Cask Ale LA | Four Brewers Podcast

Season 3, Episode 34 – This week, we head to Canada via Aaron Champion of Cask Ale LA and drink four excellent craft beers from The Great White North.

This week on the show, we’re joined by our good friend and fellow beer blogger, Aaron Champion, and he brought us some really interesting and delicious craft beer from his recent trip to Canada.

Up until around five or so years ago, Canadian craft beer wasn’t really anything anyone would bat an eye at. A lot of breweries were brewing what was widely thought of as “safe” beers, meaning that they stuck to brewing traditional mainstays in beer. This was obviously not the case with every brewery in Canada, but it was tough to think of more than a few Canadian breweries that were making anything really exciting, different, or even experimental. The beers on the show this week exemplify how the Canadian beer scene is evolving and creating some really awesome beers that Canadians local to these breweries can more easily find.

The breweries featured on the show this week are Bellwoods Brewery, Nickel Brook Brewery, Folly Brewpub, and Halo Brewery. Halo Brewery, from Toronto, Ontario, is taking a unique approach to their business model by, in a way, open-sourcing their beer recipes. As homebrewers, this is very exciting and cool, especially if you’re a fan of Halo’s beers and want to brew them yourself. Doing something like this is great for a newly emerging scene. It encourages homebrewers to take more risk and do different things with their homebrew, while at the same time encouraging other breweries to take some cues on recipe design and brewing process. It’s a win for everyone!

Big thanks to Aaron for coming down to our neck of the woods to share these beers. His blog, Cask Ale LA, not only focuses on when and where one can find cask ale in Los Angeles, but also the craft beer scene as a whole. He’s only been in The States since 2013, but he’s already a respected member of the beer scene in Los Angeles and Southern California.

BREW THE SHIT OUT OF IT, EH.

Beers from this week’s episode:
Halo Brewery – Day Star
Folly Brewpub – Imposter Syndrome
Bellwoods Brewery – Motley Cru (2016)
Nickel Brook Brewing Co. – Kentucky Bastard Imperial Stout

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4B Theme Song: The Sleeping Sea King

Season 2, Episode 12 – This week’s show is live from the one and only Firkfest, in Anaheim, California.

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The day is upon us. The time has come. Firkfest is here! Undoubtedly, you’ve heard our cute little ads before each show for Greg’s annual festival in celebration of cask ale, and for good reason–it’s a rad event. Cask ale is a style of beer that is easily overlooked and somewhat misunderstood. Is it a beer that is flat, warm, and flavorless? Is it a beer with a bunch of stuff thrown into it to make the base beer taste different? On this week’s show, we hope to provide some clarity on the topic. Yes, traditional cask ale is generally served at a certain temperature and conditioned with yeast inside the cask to attain a certain volume of carbonation, but at the same time there’s also an offshoot that incorporates firkins of beer, flavored with other ingredients to give beer inside of it a different flavor, aroma, and overall experience.

This week, we are live from Firkfest 2015. This was a different kind of live experience for us in that the show was actually broadcast live to the attendees of the event. This was also a bit of an experiment for us, and overall it went pretty well. That being said, you’ll definitely hear a difference in the audio compared to our other episodes. Tomm Carroll from Celebrator Beer News and Beer Paper LA joins us as a co-host for this episode, and is also the moderator of the panel. We are joined by Aaron Champion of Cask Ale LA, Evan Price of Noble Ale Works, Andy Black of MacLeod Ale Brewing Co., and Chris Walowski of Smog City Brewing, all of whom have experience with cask ale in one form or another.

The panelists provide a lot of insight on what cask ale is and how the definition and translation of the style has mutated over time. This is a truly traditional style of beer that represents the history of beer as we know it today. You’ve got to know where you came from to know where you’re going…

Photos from Firkfest can be found in the Photos section of the site. Big thanks to everyone who attended the event, those who went out of their way to say hello to us, and of course, Mr. Nagel for organizing another great festival.

BREW THE SHIT OUT OF IT.

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