Fresh cream

Budweiser Brewing Group (the new name for AB InBev in the UK) have announced that they are relaunching Boddingtons Cask Bitter, which was last produced in 2012. It will be brewed and distributed in the North-West by Middleton-based J. W. Lees. It will be brewed at 4% to a new recipe.

Brian Perkins, president of AB InBev in Western Europe, added: “We are excited to relaunch Boddingtons Cask Ale in partnership with JW Lees, combining one of the UK’s most iconic beer brands with one of its most respected brewers. We see real growth potential for Boddingtons in the UK on-trade, and this is a great example of how strategic partnerships can unlock value for both businesses and beer lovers alike.”

Following on from their recent investment in Draught Bass, another brand owned by BBG, this represents a significant vote of confidence in the cask ale sector from the major international brewers. However, any revival of a historic brand is very much dependent on people’s memories of the original, and in the case of Boddingtons this falls into two distinct strands.

In 1969, the original Boddingtons company successfully fought off a high-profile hostile takeover bid from Allied Breweries. In retrospect, this can be seen as a precursor to the rejection of the “big is beautiful” approach to brewing that manifested itself in the 1970s, spearheaded by CAMRA. Boddingtons were one of the poster boys of the original real ale movement. They had 270 pubs spread across the North-West, so it wasn’t particularly hard to find, and they had the badge of honour of every one selling real ale. Their Bitter, described in the 1978 Good Beer Guide as “straw-coloured and exceptionally bitter”, gained legendary status. Even though it had a modest Original Gravity of 1035, it was very thoroughly attenuated, which was believed to result in an alcohol content of about 3.9% ABV, giving it a bit of extra kick and contributing towards its distinctively dry character.

However, around the turn of the decade, something seemed to happen to it. Opinions vary as to whether it was a yeast infection, or a change in the hop supply, or whatever, but Boddingtons Bitter somehow lost its distinctive character. The brewery insisted that nothing had chanhed, but it just wasn’t the same. Growing up in North Cheshire, it was a beer I rarely came across, but when I moved to Stockport in 1985 I found myself wondering what all the fuss was about. It was still a decent beer, but it certainly wasn’t outstanding in comparison to its local competitors, and neither did it qualify as being exceptionally bitter. Anyone who remembers it from how it was in the glory days of the 1970s will now be of pensionable age.

I don’t propose to go in to detail on the convoluted history of the Boddingtons company, but in 1989 the Strangeways brewery and associated brands were sold to Whitbread, leaving it as a pure pubco, which eventually fell into the questionable hands of Greenalls. At first, Whitbread were primarily interested in the cask brand, which gained national distribution and high-prfile advertising using the “Cream of Manchester” slogan. There were some memorable TV ads featuring first Anna Chancellor and then Melanie Sykes.

However, in the 1990s attention increasingly shifted to the then innovative nitrokeg smooth version and the “widget” canned beer, with cask taking a back seat. As Whitbread exited pub retailing, and the wave of enthusiasm for nitrokeg dissipated, the Strangeways brewery was closed and Boddingtons faded as a brand. Production of the cask version eventually ended up with Hydes in Moss Side, and the alcoholic strength was upped to 4.1%, which took it into a different strength category and alienated many long-standing drinkers. My memory of it in this era was was it was a sweetish, rather gloopy beer that bore little resemblance to the original.

Eventually it was put out of its misery in 2012, although the nitrokeg version, brewed at Magor in South Wales lingered on. Along with the other leading smooth bitters, it has now been reduced to 3.4% to take advantage of duty savings, and has been reduced to the status of something of a “zombie brand” that crops up in downmarket keg pubs and social clubs and appeals to a dwindling group of older drinkers.

As I said above, the decision to relaunch Boddingtons Cask represents a major investment in the cask sector by BBG. Broadly speaking, this is welcome news, although no doubt it will cause some conflict amongst those who at the same bewail the decline in cask’s market share but denigrate any attempt by the international brewers to involve themselves in it. To succeed, cask needs strong, recognisable brands.

I will certainly be keen to try it when it appears in December, and if done well it’s likely to be the kind of beer I like. However, it will need to be a good product in its own right rather than depending on fading memories of former glories.

The press release also suggests that Lees are to some extent getting into bed with BBG rather than simply acting as a contract brewer. As William Lees-Jones says in the press release, “We also look forward to working with Budweiser Brewing Group with their portfolio of market-leading lagers and premium packaged beers in our pubs.” Lees’ own cask beers, while I like them, are often seen as something of an acquired taste, and you have to wonder whether this will lead to Boddingtons become the leading bitter in their own pubs. And where will it leave their own MPA (“Manchester Pale Ale”), which was deliberately created to be reminiscent of classic Boddingtons?

Tuck in for Britain

In an attempt to combat “food poverty”, the government have announced a pilot scheme to set up state-subsidised restaurants offering cheap and nutritious food, with the first examples set to open in Nottingham and Dundee.

This conjures up memories of the British Restaurants that were set up during World War 2 to offer workers cheap and appetising lunchtime meals that were outside the scope of food rationing. These proved very popular and at their peak there were over 2,000 examples. They are well and sympathetically described in the linked article. However, with post-war prosperity their appeal faded and the last examples had disappeared by 1960.

In the current environment, there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of cafés serving cheap and cheerful sit-down meals, plus there is always the option of Wetherspoon’s who offer a variety of straightforward dishes at very affordable prices. So it’s hard to see that many people are really excluded from eating outside the house because it’s beyond their means.

However, the powers-that-be probably don’t think commercial catering outlets achieve appropriate nutritional standards. So expect an absence of fried food and processed meat, and a strong emphasis on vegetarian and vegan options. We may even see a return of that wartime delicacy Woolton Pie. Whether this approach will win favour with the target market is of course open to question.

Add to this the lack of commercial acumen typically displayed by local authorities, and a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to customer service, and these subsidised diners may end up having very little appeal. Their only selling point is likely to be dirt-cheap prices. Although if, against predictions, they do prove successful, private sector rivals may well complain that they are victims of unfair competition.

The wartime British Restaurants were aimed at working people, but it appears that their modern equivalents are intended for those living on benefits and unable to work due to sickness or unemployment. Given this, might it be a better use of public money to provide people with support to encourage them to cook their own meals from fresh ingredients, which would save them even more money?

At the end of the day, this scheme will probably not amount to very much. But it is another example of well-meaning but patronising nannying that seeks to discourage self-reliance and promote dependence on the State.

The long retreat of cask

The Morning Advertiser recently published figures confirming the continued decline of cask beer sales in the UK, which were reflected on by beer writer Phil Mellows:

Once a month I’m privileged to have sight of the official beer sales figures for the UK. When they pop up in my inbox I duck behind the settee and peer at them through my fingers. I’m a cask beer drinker you see – well, about three-quarters of the time – and watching the steady and sometimes not so slow decline of the category is scary.

According to the pub trade’s Morning Advertiser this week, cask ale volumes dropped by more than 7% in the past 12 months on top of year after year of similar falls for as long as anyone can remember. Barely 8% of total beer sales in pubs and bars – also in decline – are now poured from a handpump. I remember when it was twice that and people were worried then.

8% of on-trade beer volumes represents less than a million bulk barrels a year, which is less than the production in the 1970s of one single brewery, Mitchells & Butlers at Cape Hill in Birmingham, most of which comprised the unlamented M&B Brew XI. It could even be true that more Brew XI was drunk in 1975 than the entire cask sector today.

So what has caused this calamitous long-term decline? Everybody of course trotted out their own favourite hobby-horses – the big brewers, the pubcos, the rise of craft keg, CAMRA taking its eye off the ball, the anti-drink lobby – but the reality is that it is due to a combination of factors that have taken effect over a long period of time. I thought I would create an X poll to see what people thought were the most important reasons.

POLL: What is the biggest reason for the decline in cask beer sales?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) June 28, 2025

The winner by a short head was “Old fashioned image”, although it is not clear whether people interpreted this as referring to the beer itself or the people who drink it. Over the past decade or so, cask ale brewers have made major steps to update the image of their beers, and it’s common now to go in a pub where most of the pumps are taken up by what might be described as “modern” cask ales. So I suspect it’s more a case of making judgments about the typical cask ale drinker. I will return later to the subject of quality.

Cost was often mentioned as a factor but, while it’s undoubtedly a major reason for the overall decline in beer drinking in pubs, it doesn’t explain why people have moved away from cask, given that cask in pubs is virtually always significantly cheaper than lager, Guinness or craft kegs.

In the early years of CAMRA, its proposition was very simple, that cask beer, when properly kept, tasted much better than its keg or tank equivalents. This was demonstrably true, and few people had much enthusiasm for the old keg ales. However, the world has moved on, and now there are very few direct keg equivalents to cask ales. Samuel Smiths and Felinfoel are the only brewers I can think of still offering this.

The alternative to cask is now not keg ales, but Guinness and international lager brands, mostly British-brewed. We even now have accounts on X celebrating British pubs praising the availability of Cruzcampo or Staropramen “in the right glass”. More and more people are now repertoire drinkers who will vary their choice of beer depending on the venue and the occasion. They are not dogmatically wedded to one particular category. “I like cask, but I find myself drinking Guinness more and more”, said one person. The challenge for anyone wanting to promote cask is how to encourage people to include it within their overall drinking repertoire. Simply denigrating other beers comes across as snobbish and is a poor tactic to win people over.

Personally I am much less dogmatic about drinking cask than I used to be. I would regard “exploring pubs” as a leisure interest, and if I’m going to a pub because I think it is an interesting place to visit I will pretty much always go for cask if they have it. If it’s poor, then I probably won’t be going back again anyway. The cask selection defines a pub in a way that having Madri and Guinness on the bar doesn’t. However, for what I would describe as “functional” pub visits, whether having a meal or just fancying a pint at a particular place and time, I might well swerve the cask unless I was confident it was going to be good. I described a couple of years ago how I plumped for a Carling rather than a single-pump Ruddles in a pubco pub. So I suppose that makes me a repertoire drinker too.

The point has been made that pub operators are reluctant to stock cask because it’s “too much trouble”. Obviously they are commercial companies and every product has to earn its keep on the bar, but the difficulties of keeping cask are often exaggerated, sometimes by those who are trying to surround it with an aura of mystique. In reality, all it takes is the conscientious application of simple principles. In the 1970s, CAMRA successfully persuaded brewers that it was worth the little extra trouble because it would bring the customers in.

The one category of pub operators for whom it definitely isn’t too much trouble are the family brewers. The vast majority of them stock cask in all or virtually all, their pubs. It is the product that bears their name, and which defines them as a business. I’d say that the tied estates of family brewers are, overall, where cask ale is best presented and best kept.

Most of the people who write about beer and pubs, whether professionally or as amateurs, are cask enthusiasts and, as I wrote a couple of years ago, this inevitably leads them to form a somewhat rose-tinted view of cask quality and availability. With the best will in the world, they’re naturally going to gravitate towards those pubs where cask is enthusiastically promoted and served well, and rarely venture into the “long tail” of other outlets.

There is little recognition of just how poor and inconsistent cask beer is in so many pubs that stock it. There are multiple reasons for this, but the biggest of all is overranging, simply stocking more beers than your turnover can support. My heart sinks whenever I read of some pub offering “a good range of cask ales”. More often than not, it will be a good range of tired, tepid glop. I’ve written about this at length over the years, but it seems to be a blind spot in the industry. A wide choice is perceived as something customers are looking for, and it seems to be a case of waiting for the other chap to blink first in terms of reducing your range, although I have seen some steps in this direction. Outside trusted outlets, ordering cask is a gamble, and losing out a few times will be seriously offputting to anyone for whom it isn’t a default choice.

There is always a tension between obscurity and over-familiarity with cask ranges. Surveys have shown that around 85% of drinkers want to see recognisable beers on the bar. They don’t want every trip to the pub to be a journey of discovery, and if all they see is a row of unfamiliar names, they may well be tempted to choose something else. But, on the other hand, one of cask’s USPs is local or regional provenance. It’s not meant to be uniform across the country, so when you find Taylor’s Landlord in Somerset or Fuller’s London Pride in Cumberland it comes across as something of a disappointment. A balance has to be struck between the two.

A factor working in cask’s favour is that it is proving very resilient. While sales volumes have fallen, this has not been matched by its wholesale removal from pubs. By and large, the keg-only pubs are still either trendy urban bars or working-class locals. It is rare to come across a pub that you really would expect to serve cask but doesn’t. It is still seen as an important part of the mix to attract casual customers, and this provides an element of optimism for the future. It also has to be remembered that Britain’s biggest pub operator in volume terms, Wetherspoon’s, is also a strong supporter of cask and indeed sells around one in ten pints produced.

Seven years ago, I wrote about The Cask Crisis, and much of what I said then still applies. The beer and pub market, compared with most other consumer markets, is relatively fragmented, and the ability of any single company to influence customers’ behaviour is limited. The long-term decline of cask is due to changes in customer preference, not some sinister conspiracy. There are no simple solutions, but in many outlets, cask continues to thrive and enjoys a loyal following. The best way to promote it is not through hand-wringing, but by highlighting the breweries who produce it and the pubs where it is served well and with enthusiasm.