A fresh approach to cask beer
By Phil Mellows
Cask beer has been a victim of the pandemic. Sales have fallen by more than 20% since 2019 in an already declining market as pubs, and probably drinkers, have lost confidence in the traditional brew after successive lockdowns forced them to pour millions of pints down the drain.
That’s been a factor, though not the only one, in the wave of brewery closures you might have noticed over the past few months.
Now a group of brewers, together with industry bodies and the Campaign for Real Ale, have come up with a plan, and some cash, to hopefully turn it around. In a week or two you might notice something happening at your local – if your local happens to be one of the 27 pubs that are taking part in the pilot for the Drink Cask Fresh project.
In fact, you won’t fail to miss the almost squintingly bright and colourful marketing materials designed to get people to give cask beer a try.
Handpumps will be dressed in carnivalesque wrappers, accompanied by matching bar runners, beer mats and posters carrying a QR code that’s takes you through to a website with more info. There will be special glasses in pints and two-thirds, and bar staff will be wearing a quite classy T-shirt, too.
After 10 weeks, if the £71,000 they’re spending on this succeeds in changing perceptions and winning more pub-goers to cask, the campaign will be rolled out around the country.
Drink Cask Fresh has been coming together for more than a year, and the thought, effort and expertise that’s gone into it is impressive. The core idea is that what makes cask beer special is that it’s made to be drunk fresh. Yet surveys suggest most people think the freshest beer at the bar is bottled lager. Which sounds strange until you realise how closely ‘freshness’ is associated with ‘coldness’.
Not that cask should be warm. As beer writer Pete Brown, who has taken over as project manager for this phase of the campaign, points out: “Served correctly, cask beer is the same temperature as the English Channel in winter, and if you think that’s warm, try jumping in!”
This does raise the question of quality, though. If someone new to cask is tempted to try it and it’s not right, if it’s not between 10 and 13 degrees Centigrade, if it’s flat or off, that might well be the last cask beer they ever buy.
All that carefully constructed marketing architecture is balanced precariously on a well-kept pint.
So quality assurance, backed by the Cask Marque accreditation scheme, is a key part of the project, and it’s the toughest part to deliver.
As well as being on top of cellar management, pouring technique and clean glassware, bar staff will have to be trained to spot a bad pint before it reaches the unwary customer’s lips. Seems to me that an awful lot can go wrong. But it’s great to see some fresh ideas giving a boost to the kind of beer that makes British pubs famous. Let’s hope it works.