There’s so much bad news around pubs and cask beer at the moment. Telling us that it’s an outdated serving style nobody wants to drink anymore and that the pubs that serve it are going the same way. Just up the road from us, Wolverhampton’s Banks’s brewery is set to close because its global owners have been unable to sell enough beer to make it worth the trouble. Perhaps this gloomy outlook rings true if you’re looking at a spreadsheet in the boardroom of one of the world's largest breweries, but from where we’re sitting I’m happy to report that nothing could be further from the truth. Small producers, such as ourselves, have seen demand for cask skyrocket in recent years.
So what’s the problem?
The aforementioned global breweries have incredibly long and complex supply chains, designed to distribute enormous volumes of lager efficiently, but poorly suited to getting cask beer from the brewer to the drinker quickly. For beer that is at its best fresh from the brewery, that’s a problem that undoubtedly affects the beer quality from some of these major brands.
Cask is rightly celebrated for its heritage, with some beers having been around for more than 100 years and the UK being just about the only place in the world where you can find a reliably good pint of cask. That heritage can act as a hindrance in some cases though; branding that has consistently leant hard into tradition has meant that many have stopped seeing it as a fun & exciting option and instead given it a reputation for being boring beer with little innovation. So whilst the logistics behind national brands haven’t helped things, the rest of the industry hasn’t helped itself either.
Where do we go from here?
With the growth in supermarket sales (more beer is now bought from supermarkets than it is from pubs), drinkers today are often looking for experiences when they come out for a beer. The rise of brewery taprooms and activity led bars has, in part, been because their offering can’t be replicated at home. What better serving style for the future of hospitality then, than something that is next to impossible to recreate outside of the pub? Cask beer is exclusively available in hospitality venues (we all know the bottles don’t cut it) and comes equipped with a sense of theatre that other beers just can’t match.
We’re best known for our kegged beers like Intuition and Signals. When it comes to our cask beers, we’ve taken what we’ve learned from our hazy styles and married it with some of the things we love most about cask. Appealing clarity and balanced, nuanced flavours of traditional styles matched with fruitier hops, exciting visuals and short supply chains meaning the beer gets from brewery to glass as quickly as possible.
Cask beer has had a rough few years, but it is rapidly gaining popularity with younger drinkers or those new to beer. Its fusty image is beginning to change with forward thinking breweries giving drinkers new options to celebrate a traditional serving style. We’re proud to see our take on cask beer enjoyed by drinkers new and old, safe in the knowledge that, for the latest wave of drinkers, cask is cool again.
