Linztoberfest – A Simple Gravity Setup using an Ice Blanket

A good friend of mine celebrates her birthday every fall with a gathering of friends. As a nod to her Germanic roots, she styles the party after Oktoberfest, a massive beer festival held annually in Munich. She made this her Oktoberfest homebrew party by asking her homebrewing friends to bring a little something to share. To differentiate myself from the crowd, I decided a few years back to give my beer a cask presentation. This event typifies the simplest cask setup – gravity service with an ice blanket & cover.

I brew my contribution about a month ahead of the party, give it two weeks to ferment, then rack it into a Cornelius keg to condition. Since the pin is slightly bigger than the keg, I plan to carbonate the beer to 1.4 dissolved volumes instead of my usual 1.3. Here is the calculation using the data from the Technical Basics section (page ___):

I am filling a pin with beer fermented at 70’F. According to the chart on page ___, I can get the .51 dissolved volumes of CO2 by using a little more than 1.5 ounces of dextrose. (.51 is a little more than .48.) Let’s use 1.6 oz to ensure that we get where we want to go.

The keg is just a pit-stop for the beer and has been slightly modified for this purpose. I’ve installed a racking cane tip on the end of the dip tube to minimize sediment that can be sucked up. CO2 gas is only used to set the seal on the keg right after the beer has been moved in and again to push the finished, carbonated beer into the pin. This technique saves the bother of preparing an additional pin as the conditioning vessel and using proper cellaring to rack it into the service pin through a gravity tap. While this may disqualify it from “authentic” cask beer, since the carbonation comes from the yeast and the beer is unfiltered, I am not troubled calling it cask.

Re-racking the (hopefully) bright beer right before service is a technique called rack bright. It eliminates the concern about serving hazy beer due to disturbing the yeast sediment right before service by eliminating the yeast. As an extra guarantee, I’ll add 10 mL of Biofine CL to the pin as I fill it. It’ll be well mixed in by transporting the pin to site. It also has the benefit of being extremely fast-acting, settling out in the few hours between placing the pin in the cradle and tapping to serve. I do myself a favor and cold-crash the yeast the night before as well. This not only encourages the yeast to settle but chills the beer. Racking occurs right before transporting the beer to site.

I usually arrive on site a few hours before the afternoon event to setup my beer and also be a help in general. For the beer, I set up a table in a location where it is unlikely to be disturbed and assemble the pin cradle. The pin gets placed in it and immediately covered with the ice blanket and the cover, which is an old army-issue wool blanket that I prefer. After helping out on other tasks for an hour or so, I return and vent the pin using a hard spile. The beer shouldn’t be too lively as I had worked with it just that morning. After the headspace has been vented, the hard spile is left in. The beer is now resting and settling until the start of the party.

The beer is starting out below cellar temperature and is in contact with an ice blanket. Insulating it is usually enough to keep the beer at an acceptable temperature for the afternoon and into the evening. It helps that these tend to be chilly fall nights. If her birthday was a month earlier, I might decide to take greater steps to ensure the proper serving temperature.

Linzy gets a kick out of pounding in the tap so it is her privilege to do so. Burp the headspace by removing and re-inserting the spile. Have someone hold the back of the pin in place and absorb the recoil while the tap is pounded in. I don’t worry too much about sanitation in this instance as it is only in service for a few hours. Still, I do spray down the tap with StarSan. Once set, pull a half pint, dump, then offer the first taste to the birthday girl. Prosit!