Homemade Sparklers

By Bob Jones

OK, I think it’s about time I report on my latest gadget. Some of you may remember my recent trip to the UK. I fell in love with the beers there and have been fooling around with ideas to simulate the flavors and dispensing methods I experienced there. The cask conditioned ales have some characteristics that are easy to simulate: hops, malt, low gas, warm, yeasty but some characteristics aren’t.

I got home and immediately brewed up a low gravity, english style ale. When I put it on my draft system, something was missing. I had kept the CO2 at 0 psi when kegging and brought the gas up to about 5psi to dispense. Tasted OK, but the head was gone, of course. The creamy whipped head is caused by the sparklers on most beer engines in the UK. OK, I thought, what the beer engine REALLY does is lift or pull the beer from the keg and force the beer through a series of very small holes. This causes both foaming and whipping of air into the beer. I reasoned that I could do the same without a beer engine.

What I built is a valve with a piece of copper tubing at the output of the valve. The end of the copper tubing has a cap on it. The cap has about 6 holes .020" in diameter in it. This assembly is placed at the end of about a four foot piece of 1/4" id PVC line. Now to use this gadget, I raise the keg pressure up to about 10 psi, open the valve and point the output into a glass. As you can imagine, 6 streams of beer exit and foam and aerate the beer. The glass fills and when you set the glass down, the beer recombines in the glass from the bottom up, just like the beers in the UK do. Now it’s usually necessary to top the glass off in a few seconds; they also do this in the UK. After I’ve dispensed the beer, I reduce the keg pressure back to 0 psi. Bingo, this gadget very closely simulates the flavors and effect of the English beer engines. The aeration and creamy head are bang on to what I tasted in the UK. I now have to decide how to incorporate this gadget better into my draft system.

I am considering either one of several ideas to make this concept a little easier to use. One idea would be to keep the keg at about 1 psi and add a small pump to raise the pressure to push the beer through the sparkler. Another is to push the beer with nitrogen instead of CO2. This way I could leave the keg at 10 psi and not pick up any carbonation. I have been threatening to go to a mixed gas system, and this may be the push over the top. Someone else suggested a hand pump (sold at some sporting goods stores) used by campers to force water through a filter for sanitation.

My appologies to all the people in the UK on butchering the tradition of cask condition ales, but I think I have come up with a pretty good simulation.

Fellow brewers, open your eyes, gased ales are not necessarly the best ales. With no gas, one can make a lower gravity beer and experience the malt and hop flavors MUCH better. I’m not saying I’m going to make all my beers now without CO2; I AM saying it really adds another dimension to beer. Several members were at the club Christmas party and got to see and try this gadget work on a keg of Pale Ale I brought. Judging from the comments I heard and the speed at which the beer vanished, I’d say others feel the same way.

Cheers,

Bob Jones