The 2015 May Day Cask Festival

The inaugural May Day Cask Festival (MDCF) was held 10 May 2013 to celebrate the pending birth of my daughter Gianna. It was a real surprise when she showed up a month early and attended! This setup was designed to fit the space allotted to Boston’s Wort Processors at the 2013 National Homebrewer’s Conference Club Night in Philadelphia. I designed the setup to serve to serve five pins, three firkins, and two kegs, a total of 68 gallons of homebrew, within the time allotted for setup, service, and teardown. The MDCF was the proof of concept before the club took the plunge. Success!

Similar to Casktoberfest, there was a blend of gravity and engine service. The main difference was the very brief window of time available to assemble, serve, and breakdown the entire setup. All of the beer was racked bright in the days before delivery to the AHA Beer Cellaring Team, which stored it in a cooler. It was delivered to the site cold, which helped immensely. The problem was that even a really large room is likely to get warm when you pack such a large number of people into it. This setup needed its own cooling rig. The design was modeled after the one used at NERAX (the New England Real Ale eXhibition). It is a modular system consisting of a chilled coolant reservoir, a pump, a manifold for the colder, pump-side supply, cooling saddles, and another manifold for the warmer return-side that returned the coolant to the reservoir.

Preparing the Beer Off-Site

For both the 2013 NHC setup and the 2015 MDCF, there was not enough time in the venue to properly cellar the beer. To mitigate this fact, certain strategies were pursued to prepare the beer for MDCF as best as possible off-site. This included stillaging the beer several days in advance and venting them two days before the event. This allowed time for the excess condition to be vented and the beer allowed to start the settling process. If the beer is under or properly conditioned, the additional venting time will have no negative effect as the hard spile will prevent the condition from escaping. If, as was the case for two of the beers in 2015, there is much excess condition, this can safely vent it without causing a mess at the facility.

Some of the beer was delivered in cornelius-style kegs. The brewers assured me that they were naturally conditioned with sugar and yeast and not force-carbonated. These vessels were allowed to sit for a day in position, then vented through the pressure relief valve just like the casks. The morning of the MDCF, they were racked to service pins using a six foot length of 3/16″ tubing connected to a liquid-side ball-lock connector with a CO2 tank and regulator gently pushing the beer from the keg into the pin at 4-5 PSI. Much like starting a siphon, the sanitizer-filled tubing was allowed to drain into a waste receptacle until it was flowing bright beer. While this may have resulted in a bit of beer waste, the lack of trub made handling the beer less worrisome. I filled the pins on end and added 10 mL of BioFine CL before sealing them with a keystone.

The beer that was already in pins I did not rack bright. Because I could setup the stillage 8 hours before the festival, I was confident that whatever trub I disturbed would have a chance to settle back down. I knew that I could move the pins without shaking them up too badly as the venue was nearby. To help ensure settling, I added 10 mL of BioFine CL to each vessel through the spile hole before firmly seating the hard spile for transport. The gentle motion of transport mixed the finings into solution and allowed them to work more effectively.

Once on site, each pin was placed into a cradle and allowed to rest. They were not vented again until just before the festival when they were tapped. This allowed the CO2 that was knocked out of solution a chance to go back into solution before the cask was breached again. The cooling of the casks in place assisted with this reabsorption of the CO2 and the settling of the trub.

The Recirculating Cooling Manifold Setup

The heart of the cooling rig is a bucket of ice water. NERAX has very nice electric coolers that recirculate a glycol-water mix to do the job. Those were prohibitively expensive for an infrequent amusement such as the MDCF. Ice water runs pretty close to 32’F and creates a cellar-like micro-climate around each cask. Ice has the advantage of being readily available at pretty much any venue at a reasonable cost. It would be challenging to maintain over a several day festival but this service situation is only for hours. It could be done, one would simply have to remove the excess water generated by the melting ice at certain intervals.

We did require electricity as a pond pump was used to circulate the icy cold water through the manifold. Specifically I use the ___ with the foam filter head attached to prevent ice from clogging up the intake. For the 2013 NHC stillage setup there was a proposal for a bicycle-powered pump which we thankfully did not need to follow through with. The pump is really simple to use as you submerge it and plug it in. The biggest consideration I had when making the purchase decision was the ability to lift water six feet while maintaining a decent flow rate.

Once chilled and pumped, the water flowed through the ‘supply’ side, which distributes the cold water under pressure to the various casks. My stillage was to be a collapsable six foot table, so my total length was six feet with the pins evenly spaced throughout. The NERAX version on which this was based uses an eight foot scaffolding set and fits five firkins. The main trunk is 1/2″ reinforced tubing so that it couldn’t twist or collapse, restricting flow, and was conveneint as the largest diameter available for the CPC Polysulfone disconnects used. The connecting distribution arms are 3/8″ diameter which worked for the quick connects used there. It also encouraged even pressure distribution in the main line as flow resistance is greater in the smaller diameter lines. An earlier version of the NERAX manifold system relied on the John Guest push-in fittings popular at CAMRA festivals in the UK. The current iteration using the quick connects is significantly more water-tight. The main point of failure are the o-rings on the male connections at the saddle.

Saddles are typically constructed of stainless steel. This makes them decent conductors for heat, reasonably rigid, and inert. They are also really expensive. As of this writing, I am investigating methods for constructing them domestically. Copper is much easier to work with provided care is taken not to pinch the tubing at any point. Creating a jig, pre-filling with sand, using a tube bending tool, all of these help form the saddle. Copper is slightly better at conducting heat but suffers in storage for being so malleable. It is not uncommon to discover one kinked or split for no discernible reason. Regardless of tubing construction, compression fittings to standardize to 3/8″ FPT allow for easy installation of the male quick connects.

Once the cooling was setup is established and the pump circulating the icy cold water, all that was left was to cover them up a bit and make them look good. My trusty old wool blanket does just the trick. The cooling may be more efficient and effective if the cover fit more tightly but for this service situation and time period it was just fine.

The plans for this cooling system are available for free at www.maydaycask.org.

Venting

The remaining beer for the MDCF was served vertically using a cask widge. Since this has already been covered by the EBF chapter, it is omitted here.