Ever decreasing circles

This week, the Morning Advertiser reported on the state of the cask market. Taking the continued commitment of CAMRA, and the re-entry of fashionable brewers such as BrewDog and Cloudwater, into account, it pronounced the overall result “a mixed bag”. However, in reality, it’s no more a mixed bag than the proverbial curate’s egg was actually “good in parts”.

The key statistic is buried half-way down the page, that in the year to January 2019, the total cask market accounted for 2.4 million hectolitres, which is 1.466 million barrels. This represents a volume decline of over 10% compared with the previous year. Given that, according to the British Beer & Pub Association, the total on-trade beer market in 2018 was 12.651 million barrels, that means that cask barely accounts for 1 in 9 pints sold, compared with 1 in 6 only a few years ago.

And that decline, while depressing in itself, contributes towards one of cask’s key problems. CAMRA’s WhatPub site states that there are 35,574 pubs in the UK serving cask beer. Even discounting clubs and beer festivals, that means that each pub only accounts for 41.2 barrels a year, or a mere 228 pints a week. That means that, assuming a pub gets its beer in the usual 9-gallon firkins, it will only be able to keep two cask lines in decent condition, whereas simple observation suggests that the average is a lot more than that.

When it’s fresh, and bursting with flavour and condition, cask can be great. But when it’s past its best, it can be distinctly underwhelming, and hardly a good advertisement for the category. So this creates a vicious circle, whereby poor pints put people off drinking it, thus contributing to even more poor pints. Everybody in the industry knows that over-ranging is a massive problem, but nobody is prepared to act alone for fear of being the person who blinked first and thus lost trade to the competition. There’s also a widespread perception that many drinkers knowingly put choice ahead of consistent quality: if one pint isn’t up to much, they just write it off to experience and move on to something else.

Cask also does itself no favours by making the category difficult to understand. A couple of weeks ago, I had a wander round a few pubs on the south side of Manchester city centre. All of these were pubco outlets, and none could really be described as specifically pitched to enthusiasts. The average number of cask lines was five, and in every one you were confronted with a seemingly random array of mostly unfamiliar beers. If someone like me, who is probably in the top 1% of beer drinkers in terms of being knowledgeable about the industry, has to ponder what might be to his liking, what chance has the average drinker?

If you are a lager drinker, in pretty much every pub you go in apart from the narrowly enthusiast-focused ones, you will see at least two or three recognisable brands on the bar and know what to expect, but if you are a cask drinker, you are expected to take pot luck. The most recent annual Cask Report said that 84% of drinkers wanted to see at least one well-known cask brand on the bar, but many pubs deliberately avoid that. That is not to say that pubs should not have varying guest beers too, but having a core of familiar beers that are regularly on makes the category more accessible and may help develop a reputation as somewhere worth visiting precisely because it does stock a particular beer.

I wrote about this in detail last year in a post entitled The Cask Crisis. There are no simple answers, especially in a fragmented and dog-eat-dog marketplace where it is all too easy to lose ground to competitors. Most of us reading this will be well aware of pubs that do manage to produce consistently good beer, and choose our drinking destinations accordingly, but the battle for cask will not be won by preaching to the converted but by winning over the marginal drinkers who are all too easily put off by stale beers they’ve never heard of.

In the Cask Crisis article, I made the point that the fate of cask ultimately lay in the hands of the brewing and pub industry. Nobody else is going to save it for them. But it would help if those who claim to speak up on its behalf paid more than lip-service to the idea that over-ranging was a major issue, and weren’t so ready to denigrate those well-known cask beers that drinkers are actually likely to see on the bar more than once. It might also be a good idea if someone could produce a guide to those pubs that, irrespective of breadth of range or rarity of the beer, did serve up a consistently good pint. I wonder what that could be called...