CAMRA’s chief executive Tom Stainer put it well: “It’s frustrating that media, which usually ignores everything positive we do and generally ignores beer, chooses to pick up on this.”
He was referring to a news item in the Sunday Times on 23 August that reported the Campaign was £800,000 in the red and membership had fallen to 143,038.
The headline called CAMRA a “group”. Some group! We have more members than the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats.
The Sunday Times’ report said sales of cask beer fell 7.1 per cent in 2025, following an 11.2 per cent fall the previous year. It added that big brewers had moved away from cask in favour of lager and craft beer but failed to point out that lager and craft are more profitable as a result of their longer “shelf life”.
It took CAMRA’s finance director Ian Hill to point out the blindingly obvious reason for the Campaign’s problems: Covid. The long, pin-pricked arm of the pandemic and government-installed lockdowns still hangs over us.
The result was that no beer festivals were held, including the Great British (GBBF). Not only was GBBF cancelled twice as a result of Covid but a further cancellation followed when London Olympia was being refurbished. The lack of festivals – national and regional – left a large hole in the Campaign’s finances.
GBBF returned last year at Birmingham NEC, a place with all the charm of an outside dunny and a pain to get to. The result was disappointing attendance and further loss of income.
To state the blindingly obvious, cask is a draught beer available only in pubs. As a result of lockdowns, less cask was drunk, which explains the decline in sales reported by the Sunday Times.
CAMRA is a remarkably resilient organisation and I have no doubt it will bounce back from its current difficulties.
We’ve been here before. When CAMRA was launched in 1971 membership soared, due in part to early beer festivals including Cambridge in 1974 and the first national one in London Covent Garden a year later.
When I joined the Campaign in 1976, membership had grown to 29,000. CAMRA had become a large and influential organisation and brewers had to take notice of its support for cask beer.
But success bred complacency. In the 1980s membership dropped to around 12,000. Many drinkers didn’t renew their membership on the grounds they thought the Campaign had successfully saved cask, with thousands of pubs stocking it and more festivals coming on the scene.
How naïve. CAMRA may have laughed such keg beers as Red Barrel and Double Diamond into oblivion but the big national brewers were determined to make the bulk of their profits from beers with long shelf lives.
The result was the arrival of the big brewers’ pathetic, thin and fizzy apologies for European lager.
The beers were risible but they were backed by massive advertising, including television.
I vividly recall the owner of a small chain of specialist cask beer pubs telling me in 1990 that sales of cask were “going through the floor”. He was gloomy about the future of the category.
And yet by the end of that decade cask was booming again. SIBA, first called the Small Independent Brewers’ Association, had made a big impact, bringing the beers of craft producers to a wider and appreciative audience.
That impact was deepened in 2002 when chancellor Gordon Brown introduced Progressive Beer Duty, giving smaller brewers much lower rates of excise duty than bigger producers.
The early years of the new century were halcyon days for cask. The number of independent brewers grew, beer festivals were packed and proliferating, and CAMRA membership was heading towards 200,000.
And then came Covid. With beer festivals – national, regional and local – in lockdown, many drinkers failed to renew their CAMRA membership.
Other factors have fuelled the problems of pubs and breweries. Extortionate business rates, VAT, excise duty, National Insurance and the Minimum Wage have piled problems on the industry, to such an extent that two pubs a day are closing and several hundred small breweries have pulled down the shutters.
The new prime minister is addressing some of these problems and there is room for optimism. But more, much more, needs to be done to boost the fortunes of the beer style CAMRA was formed to save and boost more than 50 years ago.
UNESCO has named Belgian beer an Intangible Cultural Heritage. I love Belgian beer, its rich, fascinating history and diverse styles, including beers made by Trappist monks and others by “wild” or spontaneous fermentation.
They are in a league of their own. But so is British cask beer. Most Belgian live beers are bottled whereas cask beer comes in casks. No other country in the world produces a substantial proportion of its beer in a form that sees fermentation end in the pub cellar, not the brewery.
It would give a brilliant boost to cask if it could win the UNESCO award. CAMRA, SIBA and the British Guild of Beer Writers should join forces to approach UNESCO to win this accreditation.
In the meantime, reports suggest that Generation Z – meaning young people in their late teens and 20s – are showing an interest in cask, seeing it as a natural product that should be preferred to filtered and pasteurised big brewers’ offerings.
And AB InBev, the world’s biggest brewer and producer of the likes of American Budweiser and Stella Artois, has bowed to pressure and is promoting Draught Bass, once Britain’s leading premium cask offering, worth close to one million barrels a year.
My local Ember Inn has Draught Bass on the bar. As I supped a pint I was impressed and even staggered by the number of people coming into the pub and ordering “pint of Bass, please”.
So be of good cheer. Cask beer will revive and thrive.
