CASK
CASK
Cask beer played a crucial role in the rise of beer appreciation and remains a unique product, delivering a drinking experience that can’t be achieved any other way. But cask no longer enjoys the same priority among beer connoisseurs and brewers that it once did. Its shorter shelf life and need for conscientious cellaring and dispense is part of the problem, but it’s also misunderstood by many drinkers and surrounded by myths and half-truths dating from times when beer knowledge was disseminated much less widely.
For the first time in a popular book, award-winning beer writer Des de Moor introduces cask beer to a new generation, explaining why it’s still important and what distinguishes it from other beer. He examines the history of cask in detail, explores why it’s survived, and explains why it remains this country’s greatest gift to the world of beer.
Cask beer played a crucial role in the rise of beer appreciation and remains a unique product, delivering a drinking experience that can’t be achieved any other way. But cask no longer enjoys the same priority among beer connoisseurs and brewers that it once did. Its shorter shelf life and need for conscientious cellaring and dispense is part of the problem, but it’s also misunderstood by many drinkers and surrounded by myths and half-truths dating from times when beer knowledge was disseminated much less widely.
For the first time in a popular book, award-winning beer writer Des de Moor introduces cask beer to a new generation, explaining why it’s still important and what distinguishes it from other beer. He examines the history of cask in detail, explores why it’s survived, and explains why it remains this country’s greatest gift to the world of beer.
Keys to the Kingdom.
‘Anyone can take the keys to a pub not knowing how to clean lines, not knowing how to look after cask. If I went for a job in a pub kitchen, I’d have to have at least a basic food hygiene certificate. And yet we let people with absolutely no skills or knowledge handle beer. Personally, I think it would be fabulous if a basic beer certificate was mandatory but no one in the industry is going to push for that, so we need to encourage voluntary training as best we can. Licensees and pubcos often don’t appreciate the importance of training for beer, it falls to the bottom of the pile, even though seven out of 10 alcoholic drinks passing across the bar are beers.’ – Annabel Smith
Some people in the industry are sanguine about cask’s future. Cask has been threatened before and bounced back, they say. In the 1970s it was transformed from an obsolescent beverage for elderly men to the trendsetting choice of young activists, then aged with that generation into grandad’s drink again before being rediscovered anew in the 2000s. Something similar will happen again, at some time. ‘As with many things in life, from music to fashion, food and drink go through phases and almost constant re-invention,’ says Cask Marque assessor and former brewer Nigel Sadler. ‘If we lost cask tomorrow,’ says trainer and former licensee Annabel Smith, ‘someone else would rediscover it straight away and make a success of it.’ And some in the industry, particularly in parts of England that remain cask strongholds, fail to recognise any sense of crisis in their own experience: ‘Cask doesn’t seem to need rescuing in Yorkshire,’ Tom Fozard of Rooster’s in Harrogate told me. I’m not sure this entirely accounts for the historic plummet in consumption, nor the scale of today’s challenges. Overall consumption of alcoholic drinks continues to fall: 20% of respondents in a recent SIBA survey said they don’t drink alcohol and 29% of today’s pub visits don’t involve alcohol. Contrary to some assumptions, this isn’t just driven by younger people: 20% of over–55s are now abstaining too. As we saw in Chapter 7, reduced consumption can benefit more specialist and characterful products to some extent as drinkers choose to spend their units wisely, but the big volumes of the past are unlikely to return. Tom Stainer offers the insightful observation that ‘cask has always been under threat, and the minute you take your attention off it and something more profitable or trendy comes along, it could disappear alarmingly quickly.’
A rare breed?
Rarely found in the beer world at large, cask beer retains a significant commercial presence only in Britain, where it famously survived efforts by big brewery groups to phase it out in the 1960s and 1970s, provoking a vociferous consumer campaign.
Today the term ‘barrel’ is used generically in everyday English for a variety of cylindrical containers with bulging waists, and even some straight-sided ones, but originally it meant a container of a specific size. It still does in various specialist contexts, including brewing and the pub trade. The older generic term is cask, which originally referred to a wood container made of interlocking staves bound with hoops.
A rare breed?
Rarely found in the beer world at large, cask beer retains a significant commercial presence only in Britain, where it famously survived efforts by big brewery groups to phase it out in the 1960s and 1970s, provoking a vociferous consumer campaign.
Today the term ‘barrel’ is used generically in everyday English for a variety of cylindrical containers with bulging waists, and even some straight-sided ones, but originally it meant a container of a specific size. It still does in various specialist contexts, including brewing and the pub trade. The older generic term is cask, which originally referred to a wood container made of interlocking staves bound with hoops.
Cask continues to lose out to keg
In the 12 months to March, sales of cask ale were down almost 33% on pre-covid. Compared to the previous 12 months, there has been some recovery with volume up +8%. However, growth in keg ale (+19%) continues to outpace cask. Cask ale remains popular with older consumers, although kegged ale has turned the heads of many younger consumers thanks to its colder serve temperature, fizzier composition and typically lighter taste. There are benefits to operators too; keg ale provides a higher profit margin as well as being easier to store and lasting for longer than cask.
Volume growth of keg ale is largely driven by craft brands. Beavertown Neck Oil is the third largest keg ale in the UK on-trade by volume, seeing +93.1% growth in the 12 months to 25th March 2023 compared to the previous year. Likewise, Brixton Reliance (+105%) and Goose Island Midway IPA (+22%) have both seen growth.
Cask is still a successful avenue for many traditional producers – although many are looking to modernize. Timothy Taylors Landlord cask ale saw +42.2% volume growth on last year. This hasn’t stopped the brewery releasing “Hopical Storm” – their first venture into keg ale that was on show at last weekend’s Brew London event. Greene King, another major cask ale producer, have turned their focus away from cask towards their first craft beers that have seen success since their release in 2022.
Sources: CGA OPM MAT to 25/03/2023,
‘When I’m out for a drink and people ask me what I do and I say I’m a cooper, they say, “What’s one of them?”’
- Euan Findlay of the Theakston brewery,
Cask - post lockdown
‘Previously, I wouldn’t go out of my way to drink cask beer, it wasn’t a huge part of my life, but after the lockdowns, it was “Get me to the pub!” You can get great beer at home, but it’s not the same thing. London does not have a good reputation for looking after cask but the cask beer I’ve had since has all been much better, every pub seems to be cleaning their lines, people have less lines on and they’re kept better and turning over faster. That’s prompted us to put a few more beers in cask on a regular basis for the first time.’ –
Evin O’Riordain, Kernel brewery
‘When I’m out for a drink and people ask me what I do and I say I’m a cooper, they say, “What’s one of them?”’
- Euan Findlay of the Theakston brewery,
The Market Share
“In 2021, cask accounted for only 4.3% of overall beer production and 15% of draught sales.
“That’s still quite a lot of beer: about 1.8 million hl, almost 317 million pints, but a tiny proportion of perhaps 52 million hl, or over 9 billion pints, produced on the eve of World War I.” - Des de Moor
The Market Share
“In 2021, cask accounted for only 4.3% of overall beer production and 15% of draught sales.
“That’s still quite a lot of beer: about 1.8 million hl, almost 317 million pints, but a tiny proportion of perhaps 52 million hl, or over 9 billion pints, produced on the eve of World War I.” - Des de Moor
