I have a word of advice for the doomsters anxious to write the obituary of cask beer: you should have dropped in to the St Albans beer festival at the end of September.
Attendance was close to 10 per cent up on 2025. It was noticeable that an increasing number of young people had come to enjoy a choice of 300 beers and ciders.
They underscored recent reports that Generation Z – people in the 18-30 age range – are showing an interest in cask. They like not only its taste profile but also the fact that it’s not trunked all around the planet, is made from the finest malts and hops and is produced by dedicated brewers who avoid filtration, pasteurisation and gas dispense.
The year 1975 is part of CAMRA folklore. It’s the year when a national festival was held in Covent Garden in central London and it was such a success that it put the fledgling Campaign on drinkers’ maps.
But St Albans came first. It staged a festival in March 1974 and it was the launch pad for CAMRA in Hertfordshire.
It was held in the Market Hall and brewers offered to donate beer free of charge – 14 brewers participated and there were 26 casks on display.
When a director of the large Charrington brewery in the East End of London caught wind of the festival he was determined it should feature his beer. He put an 18-gallon cask of IPA in the back of his open-top sports car and headed for Hertfordshire.
The festival ran for just one day. The beer rapidly disappeared as drinkers revelled in the rare delights of Adnams, Brakspear and Hook Norton – beers never before seen in the area. Two strong beers – Fuller’s ESB and Greene King Abbot – proved especially popular aided by the fact they were sold for just two pence per half-pint glass.
In the early 1970s there was just one CAMRA branch covering the whole of the county. Today there are four and choice for drinkers is inspirational.
In the early 1970s we were told we didn’t need a beer festival in St Albans as the city had such a profusion of pubs. There were more than 50 but back then only two offered cask beer. The festival gave drinkers a glimpse of what was available and publicans responded by ordering beer from the growing number of independent breweries.
Last month’s festival was the 29th. When the Market Hall closed to make way for a multi-storey car park the festival led a peripatetic life until 1996 when it found a new, permanent home in the Alban Arena. It’s a major show place hosting concerts and pantomimes. With the auditorium cleared of seats and a large stage, it provides an excellent venue for the festival. There’s a basement for beers from Belgium and other countries and when the weather is kind there’s a large outdoor drinking area.
There are side rooms suitable for small events. I helped judge the beer of the year competition – congratulations to Tring brewery for winning the top prize with Liberator pale ale (4.1 per cent ABV).
A new event this year was a talk and tasting by me on beer from the wood. Would anyone be interested in such an esoteric feature? The answer was that it was sold out and we had to stage it twice.
It was good to see a large number of Gen Z from both genders in attendance. We sampled a Lambic-style, wild-fermentation beer from Crossover Blendery called Little Moor (6.4per cent). It’s a pale beer aged in wood for between one and three years with the addition of morello cherries.
Tring supplied its 7.2 per cent barley wine Death or Glory aged in a nine-gallon wood firkin. Chiltern brewery near Wendover chipped in with its own barley wine, Bodgers (8.4 per cent) aged in a whisky cask. Oak and whisky melded well with traditional English malts and hops.
We ended the sessions – and they almost ended me – with two American bottled beers of astonishing strength. Boulevard Brewing in Kansas City has a Whisky Barrel Stout that weighs in at 11.8 per cent. This was followed by Alltech’s Lexington brewery in Kentucky with a 12 per cent Bourbon Barrel Imperial Milk Stout. Both beers punch their weight with massive hits of oak, bourbon, roasted grain and fruity hops. The Lexington beer had the added attraction of lactose or milk sugar that gives a delightful creamy note to the finished beer.
Wild beers, beers aged in whisky casks and strong American beers stored in bourbon barrels – they’re all a long way removed from the simple pleasures of the first St Albans festival back in 1974.
But that’s a measure of how both beer and CAMRA have evolved over that long period. And there’s one fact that’s without dispute – real ale is back with a spring in its step.
