Cask Ale Week: Quality, Price & Fresh Beer
It’s the annual cask ale week designed to promote fresh beer.
It was launched with a seminar the Brewers Hall in the City of London (report via @drinksmarven link below). The keynote was from Tim Martin of Wetherspoons. Not perhaps the most popular figure but cask beer would be in trouble if 800 Spoons pubs didn’t sell it. Martin said that cask represented about 20% of sales and that an effort was made to make sure it was getting drunk rather than sitting in the pipes. The number of beers on tap are reduced if need be to achieve this. Martin also made his traditional plea to redress the balance between supermarket and pub beer prices. The mini budget on 23rd September nodded at this.
Pete Brown, the beer writer, who has researched cask trends in recent years suggested that cask beer was by no means doomed, but much work is still needed to ensure its future. After the lockdown periods when pubs were shut and cask beer unavailable that is clearly a big campaigning issue.
Tim Martin has his views on prices and Wetherspoons is an undercutter here- and a successful one, Timothy Taylor underlined that they wouldn’t sell beer to Spoons at the price they were prepared to pay. This is the countervailing argument that a quality product should attract a premium price.
I’m still a huge fan of cask beer, but finding the top quality cask beer that is produced by UK brewers, on a pub bar-top is often no easy matter. CAMRA and SIBA are right to focus on a renewed right for pubs to sell guest cask beers beyond the tie
Leave a Reply