By Phil Mellows
Popped into one of my locals on Sunday afternoon, feeling a bit hot and bothered and in need of something cool and wet, and my thirsting eyes flew to a pump clip for a cask ale from Cornwall’s Verdant Brewing.
I Remember Having One was what it was called. But too proud to ask for something so stupid I deployed my trusty beer drinker’s finger and ordered a pint of the ‘Citra Pale’. Fresh, light and slightly hazy at a quaffable 3.8% abv, it was exactly what I needed at that moment.
The surprising thing was that it came from a brewery that’s among the most highly regarded in the country for its hop-forward keg beer. Well, perhaps not totally surprising as it’s not the only ‘craft’ brewer that’s been putting out cask.
Towards the end of last year, for instance, I had my first taste of a cask ale from Buxton Brewery, a fruity Grinlow Pale, and I reported recently on these pages that Brighton’s Unbarred had turned to cask for its revival of a 1940s-style IPA.
Manchester’s Cloudwater Brewery started brewing cask a few years ago and for 2022 has produced a whole calendar of cask releases in just about every style.
And it turns out Verdant has a ‘Cask Project’ on the go, launched only this month, so I was lucky to get in early with my pint of… whatever it’s called.
There are other examples, and at a time when cask conditioned beers are experiencing difficulties each pump clip waves a little sign of hope.
In March, SIBA, which represents the UK’s independent breweries, reported that cask beer now makes up only 46% of its members’ production, down from 67% in 2019.
Perhaps not in the healthiest state going into the pandemic, cask was a victim of Covid. Millions of pints of this perishable liquid were literally poured down the drain when the first lockdown hit, causing some brewers to pull back nervously from cask production and others dependent on sales through pubs to close the business altogether.
Many pubs, too, decided to play it safe by removing cask lines, a trend especially evident in London, where Draught Guinness sales have lately spiked as a result of cask drinkers switching to their traditional default.
If cask beer becomes an endangered species, as some fear, we risk losing a unique aspect of our drinking culture. On a trip to New Zealand for the cricket a while back, I was deceived by handpumps on the bar that merely drew up ‘bright’ beer from a kind of bag-in-box system.
Proper cask beer is a product that isn’t finished until it has been conditioned in the pub cellar, where care and timing by people with knowledge and skill ensures it’s at optimum quality when it finally hits the customer’s glass.
As such, it’s vital to the pub, a product you can’t buy from the supermarket.
Cask is intrinsically no better than any other beer, but it is a special dispense style that needs nurturing, as a good number of modern brewers are now recognising. While their volumes are relatively small, it’s good to know they’re on side.
Photo © Camra, which will be hosting the Great British Beer Festival this summer, 2-6 August.
As an American who always makes a point of drinking cask ale when in the UK, I'd just like to stress how unique the cask ale tradition is to the UK -- not better or worse, but different, with a unique taste and mouthfeel, and worth preserving because of that.
Ps. haven't gone through the whole archive but have you covered the Kentish cask ale scene on British Beer Breaks?