g. Yard's (Northeast U.S. micro) old ale was stunning.

Gary

I believe that the LCBO are very miserly with granting licenses to agents to bring in casks (or even kegs) from elsewhere.

I suspect that this is justified as protecting industries within the province.

Also, I am not sure that there is the market here to enable imported casks to reliably sell out while still in good condition once tapped.

FYI, there are only two ways to bring in casks...the first through the LCBO and they have 4 keg agents with licences and you are directed to work through one of them...guess what, we contacted them all and none of them will do it. The second way is through the Beer Store and there you have to pay a $5000 listing fee per product. That's it...no other options!!!

I am just curious. Fuller draft beers are already available in Toronto. This would be adding another in the line-up. Is it because of the special handling needed for cask?

Gary

old faithful wrote: My understanding is real ale, until it is tapped, will last in the cask for 2-3 months, so why can it not be shipped over within, say, one month (being conservative as a safety margin)? If kept cool on the trip it should be fine (no pun intended). Or fly it over if that is feasible, all the better.

Even if a keg agent were willing to bring real ale over (see esprit's post), it would probably have to sit in warehouse in London for six months before the LCBO could piggyback the order with something else, and then another six months in the LCBO warehouse (three months for testing and three months for no apparent reason). And, of course, all storage facilities would be at room temperature.

Joe.

I get the picture, that's too bad...

Does this mean imported U.K. keg draft or Guinness is almost a year old when tapped at the bar counter?? I don't generally drink those (well, Guinness sometimes) but lately I have had some very fresh-tasting Stella Artois draft (e.g. at the Duke pub in First Canadian Place). The draft Belgians at beerbistro (e.g. Leffe Brune) have been exemplary. So some of it at least must come in pretty fast.

Gary

Keep in mind that almost all draught beer from macro breweries and many micro's now and certainly the Euro's (because they started it) are pasteurized. Certainly Sleemans, Big Rock and possibly Brick flash pasteurize prior to kegging and I know a number of micro's have looked at it. Like it or not, they believe it allows them to sleep at night.

It is cost prohibitive to air freight the Euro's (except for special events) but look at the time needed to surface to ship it here.

Keg, organize and ship to warehouse - couple of days
Ship to port - hopefully only a couple of days
Load on ship - hopefully it doesn't linger on dock in sun or is temp controlled - couple of days to a week?
Ocean voyage - 1-2 weeks??
Offload - hopefully it doesn't linger on dock in sun or is temp controlled
Ship to Warehouse - hopefully only a couple of days to a week
Fill orders as needed - ???

Best case, a couple of weeks...worst, a couple of months.
Shelf life on pasteurized beer is 3-4 months. Chances are your getting beer within spec.

Cask beer does not and should not fit this profile. Do you buy bread from an Italian bakery??? Why buy beer from Europe? It is a question that has always baffled me...even with pasteurized bottled product. As much as we all want to look experienced, sophisticated and well traveled, the reality is much more a marketing issue than a true balanced perspective on a great product. Ratebeer illustrates this clearly.

Okay, let me have it.

Rob Creighton wrote:Cask beer does not and should not fit this profile. Do you buy bread from an Italian bakery??? Why buy beer from Europe? It is a question that has always baffled me...

Because until the Ontario brewing industry improves, and we all know how it is being retarded by a system that has been in place for a very long time and which completely favours producers of some of the worst beers I have ever tried anywhere in the world, inferior condition British product could potentially offer a range that is simply unavailable from local breweries currently, albeit at likely very high prices - which is not good for selling cask beer before it is rancid. Note how cask beer is significantly cheaper than mass market keg beer in the UK. I do not think that this is by accident.

The US, however, seems like a more sensible place to import a solid range of interesting beers from in bottled, keg and cask conditioned form. It is even weirder that the LCBO is happy to bring in a good range of (looking at this year's Seasonals) quite esoteric Belgian bottled ales and yet we have very little representation of micro-brewed beers from our nearest neighbour.

Nor do I see such a set of imports as being totally disastrous for local breweries. English and American style beers work better when fresh; so it is to be hoped that such imports could potentially grow the Ontario market for local microbreweries to exploit, who have a natural advantage in terms of getting product to market.

Of course it could cause the whole thing to implode.

What are your thoughts?

All these are good points. Cask beer is struggling to establish locally so why bring in the most perishable form of draught beer from far away...? Why even sample foreign draft beers which will have been pasteurised in almost all cases?

I think there is a market for everything, though. Why does the Toad in Rochester persist with it? I think because it creates interest in the draught quality beer segment, it is a reinforcement to their image of an English-type pub and it ties in with a programme of sourcing local real ale, too (e.g. from Middle Ages Brewing, Custom Brewcrafters).

The best draught beer is cask served in the good condition (a big if though). The second-best is filtered and non-pasteurised. I also don't mind flash pasteurisation if it is done right and the beer does not have a cooked flavour as a result. By the way I thought Canadian draught beers even from the large producers, e.g. Canadian draft, Blue draft, etc., were mostly not pasteurised, is that not so?

I too bemoan the lack of American beers at LCBO.

Gary

borderline_alcoholic wrote: It is even weirder that the LCBO is happy to bring in a good range of (looking at this year's Seasonals) quite esoteric Belgian bottled ales and yet we have very little representation of micro-brewed beers from our nearest neighbour.

We have to remember that knowledgable beer drinkers are still a small minority in Ontario. Even when it comes to these seasonal releases, I'm sure that the LCBO still considers Joe Sixpack to be a major consumer of the products. And since the average Canadian beer drinker still thinks that American beer = "crap" while European beer = "quality" (never mind that they are generally comparing Bud to Stella...), it unfortunately makes sense that the LCBO would concentrate on bringing in European beers over American ones.

I'm trying to find Steelback Tango and Red both on cask?? Any help as to finding it???

SteelbackGuy wrote:I'm trying to find Steelback Tango and Red both on cask?? Any help as to finding it???

I don't think steelback does that sort of stuff......

kp

old faithful wrote: I thought Canadian draught beers even from the large producers, e.g. Canadian draft, Blue draft, etc., were mostly not pasteurised, is that not so?
Gary

Flash pasteurization is a far more controlled, precise process than tunnel and is now the standard for draught. There is a lot less chance of getting "cooked" flavours associated with tunnel pasteurizers running amok. It happened in the '80's.

GregClow wrote:We have to remember that knowledgable beer drinkers are still a small minority in Ontario. Even when it comes to these seasonal releases, I'm sure that the LCBO still considers Joe Sixpack to be a major consumer of the products.

Which is why this Spring's Seasonal release is so bizarre. By Belgian standards these beers are very esoteric (which is what I meant before, rather than Belgian beers are esoteric in general), and when you consider that there is not an Earth-shattering general selection of imports in place in retail stores, it is an extremely odd decision on the part of the LCBO IMHO.