Cask Ale Kegs & Accessories

Cask beer, also known as Real Ale, is indeed something special. It’s a fresh and pasteurized product, which needs conditioning before it could be dispensed. Cask-conditioned beer is very popular among both homebrewers and craft beer pub owners due to its original taste and flavour.

Whether you are a craft beer enthusiast or a brewery owner (or both!), Beverage Craft has got every piece of cask ale equipment you may need to brew and store that tasteful beverage.

We offer high-quality stainless steel cask keg and corny keg parts & accessories - from a spile to a gravity stand, your cask ale needs have been taken care of.

What’s Cask Ale?

Cask ale, otherwise known as cask-conditioned beer, is made of four natural ingredients common for most beers:

• Water
• Malted barley
• Hops
• Yeast

Unlike keg beer and light lagers, which are usually pasteurized, cask beer is fermented twice - once in the brewery and once in the cellar of the pub or home bar. It has to be vented, tapped, and conditioned before dispensing.

Cask ale doesn’t have as much fizz as lagers since it has no added gas - however, it does have a slight sparkle from carbon dioxide produced naturally. Needless to mention, cask-conditioned beer cannot have a 6-month shelf life - ideally, it should be consumed within 3 days after it has been exposed to air.

Cask ale should be served at a temperature of around 12 C - same as it was in the cellar, allowing all the rich flavors and aromas to be savored. The cask ale flavor isn’t like anything you’d get from a bottle or a can so it’s definitely worth the brewing effort.

Cask Ale System Components

Cask Ale system is not a sophisticated one when it comes to brewing, yet it has certain interesting features. The main components are:

• Stainless steel cask keg - a barrel-shaped container usually coming 9-gal or 4.5-gal size. This is where the brewing magic happens
• Stillage (cask gravity stand) - a special frame to hold the cask still during the fermentation process, which affects the quality of the final product
• Shive - a small plastic plug pounded into the cask before a spile can be driven in to allow the cask to breathe
• Keystone - pounded into the top of a cask before tapping it
• Spile - a small wooden peg nailed into the shive to control the carbonation level
• Spigot (cask keg tap) - softly pounded into the keystone using a mallet, allowing you to tap the conditioned beer

Other cask ale system parts available from BeverageCraft include angram sparklers, cask race ventilators, and stainless steel spouts.