Great Lakes Brewing News Archive

Syracuse Brewer Keeps Focus on Real Ale

Originally Published: 10/97

By Don Cazentre

Marc Rubenstein believes in real ale.

Unfiltered. Unpasteurized. The yeast still working its magic, converting malt sugars to alcohol, yielding a smooth, natural carbonation.

Beer the way it oughtta be.

Why else would the co-owner and head brewer at Syracuse's Middle Ages Brewing Co. work so hard to produce a beer that uninformed beer drinker might call "warm and flat?"

"I think it's beer in its best form," Rubenstein said. "It's fuller in body, fuller in flavor, especially if it's consumed at its correct temperature."

And Rubenstein is a stickler for the correct temperature. He is, in fact, a stickler for all that's "real" in real ale.

"If you're going to serve real, cask-conditioned ale, why do it halfway?" Rubenstein said. "It can be a pain in the neck for a brewer.

But if you're not going to do it right, what's the point."

Real Ale Fest

That's the attitude Ray Daniels like hear. Daniels is the organizer of the Craft Beer Institute's 1997 Real Ale Festival. The Fest will be in Chicago Nov. 7-9, at the Riverwest Brewing Co., 925 West Chicago Ave.

Daniels, president of the Craft Beer Institute, expects real ale from about 30 breweries and brewpubs to enter the festival. He estimates that represents about half the number of real ale producers in the United States.

What makes Middle Ages unusual, in Daniels' view, is that most real ale producers are brewpubs.

"It's much more challenging for a microbrewer to try it than a brewpub," Daniels said. "A brewpub has complete control from the gleam in the brewer's eye to the temperature of the beer in the drinker's hand."

A microbrewer like Marc Rubenstein, however, needs to rely on the cellarmanship of the barkeeper who sells his beer.

Still, Daniels said, interest in producing real ale is growing. "There's been a tremendous boom," he said. "It's driven by two things. It's a romantic way to produce beer, the English way. Americans have a tendency to gravitate to European traditions, and this is one that had not been explored.

"Also, everyone is looking for a point of differentiation. Something that makes their beer different."

But what about that issue of proper cellarmanship? After all, in real ale, freshness counts.

It's best when produced by a local brewer. The best real ale in the world may come from an English brewery like Fuller's of London, but it's not going to taste like the best by the time it reaches your local beer bar.

That's where the brewers like Rubenstein at Middle Ages come in.

At the brewery

Middle Ages has been making English-style ales in a 30-barrel microbrewery in Syracuse since May 1995. It's a Peter Austin/Alan Pugsley inspired brewhouse.

Rubenstein made his first real Ale in August 1995. Today, he estimates than 10 percent of his draft product is real ale.

For Rubenstein, producing a beer destined for a real ale firkin is made by the same method as beer intended for bottles or standard kegs until the end of the fermentation process, when most of the alcohol is produced.

At that point, bottled and regular draft beers go into the conditioning tank, where they are pressurized with carbon dioxide. When filling regular kegs, Rubenstein uses connectors and gauges to keep the pressure on. Then the keg is sealed, yielding a consistent, carbonated product.

But it's not real ale. To be real ale, a beer must be allowed to mature and undergo a secondary fermentation in the cask from which it's poured.

So Rubenstein sends his real ale straight from the fermentation tank to the firkin. When the cask is full, it's sealed the old-fashioned way: A bung is placed over the hole in he center of the barrel and driven home with a mallet.

Then Rubenstein starts secondary fermentation with his feet, by kicking the firkin across the brewery floor. Nothing technical there.

There's one other non-technical touch. Rubenstein frequently dry hops his cask ales. He adds leaf hops to the kegs using the old English measurement: the handful.

All this is worth the effort for Rubenstein. "If the beer is not alive when it hits your glass, you're not getting a cask ale," he said. "If the kegs use carbon dioxide, you're getting a dead beer. We want to give people real, living cask ale."

At the pub

When a brewer makes a bottled or standard keg brew, his work�and most of his worry�ends when the beer leaves the brewery.

Not so with cask ale.

"Cask ale is fragile," Rubenstein said. "You need to able to trust the accounts (bars) that are going to sell it."

For one thing, a cask ale must be vented�or spiled�a day or so before it's served. This requires a keen sense of timing.

It requires a knowledge of both the beer and the bar's clientele. When is the beer ready for the bar, and when is the bar ready for the beer?

Rubenstein is particular. He sends his Middle Ages cask ale to only six pubs: The Blue Tusk and Clark's Ale House in Syracuse; The Old Toad and Rose & Crown in Rochester; Ebenezer Onion in Buffalo; and the Ginger Man in New York City.

When Rubenstein went to New York to talk to the folks at the Ginger Man, he was surprised and relieved to find they had a copy of "Cellarmanship", the publican's how-to book published by the Campaign for Real Ale.

"That boosted my confidence in selling my cask ale there," Rubenstein said.

One of the most important factors that brewers like Rubenstein must leave to the barkeepers is temperature. Rubenstein likes his beers to be served at 50 to 60 degrees.

For Syracuse's Blue Tusk, Rubenstein does his own spiling at the brewery before he delivers the keg. Blue Tusk owner Mike Yorton has found cask-conditioned ale to be popular enough to support two English hand pumps among the array of 50-plus taps in his bar. He generally serves Middle Ages beers on one and a Rogue Ale on the other.

In August, Yorton began a new gimmick: On "Firkin Fridays," he hoists a Middle Ages cask to the top of his bar and lets gravity fill his imperial pint glasses. It goes quickly.

"It takes a couple of days to kick a keg on the beer engine," Yorton said. "But on the firkin, it's gone in a couple of hours. That's how you know it's good stuff."