Rising Sun — the cellar
Cellar and the short list
Three handpumps on the counter, three casks on stillage under it, and a list that changes when a cask ends rather than when somebody feels like changing it.
The cellar sits directly beneath the bar side, which means the lines are short and the beer has very little distance to travel. That is an advantage and it is also a constraint: a small cellar holds a small number of casks, and a cask that is on is on a clock whether or not anybody is drinking it. Everything on this page follows from those two facts.
How the cellar is kept
- Temperature
- Read first thing and written in the cellar book with the date beside it, so a drift of a degree over a week is visible instead of being remembered wrongly. The book stays in the cellar on the shelf by the hatch.
- Stillage
- A cask goes on the stillage and is left alone to settle before anything is driven into it. Moving a cask that has started to drop its sediment puts it back to the beginning, so a delivery that arrives on a busy afternoon waits until the afternoon is over.
- Spile
- Soft spile in while the cask is working so it can breathe; hard spile in when it is not being served so it holds its condition overnight. Taking the spile out and forgetting to put it back is how a good cask is thrown away.
- Tilt
- Brought up on the tilt only when the cask is low enough to want it, and brought up slowly, in stages, over a day rather than in one go. Rushing the tilt pulls the sediment through and costs the rest of the cask.
- Lines
- Cleaned on the same day every week, written in the book, and done when the house is shut rather than squeezed into a quiet half hour. A line that has gone a fortnight will spoil good beer and taste like the house does not care.
- Ullage
- Everything pulled to waste goes on the sheet beside the breakages. Those two figures read together at the end of the week say more about how the cellar is being run than a sales total does.
Why three pumps and not eight
A cask has days, not weeks, once it is working. Put eight on and the slowest two will be tired before they are empty, and what goes down the drain is beer somebody brewed properly. Three is the number this cellar can turn over honestly, so three is the number on the counter.
Three casks, three lines, one short run up to the counter above. The far cask is the one on its last night.
Changing a line
- The cask that is ending gets a note on the board the night before, so nobody is promised a pint of something that will not last the evening.
- When it blows, the pump is pulled off and clipped so the handle cannot be used by mistake in a busy hour.
- The line is cleaned through before anything new goes near it. A new cask on an old line is a waste of the cask.
- The next cask has already been on stillage long enough to have settled, because the order was placed against the daily rate rather than against the gap on the counter.
- It is tapped, left, vented, then tasted at the counter before the clip goes back on and the board is rewritten in chalk.
That sequence is why the house would rather tell you what is on when you are standing at the bar than print a list here. By the time a list is typed it is a promise about Thursday made on Tuesday.
The stock turn sheet
This is the back-page sum that decides when the order goes in. It takes what went on stillage, what is still there and how many days have passed, and gives the daily rate and the cover that rate leaves. Nine gallons to a firkin is seventy-two pints, which is why the pints box starts there.
Written to at house@dckhospitality.info, read behind the bar. If you are after the room rather than the cellar, the function room and taking a booking are the two pages you want.