First Gravity Cask Tapping

We’ll be tapping our first gravity cask this weekend in our tasting room. The cask came to us from Germany and originally contained Franconian lager. Its volume is 20L (5.3 gallons). We filled it with Wytchmaker Rye IPA and dry hopped the cask with whole leaf Centennial hops.





A gravity cask is another way we can serve naturally carbonated beer in addition to bottles and firkins. As we’ve mentioned before in our blog posts, we’re huge fans here at Jester King of beer that’s unfiltered, unpasteurized and bottle/cask conditioned. We feel strongly that there’s a complexity and depth of flavor in our beers that comes from re-fermenting the beer in its serving vessel with a dose of fresh yeast, as opposed to force carbonating the beer by infusing CO2 into solution like it’s a soda pop. It’s an old world method of finishing beer that’s far less common in the brewing world today given the ease, efficiency and rapid turnaround time of force carbonation. But we love what bottle/cask conditioning does to the flavor of the finished beer, so we’re aspiring to brew as much bottle/cask conditioned beer as we can with the ultimate goal of only producing beer this way.


We’ll be tapping the cask at 1:15pm on Saturday (9/17/11). Hope to see you!

– Jeff