Category: Real Ale

| Beer, Cask ale, Pubs, Real Ale

Six Reasons Cask Ale-Loving Publicans Should Immediately Whack the Price Up*

(*Relative to other drinks they serve)

It sounds counter-intuitive. Especially when drinkers face the prospect of losing any disposable income we may have had. But all the available market data suggests that the best way to sell more cask ale is to make it more expensive in comparison to other drinks on the bar. Here’s why, in six handy points.

1. People who already drink cask are perfectly happy to pay more

Cask drinkers have always been, on the whole, older, more upmarket and more affluent than the average beer drinker. They have a higher than average income, and spend more on average when they go out to the pub. In one survey of reasons why they drink cask, “price” scores 10th on a list of 13 options, with just 21% saying it’s important, versus 53% citing “flavour” and 39% saying it’s important that it’s “brewed locally.” In a separate study, “better value for money” comes 8th in a list of ten factors, with 25% saying it’s relevant versus 74% again claiming “flavour” is what matters. 72% of all ale drinkers say they tend to buy quality rather than quantity, compared to 44% who say they tend to be influenced by what’s on special offer.

It’s worth noting that cask ale drinkers are drinking less cask ale than they did. What are the drinking instead? Craft beer in other formats such as keg. 67% of all craft keg beer sells for north of £5 per pint, whereas over 70% of cask ale sells for less than £4 a pint.

Cask ale drinkers are telling us they care about quality more than price, and proving this by switching from cask to drinks that are far more expensive.

2. Non-cask drinkers already think – wrongly – that cask is more expensive than the fancy Mediterranean lagers they’re currently drinking. So what have you got to lose?

Get a load of this recent story from spoof news website The Daily Mash:

It’s a funny story – ignorant and badly informed, based on a premise that’s entirely false – but funny nonetheless. On average, cask ale is cheaper than any other pint on the bar apart from bog-standard cooking lager. And yet, the rapier wits at the Mash aren’t the only people who believe it’s eye-wateringly expensive.

In a survey of beer drinkers who do not drink cask ale, when asked what the barriers, are, “price” comes second in a list of 15 possible reasons, just behind “taste”, and well ahead of the clichés we all tell ourselves matter, such as the perception it’s warm (3rd), old-fashioned (6th) or flat (9th). Almost by definition, these people are already drinking beer that’s more expensive than cask ale is in reality. So putting the price up isn’t going to deter them any more than they already are. And they could afford it just fine if they had a reason to want to buy it.

But why do they think it’s so much more expensive than it really is? Partly, people assume darker beers are more expensive. Many also mistakenly believe cask is on average higher in ABV than other beers, and therefore more expensive. But the main reason, to my mind, is that outside the beer bubble, among the vast majority of drinkers and in places like the Daily Mash, people see cask ale and craft beer as synonymous. (And why shouldn’t they?) Check out this splash from a feature in the Guardian from 2019: A “craft beer enthusiast’s guide to Manchester”… illustrated with a pic of six cask ale handpumps.

If craft beer is expensive relative to other drinks (and it is) and real ale is the same as craft beer, then that’s also going to be expensive – isn’t it? Makes you wonder why the opposite is true.

In terms of price, non-drinkers of cask wrongly assume it is priced close to craft beer. You could always seek to correct this perception and point out how cheap cask is… but you’d be wrong to do so.

3. People are increasingly choosing more premium products across the board

“Premiumisation” has been one of the dominant trends in marketing for at least the past thirty years, and it’s not going away. For anyone above the poverty line, there’s a basic version of most consumer goods that’s easily affordable. As status-driven beings, we therefore actively seek out premium versions of the products that matter to us, to help us stand out and feel special. Yeah, you do.

In beer, this is why Peroni exists. The most recent example of premiumisation across the board is the performance of different beer styles as the on-trade had opened back up post-pandemic, versus their relative price. As a general rule, the more expensive something is (the blue bar) the better its volume performance when comparing 2022 with pre-pandemic 2019 (the red bar). The best performing segment in the whole of the on-trade drinks is “Mediterranean lager”, likely to be the most expensive mainstream beer on the bar, beaten only by craft. Standard lager and cask ale – the cheapest pints on the bar – are performing worse than anything else in the pub.

People are premiumising their drinks choices because they’re going to the pub less often and so need things to be a bit more special when they do go. It’s not necessarily that they WANT to spend more – but they are PREPARED to spend more rather than accept something they see as inferior.

4. This applies even – especially – during economic hard times

When money is tight, certain types of treat become more, not less, important. Premium versions of mainstream brands tend to do best during economic downtimes: “I can’t afford a nice holiday. I can’t afford a new car. Sod it, I’m going to splash out on a more expensive cut of meat/fresh orange juice/morning coffee.”

In June, CGA Strategy asked a broad range of consumers, “If your disposable income is reduced as a result of rising costs, which of the following do you plan to prioritise for spending over the next 12 months?” People were given 12 options for things they were most reluctant to cut down on, and invited to tick as many as they liked. The top answer was “visits to hospitality venues”, with 35% saying this would be important to them – double the percentage who cited entertainment packages such as Netflix.

Having said that, people still believe they will be spending less money overall on going out. But how are they planning on economising? The top answers revolve round going out less often, and drinking less when they do. Choosing cheaper, less premium versions of what they drink came second-bottom, with just 12% saying they’d consider this, just below visiting less premium outlets. More people said that the cost of living crisis will make them MORE LIKELY to choose quality/premium drinks (32%) than those who say it will make them LESS LIKELY (28%).

Economic hardship makes us more, not less, likely to choose more expensive/premium drinks.

5. Pub groups actively don’t want to sell more cask right now

So here’s a weird and slightly unsettling thing. At the beer industry seminar for which I gathered all this research, CAMRA and SIBA presented a new marketing campaign to get people to drink more cask ale. They’re seeking funding from across the industry to get it going. After the presentation, there was some grumbling from some people in the room who run groups of pubs. They protested that if the campaign were successful, it might make people drink cask ale rather than drinking other beers. Given that they were there because they are part of an industry body called Cask Matters, you might think they saw this as a good thing, not to say the whole damn point. But no: they were concerned about this possibility. Their pubs are struggling. The last thing they want just now is for people to stop drinking expensive world lager or craft beer, which pays pubs a decent margin, and start drinking more cask beer, which delivers a lower margin, instead. Therefore, with relative prices as they are, large pub groups are likely to OPPOSE any marketing activity that seeks to grow cask at the expense of other beer. We are in the ridiculous situation where companies selling cask beer – sometimes even companies that brew it – are potentially actively opposed to growing cask ale’s share of total beer.

Let’s be frank: if this remains the case, cask beer is utterly fucked outside the specialist independent pubs that make it their mission. The only possible way of changing this is to raise the price of cask beer relative to other beers on the bar.

6. Where cask is more expensive now, it actually sells more

If you still aren’t convinced, if you need one final argument, it’s this: where cask ale is more expensive on the bar currently, it actually sells more quickly. Surveying 4765 pubs across the country in 2019, CGA strategy found that in pubs where a pint of cask cost more than £3.70, it sold 32.5% more pints than in places where it cost less. Stripping out London and looking at the rest of the UK, it sold 9.5% more pints where it was selling for more than £3.45.

Now – chances are, these pubs were not just selling cask more expensively. They were probably nicer pubs charging a premium across the board. Interestingly, drinkers tend not to judge price in absolute terms. You know that in one venue, drinks generally are going to cost more than in another venue. If you’ve ever chosen to go to a nice pub instead of a nearby Wetherspoons, you know what I mean.

Across ale generally, the brands that are succeeding are the brands that are most expensive. Check out the growth in the top ten ale brands (cask and keg) between 2019 and 2022:

Beavertown Neck Oil has grown by 482% since before the pandemic – I guess not many people are too bothered by it selling out to Heineken. A substantial chunk of this growth will be due to Heineken’s powerful sales force shoving it out to pubs across the country. But even if simple distribution growth were responsible for, say, 70-80% of this growth, it’s clearly still selling like hotcakes in the pubs it’s flying into. This proves that drinkers have a thirst for a flavourful, sessionable pale ale – if it looks good on the bar, comes in a nice branded glass etc. The growth of Camden Pale makes the same point, somewhat less emphatically.

When we get to cask, the only brand in the top ten experiencing similarly strong growth is Timothy Taylor Landlord – a beer that sells into the trade at a higher price than its rivals, is less likely to do deals on price, and therefore tends to cost more at the bar.

So there are lots of contributing factors to this, and it’s not necessarily a direct correlation. But the data shows that if you’re keeping and selling cask properly, you can charge more for it – and sell more of it as a result.

The cask ale industry is currently in a pricing death spiral. Pubs are looking to buy it as cheaply as possible, and among 2000 breweries serving a shrinking market, there’s always a brewer who will undercut their rival. This is stripping value out of the market, which is why small brewers are switching to keg, publicans are often keeping cask badly, there’s not enough investment in marketing it to make it relevant to image-conscious, promiscuous drinkers, so it’s staying on the bar too long, so it tastes shit, so even die-hard cask drinkers are going “Hmm… not sure about the quality in here. Best stick with a Neck Oil just to be safe.”

Just put the fucking price up, guys.

I was a marketer long before I was a beer writer, and I still like to keep my hand in. For more marketing insight, sign up to my regular industry newsletter, or get exclusive, paywalled content via my Patreon. If you’d like to have a chat about you business specifically, drop me a line.

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| Beer, Cask ale, Pubs, Real Ale

If you love cask ale… set it free.

It’s Cask Ale Week, and Britain’s ‘special’ beer style is in freefall. It’s time to cauterise the wound that’s bleeding out.

Last week, at the launch of Cask Ale Week, I was asked to present a summary of all the market data and research that various brewers were willing to pool and share. I learned a lot. But here’s one of the most urgent points for cask ale brewers.

The whole on-trade drinks market is still recovering from Covid (just in time to be pummelled by a cost of living crisis and the collapse of the economy). But some parts of it are suffering worse than others. Standard lager is struggling as people trade up to “premium” options such as the newly invented “Mediterranean lager” category. Still white wine is having a rough time as people – especially young people – switch to cocktails instead.

It’s not looking good for cask ale

But down there at the bottom of the table is poor old cask ale. A quarter of the volume of the market had already disappeared in the decade to 2019. And as the rest of the on-trade makes its slow and difficult way back to parity with the pre-pandemic year, cask languishes a further 25% down in volume versus three years ago. The number of pubs stocking it is down. And in the pubs where it remains, it’s selling 18% less than it used to.*

There are far too many reasons for this to fit in one blog post – same as there are far more things that could be done to alter the decline. But what’s abundantly clear is that the strategies cask ale brewers, stockists and fans have been pushing up to this point are not working. If you want cask to survive, you need to change the conversation and actions around it.

When I write stuff like this, this is usually the point where some cask die-hards chip in with the “It’s snowing outside my house therefore global warming is a myth” argument. “I know loads of great cask ale pubs,” they say. “The quality and range in them is excellent. They are busy and punters are happy. Therefore you are talking bollocks, Pete.”

The premises of this argument may be true, but they don’t lead to that conclusion. Yes, there will always be great cask ale pubs that will make a profit from selling cask ale. And the people who love cask ale will seek out those pubs and drink in them. But what percentage of all cask ale pubs are like that? And if you look at the overall figures, how awful must the other pubs be to create such nightmarish headlines overall?

Well, now we know.

Throughput is king

One of the biggest of the many issues facing cask is throughput. While some brewers disagree, the industry consensus is that once it is on the bar, a breached cask should be sold in three days. After that, the quality starts to decline. It starts with it just tasting not as good as it should – not as good as an experienced drinker knows it could be – and it ends up tasting like vinegar. In pubs that are not core cask ale pubs, you probably wouldn’t take a pint back. If you did – trust me on this – the staff, who are not trained in perfect cask ale, will say, “Well, no one else has complained” or “It’s cask, mate. It’s meant to taste like that.”

The data shows that if you’re an experienced cask drinker, you’re 39% likely to never visit the pub again. You’d tell your mates not to go there either. But the vast majority of cask drinkers only do so occasionally. And what those people do is go, “Oh, I guess I don’t like cask ale.” They blame the drink rather than the pub. They order a pint of Neck Oil (up 482% in volume since 2019 – and no, that’s not one of my frequent typos) or a Negroni (on-trade spirits up 16% since 2019) instead.

This is a huge problem, and it’s getting bigger. Brewers would love it if publicans who don’t sell a cask in three days take it off sale. But as cost pressures on the publican mount, that’s the last thing they’re going to do. Only 24% of pubs selling cask sell enough of it to guarantee a maximum three-day shelf life. If you were to just look at the peak selling time of Thursday to Sunday, that number is 54% – but that’s down from 62% since 2019.

So pubs that can’t sell cask fresh enough are actively driving people away from drinking cask. And over the course of the week, that means three out of four cask pubs are actively turning people off cask. The industry has loads of quality and training initiatives. It also has loads of passionate landlords who pride themselves on their cask ale as the sign of a good pub. But they’re not in these pubs. So why are these pubs selling cask?

The Oxford Partnership looked at flow data measuring beer going through the pumps in a sample of designed to reflect the national average. They then segmented these pubs on the basis of how quickly they sell cask ale on one axis, and how big cask ale is as a share of all the beer that pubs sells on the other axis.

The results are interesting.

If you were a sandwich maker, would you put 20 fresh sandwiches into a shop that only sells three sandwiches a day?

Adding up the bottom row, we see that 21.7% of pubs are selling more than 72 pints of cask a day on average. No throughput issues here. These 21.7% of pubs account for 42.1% of all the cask ale sold.

Whereas look at the top left boxes. 39.3% of all pubs sell less than 48 pints of cask a day. Frustratingly, this is a different measure than the 24 pints per day that needs to be sold to keep cask in good nick. But the principle still holds. They’re not selling it quickly enough, which is why nearly 40% of all pubs selling cask can only muster 13.9% of all cask volume between them.

These are the pubs where there’s maybe one handpull on, or three with two turned round for most of the week. That handpull probably serves Doom Bar or Greene King IPA, because if you’re reducing your range after lockdown, in theory it makes sense to stick to familiar brands. But this simply reinforces the dull, staid image of cask, on a bar where spirits, cocktails, craft beer and lagers like Madri all have a bigger, more colourful presence than they did three years ago. And so the cycle accelerates.

So maybe it’s time to rip cask out of those 39.3% low volume, low share pubs, or at least a good proportion of them. (This is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of anyone involved in Cask Ale Week.) An additional 13.9% volume loss might seem unbearable on top of the volume loss the market is already suffering. But you’d be cauterising the wound. You’d be getting rid of the vast majority of shit pints of cask beer that are being served every day.

You’d break the cycle of poor quality pints turning off occasional drinkers. Only serve cask in outlets where it sells enough for the quality to be decent.

Once you’ve stopped the rot, you can start the recovery. Once you can be sure that curious, younger drinkers will be served a pint that won’t put them off for life, you can feel safe giving them good reasons to try it. But that’s another story…

*All figures Oxford Partnership research, Feb-April 2022

I was a marketer long before I was a beer writer, and I still like to keep my hand in. For more marketing insight, sign up to my regular industry newsletter, or get exclusive, paywalled content via my Patreon. If you’d like to have a chat about you business specifically, drop me a line.

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| Beer, CAMRA, Cask ale, Media bollocks, Real Ale

Now “disgusting” CAMRA is trying to destroy the country.

They’ve really gone and done it this time.

(*Not really.)

The comments below the articles about CAMRA’s latest outrage in this week’s national dailies are damning:

“And because of that I’ve just cancelled my membership.”

“Right, thank you. I will not be renewing my CAMRA membership. This is absolutely disgusting.”

What have CAMRA done that’s so terrible?

Well, it seems they have been “overrun” by “woke communists”.

“I will just have stop drinking real ale now because it has just become “Unreal Ale”. An utter woke joke.”

“That’s my membership cancelled , can’t believe camra has gone disgustingly woke”

“Go woke go broke. Another organisation overrun with communists who will now lose membership.”

“You have just lost this normal person with your wokery.”

“CAMRA try to appease B,la c k Lives Mateer Marxists because they are scared. of them”

In doing so, the supposedly real-ale-supporting organisation has revealed that, far from wanting to preserve one of our greatest cultural assets, its secret agenda is to destroy Britain itself.

“When will the real people in this country take it back from those who want to destroy it.”

Obviously, CAMRA is not powerful enough to do this on its own. It’s obviously become part of a global conspiracy.

“Why does all this seem Co-ordinated world-wide? Who is the global puppet master?”

(I could take a pretty good guess at the kinds of people the commenter thinks might be behind this.)

But here’s my favourite comment, and this one is dedicated to the overworked people at CAMRA’s head office and the thousands of volunteers who make the organisation run with no financial reward in return:

“Looks like CMARA has gone the same way as the NT and the British museum,and quite a few more our national institutions,they are now run by overpaid woke and PC executives.”

‘Going woke’ is a terrible crime, particularly in the eyes of people who use the term daily without having the slightest clue of what it means.

So what form has CAMRA’s wokeness taken? Has it banned beards? Has it insisted that everyone at GBBF must take the knee before the bars open? Given that it is now run by communists, has it called for the means of beer production to be seized by the proletariat?

No. Worse than that, CAMRA has asked people to complete a QUESTIONNAIRE.

CAMRA has asked for feedback. Via a SURVEY.

What evil fucking Commie bastards they are. Why don’t they just burn Olympia to the ground like they so obviously want to?

After years of being criticised for only being relevant to white middle-aged men, CAMRA is asking how it might broaden its audience from that base. After decades of women reporting that they are patronised, ignored ridiculed, harassed or even assaulted at beer events, CAMRA is asking people for their experiences, to gauge how serious the problem is and, if necessary (spoiler alert: it is) to do something about it.

Speaking as an overweight, bearded, middle-aged real ale drinker, I’d say this is long overdue, and is to be welcomed. Many people like me on Twitter share the same view. But the sewers that run below the lines of Daily Mail articles contain creatures that are less happy:

“what the hell do women know about beer…”

More than you know about how to write a sentence, mate.

“I better stop drinking, then they can have more of the other lot”

“One of the last bastions of being a white middle aged man is going. Can we have nothing that is ours alone, why does everything have to be shared with minority groups!!”

Dudes. Not enough people are drinking beer for all the people who make it to stay in business. There’s lots of real ale. If all the women, gay people, trans people, black and brown people, and all the people I have not mentioned in this sentence all start drinking it, there’ll still be more than enough left for you and your mates. And didn’t your mummy tell you that it’s nice to share?

This is the odd thing about people who are frightened of sharing the planet with other people who are different from them in some way. They believe rights and freedoms are like a cake – or a pint, I suppose. We middle-aged white men have more rights and freedoms than most. If other people win more rights and freedoms – the (lack of) thinking goes – then that must mean we lose some, because the cake is only finite in size.

If we’re not scared – or “triggered” – by the thought of sharing a space with people who are a bit different from us, we might actually gain quite a lot. The size of the whole cake grows. Which is better for everyone.

Eventually, this fear turns itself inside out and becomes slightly surreal:

“If CAMRA do not give up this woke nonsense then you expect there to be a splinter real real ale group that ANYONE can join, no questions asked, you just need to like real ale.”

Yep – if CAMRA carries on trying to broaden its appeal so that anyone who likes real ale can feel happy to join, then don’t be surprised if there’s a rival organisation springing up to replace it, based on the radically different principle that anyone who likes real ale can feel happy to join.

It’s easy – and necessary – to take the piss out of small-minded, ignorant bigots. It’s alarming to live in a world where initiatives to be open, friendly and tolerant are seen as evil, disgusting and communist, and people who despise anyone different from them, who feed on hate, somehow feel that it is they who are normal and decent.

I get that some of this driven by genuine fear, however misguided or based in ignorance that fear might be. But I’d suggest the fear of being ignored, patronised or physically or verbally assaulted that women and minority groups share is more justified, based as it is on real-world experience.

Since the 2010 Equalities Act, it is illegal for any public body, company or organisation to allow discrimination, harassment or victimisation on the basis of:

  • age
  • disability
  • gender reassignment
  • marriage or civil partnership (in employment only)
  • pregnancy and maternity
  • race
  • religion or belief
  • sex
  • sexual orientation

If CAMRA did preside over a culture where such behaviour was endemic, then like any other public body, society, workplace or organisation, it would be breaking the law. Workplaces must have policies in place to protect their employees against such behaviour. Even before you get to the fact that it might be a nice idea if flagging real ale sales could be boosted by making it more relevant to more people, CAMRA has a legal responsibility to make sure people feel safe at its meetings, events, and offices.

It’s also worth noting that CAMRA is asking everyone to complete this survey. Nowhere does it say that overweight, middle-aged white blokes are excluded. I filled it in weeks ago, and I didn’t get a response saying “Sorry, you don’t count.”

If membership and punters respond and say there’s nothing wrong, that everyone feels safe and happy at beer festivals etc, and there’s no evidence of widespread discrimination, then fine – nothing needs to change, does it?

But somehow, I doubt that will happen. I suspect the survey will uncover stories as troubling as craft beer’s “Me-too” moment did last spring. And if that does happen, then CAMRA has an obligation to act. It’s incredibly positive that the organisation is being so proactive in recognising that. So please, take the survey, whatever age, weight, ethnicity, gender, sex, colour, race or sexual orientation you are. The whole point of this is that everyone matters.  

And you know what? In the unlikely event that CAMRA is taken over by woke communists who go out of their way to put women, people of colour, trans people and differently abled people into every key position in the organisation, even then, the stereotypical CAMRA man will still be as welcome in every aspect of the organisation as he is now.   

Except the people who left the comments I cut and pasted above, and the far worse comments I felt I couldn’t repeat.

Those people can fuck right off.

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| Beer, Cask ale, Cask report, Craft Beer, Five Points, Real Ale

Cask Ale is Dead? Try Telling Five Points

In a troubled market, the East London brewer announces it has doubled its cask ale sales. How? By doing the things everyone knows need doing.

All images © Five Points Brewing

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my long-standing involvement in the Cask Report. For the last few years, the picture has been grim. Cask – once the best performer in a declining beer market (i.e. it was in decline, but at a far slower rate than any other beer) – is now falling far faster than any other beer, with double-digit year-on-year decline.

Pundits often point to the fact that cask is unreliable, and with the rise of craft beer, drinkers can now choose flavourful, interesting beer that – even if you believe is not quite as good as cask at its best – is certainly far, far better than cask at its worst. Pubs often don’t keep cask well because it requires more work, and what’s the point of that when it offers the lowest margin of any beer on the bar?

The arguments go round and round, the same every year, as cask ale sales continue to dwindle.

So what a delight this morning to hear from Five Points that they have DOUBLED their cask ale sales year-on-year.

In 2018, cask accounted for 20% of Five Points’ beer sales. In 2019, this grew to 26%. In the context of an undisclosed expansion in production over that time, cask is taking a bigger slice of a substantially bigger cake – according to the company, an increase of 325,000 pints versus the previous year.

How? Why?

Well, as one of the darlings of the craft beer scene, whenever Five Points have gone to festivals, cask has always been part of their offer. Their core range are all available on cask as well as keg.

Then last year, they introduced a new beer, available only on cask. As the craft beer world goes crazy for novelty, this beer was a best bitter – possibly the least fashionable style craft geeks can imagine.

And it went crazy.

I first realised they were onto something at last August’s Great British Beer Festival, when they had two versions of Five Points Best – one brewed with Fuggles hops, one with Goldings.

They sourced these ‘boring’, ‘twiggy’ British hops directly from Hukin Hops in Kent, a fourth-generation hop farm where the fourth generation is bringing fresh ideas to an ancient trade. And guess what? If you treat these classic British hops with the same care and attention as American hops, they’re just as good – who would have thought? Different, yes, subtler, absolutely, but not boring. And definitely not twiggy.

In terms of presentation, cask and keg sit alongside each other in the company’s portfolio, with the same enthusiasm around each. Five Points sell their cask beers to local pubs with a reputation for keeping cask well. This year, they’re introducing cask training for the publicans that stock their beers, financial incentives for new pubs to start stocking them, and a Cask Ambassador in their sales team to help pubs maintain quality.

This is what good cask ale look like. And the thing is, it’s all there in the Cask Report, every year, that this is what you need to do to make a success of cask.

I’m not saying that Five Points is the only brewery making a success of cask ale – talking to publicans across the country who are passionate about cask when I was doing research for last year’s report, their stories were so positive I almost started to doubt the official figures on cask’s plight.

But Five Points are at the absolute heart of London’s craft beer scene. They don’t need to invest in cask; they do it because they want to. Today’s announcement about sales figures is not just significant because of the extent it bucks the prevailing trend. It chimes strongly with me because it proves what we’ve been saying in the Cask Report for years:

One, there’s no massive prejudice against cask, you just have to give people a reason to try it, to make it relevant to them.

Two, cask belongs inside the broader scope of craft beer, not in opposition to it.

And three, there’s no mystery to making a success of cask. All you need to do is give enough of a shit about it.

Also, Best Bitter goes astonishingly well with the pizzas at the Pembury Tavern. See you there next month.

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| Beer, Cask ale, Real Ale

The Session: Keg versus Cask

I’ve been asked to take part in the session (a regular event where someone suggests a topic and bloggers the whole world over all write about it) a few times before now.  The fact that I have never taken part has nothing to do with me being Above That Sort Of Thing and everything to do with me simply not having time, or not having anything particularly interesting to say on the chosen topic on the day in question.

I’m taking part this month for two reasons: one, I was specifically asked to do so by Reluctant Scooper this month’s host and one of the most underrated bloggers – nay, writers in any medium – on Planet Beer.  Second, because the topic Reluctant – or Simon as his mates call him – has chosen is one I’ve been meaning to blog for some time.

The topic is beer dispense: does it matter?  And I want to focus on the debate between cask and keg.  Because I think I’ve got it worked out now.

It’s been a bit of an argument, and I waded in deep recently by slagging off people who think that good beer always has to be cask conditioned or, at a push, bottle conditioned.  One of the more sensible, but still devout, CAMRA members who commented on that post suggested that these days, one has to accept that there are some quality kegged beers around, but that any beer that’s good on keg would de facto be better if it was on cask.

I disagree, and here’s why.

I’m not a brewer.  I welcome corrections, rebuttals or even confirmation of my theory.  And this is NOT one of my anti-CAMRA posts – I’m not attacking anyone else’s beliefs or opinions, merely stating my own.

The idea came to me when I was in the Old Toad in Rochester, New York, a couple of months ago.  Local brewers Custom Brewcrafters had created an Imperial IPA for the pub’s twentieth anniversary called, appropriately enough, OT20.  It was 9% ABV and full of the currently ubiquitous Citra hop.  Appropriately for one of the US’s first cask ale pubs, it was available on cask as well as keg, so I had a half of each to compare.

The big differences were, unsurprisingly the temperature and the level of carbonation. The hop aroma was much more prevalent in the keg – not surprising as carbonation helps release such aromas from beer. I was straining to get much from the cask. And then in the mouth, the keg version felt lighter. Obviously more refreshing, but also cleaner and more delicate. By comparison, the cask version felt thick, oily, almost greasy.  The flavours were more complex and intense, but muddy somehow, bordering on unpleasant.

This is a beer style that was invented (or rather, adapted in its modern guise) for keg, and it did not suit cask at all. It’s an American beer style. It was never meant for English-style cask.

And that made me realise, conversely, why cask ale is so special.  It suits traditional British ale which, for the last hundred years or so, has mainly been at very low ABV, and very balanced.  What I’d experienced with a double IPA was a concentration of hop flavour and an intensity of character that had become unpleasantly cloying.  Take a 3.8% session ale that’s relatively low in intensity, and filtration and carbonation would make it very bland indeed.  But that same concentration of flavour that cask bestows gives it a surprisingly interesting depth and layers of flavour, subtlety and character.  That’s what makes session real ales so special and satisfying.

It also explains why some people who only drink session real ales cannot imagine any beer being as good if it were filtered and carbonated.

And it explains why extreme beer hopheads can often find cask a little unfulfilling.

So – if carbonation strips out hoppy depth and turns it into aroma, and cask turns moderate beer in on itself to give it complexity, the best method of dispense becomes a function of recipe and ABV.  Neither is intrinsically better than the other.

I was then able to admit to myself that, much as I adore Thornbridge Jaipur in any form, I’ve always seceretly harboured a preference for it in bottle over cask.  And why Elderfower-flavoured Badger Golden Champion is delightful in bottle but a dud on cask.  And why some people prefer Fuller’s London Porter on keg.

So if I’m not talking out of my arse, where’s the dividing line?

Thornbridge’s Kipling is 5.2%, and has recently been trialled on keg.  I tried it in the Euston Tap and was slightly let down.  I immediately had a hankering for the juicy body of the cask version.  It’s a hoppy beer, sure, but not extreme.  And then, when I tried the side-by-side experiment in the Jolly Butchers with Camden Pale Ale, I much preferred the keg.  The carbonation was gentle – you’d have to be a Luddite twat to describe it as ‘fizzy’ – and the citrus hop flavour was very much to the fore, clean and incisive.  The cask, again, seemed oleaginous and out of balance.  So it’s somewhere around 5%, and somewhere around reasonably full-bodied, and something to do with personal taste.

Doubtless some deniers will say I was on each occasion drinking cask that wasn’t in top condition, but you’re wrong, it was very good – different beers simply suit different methods of dispense.

So now can we all abandon irrelevant dogma, hold hands and live happily ever after in a sunny, harmonious beer world where everyone celebrates the bounteous diversity on offer?

No, thought not…

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