The Bar Towel

For those of you who are into ratebeer (I am not), I came across something at Volo on Saturday afternoon that I had never had, or seen, previously - cask conditioned F&M Stonehammer Dark Ale. Don't know if this is new or if it is old news to ratebeerians. Anyway, it was pleasantly malty, and more-ish. This style isn't my personal favourite, but it was well balanced and a nice pint. I always love to try something new on cask.

Rate Beer doesn't have seperate entries for cask conditioned versions of beers that are also available in regular kegs/bottles. We generally just mention in the tasting notes if we are rating a cask version.

I'd still be interested to try this, though. I had the regular version for the first time at the C'est What festival the other night and didn't care for it, so I'm curious to see if the cask conditioning would improve my opinion.

For those with an interest (and I see no reason why this merely applies to rate beer fanatics), Volo also currently have cask conditioned Headstrong Pale Ale on sale, which I think is very unlikely to have been available anywhere else in Ontario before.

The F&M Dark has been on for a number of days now, so if you do want to try it, you should probably move very quickly indeed (by which I mean try it tomorrow or likely miss it entirely).

midlife crisis wrote:For those of you who are into ratebeer (I am not), I came across something at Volo on Saturday afternoon that I had never had, or seen, previously - cask conditioned F&M Stonehammer Dark Ale. Don't know if this is new or if it is old news to ratebeerians. Anyway, it was pleasantly malty, and more-ish. This style isn't my personal favourite, but it was well balanced and a nice pint. I always love to try something new on cask.

Ratebeerians in general I don't know, but Hamiltonians have had this beer on cask for many, many years now, at least as far back as 1999.

Have you really? I know the Maclean's Pale has been around, cask conditioned, for many years, but I had never even heard of Stonehammer Dark Ale (as opposed to Stonehammer Pilsner) until about six months ago, let alone cask conditioned. Wish I had known! I presume the outlet has been the Judge.