For a pint of cask-conditioned ale, arguably among the oldest and purest formats for serving beer, just one option exists in this city, and on any given day, it is likely the sole place in the region that brews and pours them under the strictest standards. Unfortunately, Marchelhills, Fitchburg's only British brewer, will never open to the public, because it isn’t a commercial brewery. It is a private residence.
The head brewer and homeowner, Tony Mitchelhill, a British transplant, has spent the better part of his 20 years in the U.S. championing what the Brits call “real ale.” This long love affair with cask ale pervades his life, so much so that he built a pub in his basement along with a cellar for storing casks and the beer engines for pumping the ale into his glass. Cask ale first enamored him in 1978 at the tender age of 18; he had a taste at the Victoria Hotel in his hometown of Lytham St Annes, a coastal resort town in North West England. And 44 years later it remains his preferred method for enjoying a pint.
“If everything is on target, and a pub is taking good care of its beer and has good equipment, what’s coming out of the beer engine into your glass, handed straight to you, is in the best, optimal place it can ever be — condition, carbonation, temperature; everything is there.”
Cask ale has been called the lifeblood of the British beer industry for at least a century, but has never taken off in the U.S. As a member of the New England Real Ale eXhibition, or NERAX, Mitchelhill and the others in the group’s working party seek to move cask ale from the niche to the mainstream, through an annual festival showcasing ale brewed both in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and by promoting the bars and breweries offering cask. I met him last week at Thirsty Robot Brewing Co. here off Summer Street for a beer. He arrived by bicycle, his home not far from Thirsty Robot, parking it at the bike rack he donated to the brewery.
Mitchelhill is a cask aficionado. An engineer in the television and radio industry by day, he studied brewing in England. While living in Yakima, Washington, he designed and built a cellar for storing and serving cask ales at the Beer Shoppe, a beloved former store and gathering spot for Washington State beer lovers. Bespectacled and wearing a plaid button-up tucked into his trousers, he looked and sounded professorial as he spent the next hour giving me an education on cask ale. He started with this: Cask ale, not itself a style of beer, is defined by the way you serve it.
Mitchelhill and NERAX have the unenviable task of winning over the typical American craft beer drinker to a form of ale diametrically opposed to the trends and tastes influencing their palates today. For one, cask ale is served warmer than we’re used to and has less carbonation. Moreover, breweries preparing ales for casks avoid overloading them with adjuncts, various hops or outrageous ingredients. Double dry-hopped triple IPAs don’t lend themselves to this format. Rather, cask ales are perfectly balanced and come in lighter styles, such as the deceptively complex mild or bitter.
“One of the beauties of cask ale is you can brew a well-balanced beer at a very low alcohol strength that will have tremendous flavor and body,” Mitchelhill said, noting the ales can range from 3% ABV to a little over 4% ABV. “I always liken a cask to a favorite pair of winter gloves that just fit you perfectly.”
Most breweries in the U.S. invest much of their time and money on producing shelf-stable beer, canned or kegged, ready for sale immediately at the bar or bottle shop and capable of sitting untouched for months in relatively good condition. Cask ales, on the other hand, leave the brewery practically unfinished, still fermenting. From there, the brewer relies on the pub owner to care for the ale. Thus, we arrive at one of the other primary challenges for NERAX: Bars and breweries in the U.S. don’t seem keen on providing the level of care cask ales require, Mitchelhill said.
“Everything has to be predicted days ahead with cask ale. It’s a constant looking ahead,” he explained. “You have to be so dedicated and understand what’s coming in. You’re dealing with a living, perishable product. It’s like cheese made from unpasteurized milk. Whereas there’s a developed culture and an industry and there are true qualifications in Britain around cask ale, that maturity of what’s needed to handle it correctly doesn’t exist in the USA. It’s been up to a few impassioned individuals.”
Casks come in different sizes, from a pin (5.8 gallons) to a firkin (10.8 gallons) to a kilderkin (21.6 gallons); traditional casks were wooden vessels, but now most are stainless steel or food grade plastic. Once the cask arrives at the pub, the cellarman lifts it up sideways onto a stillage, where it stays undisturbed in the cellar, kept at between 50 and 55 degrees, for at least a day. It’s then vented from the top, which Mitchelhill told me can result in anywhere from a dribble of foam to “Mount Vesuvius.”
The cask is tapped and is left alone again to mature for another few days until it hits a sweet spot, during which it develops its carbonation, or condition, and is ready for the pub to serve through the hand-pump, or beer engine. Watching cask ale flow through the swan-neck nozzle of a beer engine is transfixing: Four ups to fill a British pint (20 ounces), with the ale flowing out with a thick, creamy head of foam that rises from the bottom of the glass. Casks are fleeting, lasting only about three or four days at the pub.
“Sometimes you’ll find a beer that’s been on for three days, that just hits this magical point. It’s very variable. It changes character from day to day,” Mitchelhill said.
Active for 26 years, NERAX has been exposing more beer drinkers to cask ale at the state’s most under-the-radar festival. Although well-attended, the Real Ale Festival, held in South Boston, doesn’t typically draw the same fanfare or media coverage as larger beer fests run by the Massachusetts Brewers Guild. Still, Mitchelhill said, NERAX treats the tradition of cask-conditioned ale with as much reverence as similar events in Britain.
In 2019, the last year NERAX put on the festival, British brewers sent over 50 casks of ale, which were paired with the same number of casks from American breweries. NERAX plans to bring the festival back next year after a two-year hiatus, Mitchelhill said, and expects to finalize the details in November.
NERAX works with the Campaign for Real Ale, or CAMRA, in England to gather the casks. CAMRA has been fighting to preserve cask ale in Britain since 1971, a largely successful campaign, even as cask ales have declined slightly in the UK recently, struggling to capture the hearts of younger beer drinkers.
CAMRA, though, has some 160,000 members, decades of history and laws protecting the integrity of cask ales to pull from. NERAX has between 20 and 30 members and no rich tradition to lean on. And too often in the U.S., beer drinkers are exposed to poor quality cask ale.
“Unfortunately, with cask-conditioned ale, if it’s done badly, you can get a pint of the worst flat, horrible, warm vinegary tasting rubbish,” Mitchelhill said. “Then you turn someone off forever.” It’s doesn’t mean Mitchelhill is giving up the fight. He’s just tempering his expectations for how far cask ales can go here. Anyway, he needs to keep the ales flowing for his sake.
“To my palate, they really are the only beers that hit the spot. Quite often, I will drink keg beer. If it’s really cold and fizzy, I’ll let it warm up a bit at least,” he said. “I’m afraid the trend in the USA that leads to very extreme interpretations of IPAS are not something I’m comfortable with. I do not personally like them. I can’t deal with them quite frankly. Sometimes if I’m at a place and I see IPA after IPA, I’ll settle for a Guinness. At least it’s consistent.”