(Un)real Ale: Cask Conditioning at Home

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of Zymurgy Magazine

By Dave Carpenter

What is Real Ale?

The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) is a UK-based organization that champions cask-conditioned ale and, through its Good Beer Guide, endorses pubs that serve it. CAMRA coined the term real ale in the early 1970s to differentiate traditional British pints from the force-carbonated, pressure-dispensed pale lagers that now enjoy worldwide ubiquity. CAMRA and the Oxford English Dictionary define real ale as:

A name for draught (or bottled) beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.

Now, definitions are helpful, but they can be misleading. By the definition above, a bottle-conditioned saison qualifies. But I’m not talking about saison…