Back in 2019, I posted a list of the ten best-selling cask beers in the UK, taken from this article in the Morning Advertiser. Abbot Ale is #4 on the list. They’re probably much the same now, although the volumes will have diminished. But the notable feature of this list is that most of them are beers about which many “beer enthusiasts” won’t have a good word to say. They’re dismissed as dull, bland, dumbed-down, mass-market products. Landlord is probably the only one that would receive general approbation.
Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but if you want to promote a category of product, it seems self-defeating to disparage most of the leading brands within that category. For any product category to thrive, it needs strong, well-regarded flagship brands that people are happy to recommend. As Cooking Lager recently very perceptively said in the comments on one of my blogposts:
…It's an attempt to rationalize its decline that hints at the truth. Recognition & trust.It’s not good enough to grudgingly say “it’s not too bad if it’s kept well”, you need to be able to say unequivocally “This is a good beer. It’s a good example of real ale”. If you profess to be a real ale enthusiast, but if you’re asked to recommend a beer and all you can come up with is some obscure product intermittently sold in a handful of outlets, you’re not encouraging people to drink it. Maybe they’re not the absolute best beers in the world – the top selling products in any category rarely are – but to damn them with faint praise does the whole category no favours.Drinkers are not enthusiasts, they are not thrilled by thousands of breweries dispensing beer you've never heard of.
Much cask ale, these days, is just that. It lacks trust and recognition that sees a drinker say "I know that beer, I've had it before, it's good, it's trustworthy, I like it"
The main consumer campaign for this category of ale have championed their own preference for an enthusiast cottage industry which to none enthusiasts is a commodity product they don't recognise or trust. A CAMRA micropub services their niche interest. Leave that there and let normal pubs serve a regular good quality beer drinkers trust, not 6 pumps of commodity indifferent pale ale.
Champion reliable national and regional brands, ensure those are consistent and good, and people will drink cask ale. A pint of Holts bitter is a decent pint. Remove the "when kept well", "in the right pub", and people will recognise and trust it.
Some may point out that their local taproom or micropub does consistently good business without selling any of these beers, and that may well be true, but it is the acceptance of a niche existence. Most drinkers of cask beer are not enthusiasts, they just want a decent, reliable pint. If cask fails to deliver that, they will take their custom elsewhere, which is just as likely to be home drinking as another beer in the pub. A survey that I have quoted on here before found that 85% of cask drinkers want to see well-known, recognisable brands on the bar. They don’t want to have to negotiate a minefield of unfamiliar beers every time they go to the pub.
But it seems that some people are entirely relaxed about cask losing market share, provided they can still get hold of it in their local specialist outlet. If you disparage all the leading brands of cask beer, you’re disparaging cask itself.
I too am outraged that Abbot should be runner up. It should have been the winner.
ReplyDeleteYour article is spot on. I am fed up of defending my decision to drink Abbot or Pedigree in preference to the "real ale" from a micro brewer.
It is fairly obvious that a brewer who has a century of practice in making beer is going to produce a consistent quality product. and, of course if you have a favourite drink you want it to be readily available and not have to travel fifty miles to find it.
Consistent quality, but increasingly bland. None of the national cask ales taste anywhere near as good as they did before they were nationally available, even when served in perfect condition, and that's down to brewers adjusting the recipes to make them easier to be distributed nationally. Widespread poor cellarmanship doesn't help either.
DeleteI agree totally with this comment
DeleteAbbot Ale is superb - and good in cans too. The others in the list are boring beers. Abbot is my choice in Spoons, unless they've got Wobbly Bob or Morocco Ale that is.
ReplyDeleteThey're all good beers. What does "bland" even mean ? Fish and chips or pasta carbonara is bland, compared to bouillabaisse or pad thai, I guess ?
ReplyDeleteFish and chips can be made well or badly.
Deleteand do you have a good word to say about Doom Bar? I can’t remember having a particularly great pint of it, at least in the last 10 years.
ReplyDeleteWell, I've had at least 4 really excellent dry pints of Doom Bar (Lincoln, Winchester, Sawbridgeworth, Llantwit Major) over the years, though of course in Spoons it's served much too early so sweet.
DeleteIt's widely underestimated just how much difference cellarmanship can make to the quality of beer across the bar. It would be interesting to see what the likes of Heaton Hops and the Petersgate Tap could make of Doom Bar, although that might be a step too far.
DeleteThe Petersgate had Bass on, one of the best pints I've ever had. Didn't the Heaton Hops put it on recently too ? I know Bass is slightly better regarded than Doom Bar of late !
DeleteYes, the magic of cask beer can strike at any moment and I've had excellent (as well as awful) pints of Abbot. Denigrating cask beers because they're national brands is doing the devil's work.
ReplyDeleteBack way back when there were "trusted brands" no-one wanted to drink them. If you weren't the toughest nut in the pub you were told that you should be grateful for getting slops from the drip tray. Nobody wanted corporates (not even the lager drinkers), and by the early 1990s they were shown the door.
ReplyDeleteBy all means drink lager if you want it but there's plenty of people that drink cask ale and expect good quality beer from microbreweries, and that is what they receive.
But often that just isn't the case, and that microbrewery beer from Andwell or Crafty Brewing or Bollington is just slightly warm and indistinct (and not THAT exciting , whatever that means, anyway).
DeleteI can't say I recall any mass movement away from well-known cask beer in the 1990s. What did happen was that a lot of lower-end pubco pubs dropped cask entirely now that they no longer had the brewer's name above the door.
DeleteShould your fourth paragraph, last line, be ''any category rarely are'?
ReplyDeleteYes, thank you. The cheque is in the post :D
DeleteI brush my teeth. I use any semi decent toothpaste. Same with beer
ReplyDeleteThere's 6X on at my local. It was vinegar when I tried it four days ago and it's still being sold this afternoon. The only alternative is some Shepherd Neame abomination that tastes of coloured water and Mad Goose which like Landlord is one of those beers that a lot of people rave about but does nothing for me.
ReplyDeleteI asked the landlady why she doesn't just get in Pride which flies off the bar when it's on - " we don't want people to get too attached to a good beer because we're forced to buy a lot of rubbish from Stonegate. "
I kid you not.
" we don't want people to get too attached to a good beer " - wow.
DeleteYou'd be amazed how many pubs put Bass on, tell the world about it, get lots of publicity for putting it on, then drop it for something else the next week "Because we like to ring the changes".
No-one wants one pub in three miles that had only served (bad) pints of Bass for the last five years. People want plenty of choice, and good beer comes through demand for the stuff.
DeleteThe way to understand CAMRA is the same way to understand the philosophy of our current King. All built on Schumachers "Small is Beautiful" When that clicks, it's clear. A cottage industry of microbreweries is their preferred model for the cask beer sector. It serves a niche of enthusiasts. Why care about a mass market? Leave that to Peroni.
ReplyDeleteThe craft beer zeitgeist based its ideas on the same thing. Small = good, Big = Evil.
A brand is only a mark or recognition and trust, and when that comes a degree of scale is a natural outcome.
A brand is also a story. Bass is a story of the history of British brewing attached to a decent enough beer. Most buy the story as much as the beer. Such as many San Miquel drinking are buying a memory of their summer holidays.
If you care about the cask sector being more than a cottage industry for enthusiasts, CAMRA is not your vehicle form achieving this. CAMRA is what it is, achieving what they want.
A strong brand, produced to scale is a success story of British Brewing, not a lowest common denominator bland product. Go against the zeitgeist.
Then your "strong brand" (which was usually an aspiring brewer's stolen work) will be the only choice. Then you'd get hordes of complaints because nobody wants to drink corporate beer. Times have moved on and there is now tons of choice. And lager if you want it.
DeleteA further consideration is that, the more cask's market share falls, the more it undermines CAMRA's "super-complainant" status of speaking on behalf of all beer drinkers.
ReplyDeleteCAMRA relies on it's membership numbers for clout. That's why it sells retail offer memberships to customers, rather than attempt to attract volunteers. MPs notice big groups of voters even if 90% of a group don't really care enough to make any of it a voting decider.
Delete