Franconian Beer Message Board

On draught/draft vs on tap, vom Fass vs vom Holzfass vs bay. Anstich
Posted by DonS on 2011-11-25 11:09:39
No, that's not the nature of the (perceived) problem. Many American "craft" brewers don't bother with much filtration at all, and you get either a moderately cloudy beer on CO2, or a murky beer on cask. The murky cask beer is usually because it got stirred up or was delivered too recently, no time to let it settle at least a little bit, so a lot is in suspension, and it's being poured on gravity too. Cellar management is mostly non-existent in the USA for the simple reason that most places don't have cellars for storing cask beers. Besides that, cask is an ultra-tiny minority share of beer poured in the USA, even in areas where "craft" brewers enjoy relatively high shares of the overall market (Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Denver, San Diego). In Seattle, "craft" beer has about 25% market share overall; within the "craft" segment, cask ale is maybe 5% of that at best. That means maybe 1% or so of all beer in Seattle is cask. Other regions of the USA have even less, and in some parts, in just plain doesn't exist. For those blighted places, matters of cask vs keg or Germanic/Bavarian/Franconian equivalents are moot.