The premium merry-go-round

The hackneyed topic of cask beer premiumisation has recently reared its head again in the shape of comments by Georgina Young of St Austell Brewery. Tandleman rapidly provided a comprehensive and impassioned response. Cask beer, he always reminds us, has to be priced to go. Looking back I recall that back in 2019 I did similar out of something of a sense of exasperation.

The idea that increasing its selling price will improve the quality and perception of cask beer always seems to me to be a case of putting the cart before the horse. Premium positioning has to be earned over a long period of time – it can’t be achieved overnight. It’s certainly possible to achieve premium pricing for individual beer brands and pubs, and many, to a greater or lesser extent, succeed in doing this. But to premiumise an entire sector comprised of many disparate products, producers and outlets is an impossible task.

A key aspect of the market that very much works against the idea of premiumisation is the widespread culture of ever-changing guest beers. To achieve premium status, you need to be able to exercise a strong measure of control over product quality at the point of sale. You must make it possible for people to readily find your product, and to be able to make repeat purchases if they like it. And you will need to develop the perception of your product over a long period of time through a carefully considered and crafted marketing strategy.

But none of this applies to rotating guest beers. Yes, it matters that the individual pub knows how to look after its beer, but if one isn’t to your taste there will be another along in a couple of days, or even later the same evening. There’s no realistic way of having confidence that a particular brand will be available, and no opportunity to make repeat purchases. Sometimes, a guest beer may be one that you recognise and have enjoyed before, but very often they will be completely unfamiliar short-run brews. It is turning cask beer into an interchangeable, disposable, commodity product.

A further issue is branded glasses. The past ten or fifteen years have seen a major change in the on-trade beer market, as pretty much all of the leading brands have acquired their own distinctive design of glass. But obviously this cannot apply to rotating guests, which will just be served in a generic unbranded glass, or at best one with the name of the pub on it. This is also an issue for the perception of cask beer more generally.

I recognise that plenty of beer enthusiasts like this approach to selling beer, and are always on the lookout for something new. A fair number of pubs do well out of it. But it’s something that just doesn’t resonate with the 90% of pub drinkers who don’t drink cask, and indeed also a substantial proportion of those who do. Most people just don’t want to drink beers they’ve never heard of. And it goes completely against all recognised strategies of developing premium status.

By far the most successful example of a premium brand in the current beer market is Guinness, which I wrote about last year. Guinness ticks all the boxes of premiumisation. It is permanently available in a large number of pubs, so you know where you’ll be able to find it, and that you’ll be able to make a repeat purchase. It doesn’t occasionally crop us as a rotating guest stout. It’s distinctively different from anything else on the bar. A great deal of effort is put in to maintaining quality, and poor examples are highlighted, for example, by the ShitLondonGuinness Twitter account. And its brewers have over the years carried out a series of very well-crafted and memorable marketing campaigns to burnish its image, with a level of consistency no other brand can equal.

Going back thirty or forty years, this was matched by Stella Artois, which was carefully positioned as a premium brand using the “Reassuringly Expensive” strapline, which was introduced in 1982. But, more recently, this image has been eroded by cheapening the recipe and progressively reducing the strength, so it is now regarded as just a bog-standard product in what is described as the “premium lager” category, although in reality that just means “stronger than cooking lager”. It’s a classic example of the destruction of brand equity.

I would have said that Peroni had achieved something of the same image, being a beer that sold for a price premium, was not on draught in Spoons and was not sold in slabs of 440ml cans. I can’t say that premium lagers are something that much interests me in pubs, but I do get the impression that some of the shine has worn off more recently. And reducing its strength from 5.1% to 5.0%, while trivial in itself, is a slight chink in its image as something that stands out from other products.

In the cask sector, Timothy Taylor’s have achieved considerable success in positioning Landlord as a premium beer. It is now the second best selling cask beer and seems to consistently achieve a higher price point than other beers. It is noted for literate, gently humorous advertising placed in upmarket publications. However, Taylor’s don’t control quality at the point of sale, and it is frequently disappointing, in particular often being served too green. Unless it’s in a pub where I know I can trust the cask quality, I tend to give it a miss in favour of something else.

Ironically, one beer that has almost accidentally achieved many of the characteristics of a premium brand is Draught Bass. Pubs have to make a point of asking for it, rather than having it foisted on them by brewers, so the quality tends to be better. It has a strong reputation amongst a loyal band of devotees, so to some extent markets itself. And it has possibly the most instantly recognisable design of branded glass of any cask beer, which now seems to have got into most outlets. But it remains something of a secret in the wider beer market, and so doesn’t tend to sell for a premium price. Which, as a drinker, I’m not complaining about.