One of the things I was most excited about when I was invited to join the Schlafly crew at the Great Taste of the Midwest was the opportunity to taste one of my all-time favorite beers in an entirely new way, cask Bell’s Brewery Two Hearted Ale. But let’s be honest, a little 2 or 3 ounce pour just doesn’t really cut it. Sure it’s a nice little sample, but cask beer deserves to be in a pint glass.

Well, I’m happy to announce that on Friday, November 21 at 5PM, 33 Wine Shop and Tasting Bar will be cracking into a cask of Bell’s finest beer, Two Hearted Ale. This will be available until the cask blows, so I wouldn’t dawdle getting down to 33, because I know I’m going to have my fair share of this beer. I want to thank Jake, Dylan and Jim O’Connor of Bell’s for making this event happen, this is very exciting stuff for the St. Louis beer community.

A few weeks ago I had to travel to Champaign, IL for business. I’m not a huge fan of traveling for business, but I can usually make the best of it by finding some of the interesting beer stuff in other cities. While in Champaign I made sure to stop and try The Blind Pig as it was rated as one of the top 50 beer bars in the world by RateBeer in 2007. I was not let down. One of the first things I spied was New Holland Existential Hopwine on cask, which got me to wondering, “when do we see a bar in St. Louis that has a rotating cask selection?”

Don’t get me wrong, the addition of Dressel’s Pub to the cask beer scene is extremely welcome and I’d almost kick over my own brother to get a pint of cask 5 Day, but maybe I’m getting a bit greedy. I’d love to see a bar in St. Louis that not only serves cask beer, but serves a rotating selection of it. Now, I realize that this dream may not be as easy to attain as I’d like, because I’m sure there are plenty of logistical challenges. But a man can dream, can’t he?

Maybe the guys at CAMRA have finally gotten to me and programed my brain in my sleep to really believe it, but I’m pretty obsessed with cask beer. The slightly warm, slightly flat that always brings more than a slight smile to my face. One of the problems with cask is that it’s pretty hard to find in St. Louis. For the longest time it was basically available at either the Tap Room or Iron Barley (and from what I gathered Square One on rare occasions.) But now it looks like we have another location for “true” ale:

Dave Johnson from O’Fallon Brewery emailed me to let me know that cask 5-Day IPA is now available at Dressel’s Pub. Cask beer at a Welsh pub? Sounds like a winning combination to me.