Saturday, 27 July 2013

Keepers of the flame

I wrote here about how the recent heatwave has been showing some pubs’ cellar management practices to be distinctly wanting. And Adrian Tierney-Jones has been wondering whether the heat will make this Craft Keg’s summer. So I thought I would ask whether blog readers have felt tempted to forsake cask beer for the chilly but consistent delights of keg.

The result was a resounding “No”, with 53% of total respondents, and 56% of cask drinkers, saying they had stuck with it come what may, whereas only 19% had made a significant shift away from it. I answered “on one or two occasions”, by the way, and there have been one or two more where I wished in retrospect that I had.

There are plenty of pubs that do have the turnover, cooling systems and general nous to serve clear, fresh, cool cask beer even in blazing temperatures, but if you just go in pubs at random you will equally find plenty that don’t. Maybe the split in attitudes reflects whether people’s pubgoing tends to stick to tried-and-trusted favourites, or whether they cast their net rather wider.

on

3 comments:

  1. Graeme27 July 2013 at 16:34

    when it's hot and you go to an unfamiliar bar/pub...they have a choice of 6 lagers and one hand-pumped bitter, how often would you take the risk of choosing the bitter?

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  2. Curmudgeon27 July 2013 at 16:41

    That could even spark another post - the apologetic handpump at the end of a predominantly keg bar, often seen in Scotland.

    It's usually a good sign if other people are drinking cask.

    Today has been pretty hot, although not quite the heatwave extremes. I went in a couple of pubs at lunchtime, two pints no more than OK, but no temperature problems.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cooking Lager27 July 2013 at 17:10

    Well done, Mudge, good to hear readers of this tosh have not abandoned warm flat brown beer for ice cold fizzy chemical fizz.

    Time for a bacardi breezer peach spritzer, cool down a bit.

    ReplyDelete

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