For the record, Chorlton Beer and Music Festival took place last weekend and was blessed with glorious weather and (thankfully) a well insulated roof over the beer. Keeping the stuff cool was still tricky stuff though. We experimented with a sort of ice blanket over one of the casks, in addition to the usual wet tea towels, stockinette and the like, and we were rather pleased with the results.
This ice blanket was surplus packaging from something like a consignment of frozen meat or fish. It's a sort of bubble pack, but with giant bubbles - well, couple of inches across at any rate. They're filled with water, you freeze them and you put them over the cask. Because they're a series of bubbles, you can bend the pack to the shape of the cask and drape it over the top, which is where the cooling effect is most needed. Previous experiments with ice packs have involved bin liners full of ice cubes (from friendly pubs or fishmongers). The problem with these is that, as the ice melts, you just get two large pockets of icy water, one on either side of the cask, but with no ice or water on the top of the cask (imagine a pair of saddlebags over a cask).
Anyway, I commend these "bubble" ice packs to you. The only problem is that, clearly, you need to refreeze them overnight. My freezer certainly wouldn't have coped with all the ice necessary to chill some 60 casks, but I daresay other people could have helped with that. Or we could perhaps have brought a freezer unit to the venue.
I don't know how easy it is to buy these things commercially, without buying a lot of frozen meat or fish in the process, but Google found me these sites: , .
Meanwhile, we tried a couple of other innovations. One was plastic glasses. I've always shied well away from these in the past, mainly because the only plastic glasses on the market seemed to be too flimsy and not Crown stamped. This time we used a fairly rigid, quite substantial clear plastic tumbler, 10 ounce brim measure and Crown stamped. They seemed to go down very well - no complaints at any rate. A few cracked slightly in use, but not enough to lose beer, and anyway we were using hundreds. I believe that 12 ounce, line measure tumblers are also available, but the purchasing was out of our hands.
And also plastic: scaffolding boards. Instead of the usual quick-fit scaffolding, we had to use something less bulky, to fit the venue. We ended up with metal trestles topped with heavy duty black plastic boards. These worked very well, they were light to handle and they didn't soak up split beer. The only drawback was that the casks were resting on traditional wooden chocks, and these didn't seem to grip the plastic boards too well. As long as the casks were full and heavy, things were fine, but once we got down to the last 3 gallons or so, there was a tendency for chocks and casks to start shifting slightly. Perhaps we need plastic chocks next.
Anyone else had experience of such things?