The Cask Report 2019/20: Temperature, Quality & Craft
I joined CAMRA in 1975 and remain a member so I have some interest in and have drunk a good deal of cask beer over the years.
These days I also drink keykeg and sometimes keg as well. After all the days of Watneys Red Barrel and Double Diamond are, for the moment anyway, done.
I always read the annual Cask Report with interest, it contains lots of material of interest (link below to the new update) and full marks to Pete Brown and others for the hard work they do in researching it and producing it.
I’d highlight three areas from this year’s report:
Temperature. According to John Major cask beer should be served at the same temperature as a tepid cup of tea- 12C. In 1975 I could probably have lived with that (and did) and in the long hot summer of 1976 if your cask beer was too hot you put some ice in it..
Things have moved on. The report rightly notes that 14C is too warm for cask and I’m now more happy with at 9-11C (not lower). Of course it’s the influence of drinking chilled craft keg that underwrites this but keeping beer cool-ish but not frozen in a decent cellar is important.
Quality: the report notes that people who are served a poor quality pint of cask are put off, not surprisingly. I’d say its more common than might be thought even in pubs that look after their beer and have a reputation for doing so.
If you’re in a pub in the earlier part of the week it may well be quiet and the handpumps may not get much use. Yet cask is a living product and it won’t wait until busier times later in the week. My experience is not so much of poor quality but of an average pint when I expect a great one. In this sense the report’s finding that cask ale ranges on bars have reduced it may be no bad thing, though of course it does raise issues of competition for micro-brewers
Craft. I probably now drink more craft keg than cask. I rarely drink pints nowadays, more often two-thirds or halves. There is a lot more to sample than in the days when the choice (in North London) was one or two handpumps on the bar (in the better pubs). I noticed in the report references to drinking at lunchtime. I’m not sure who does that now (Wetherspoons aside) which may explain why so many bars and pubs certainly in London don’t open until 4pm npw.
That said I note a customer preference in pubs I frequent in North London (and indeed now to some extent in Cardiff) for craft keg over cask with a decline in the number of pubs. People who are interested in their beer are making a choice here. However, if the choice on the cask side was Marble Pint, Five Points Best or Harveys Best maybe the choice would be different….
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