Mountain or molehill?

I recently spotted a tap for keg Wainwright on the bar of a pub. I suppose I knew this existed (I have certainly seen keg Pedigree) but I can’t say I’d ever seen it before in the wild. What perhaps surprised me that it wasn’t in some marginal low-turnover boozer but in a prominent Good Beer Guide listed pub with several well-kept cask ales on the bar. So the question occurred as to whether this is something that lovers of cask ale should be worried about.

A significant and often under-appreciated achievement of CAMRA is that it has created a large constituency of drinkers who are loyal to cask as a category over and above individual brands. Back in the early 70s, people would probably identify first as “bitter drinkers” and then express a preference for Tetley’s, Boddington’s, Courage or whatever. But that has reversed now, and in general they will go for cask first ahead of any loyalty to a specific brand. When I mentioned this on Twitter, the general response was that people would give it a swerve purely on the grounds that it was a keg beer.

It’s not even as though they get the opportunity to switch between the different formats now anyway. Again, fifty years ago it was easy to find the same beer available in cask and keg or top pressure form, and it could be difficult to distinguish the two from the bar mountings. But now, overwhelmingly, the two are separate brands – even Tetley’s Cask is clearly distinguished from Tetley’s Smooth. The only breweries I can think of that sell keg and cask versions of the same beer in their own pubs are Felinfoel and Samuel Smith’s.

However, while a lot of drinkers do have a strong loyalty to cask as a category, many others who drink it occasionally will be “repertoire drinkers” who switch between lager, Guinness, keg ales and cask depending on mood and occasion. The growth of “craft keg” has in a sense rehabilitated the keg category. If people are routinely seeing the likes of Punk IPA and Camden Pale on the bar, then what’s to stop them trying keg Wainwright as well? Or indeed keg London Pride or Landlord?

So, while I don’t see the existence of keg versions of Wainwright and other top-selling ales is in itself a threat to cask in well-established outlets, there must be a possibility that it could damage cask by blurring its distinctiveness in more marginal venues.

And I have to say it comes across as a touch hypocritical that many beer enthusiasts are happy to embrace craft keg ales, including those that don’t qualify as “keg-conditioned”, but will turn their noses up at keg versions of ales that in cask form would be sufficient to get a pub into the Good Beer Guide.

It should, of course, go without saying, that the best way to promote cask ale is to ensure that it is served fresh, cool and full of condition. Cask’s worst enemy is not keg, it’s poor cask.