Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 848 BREWING & BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES BUSINESS Here is a glass of cask beer. Gleaming, polished, reflective and suggestive of a good time to come. It could be the colour of an ancient sideboard left to you by a venerable aunt; or it might be reminiscent of sunshine, the first rays of the sun crossing the land on a summer’s morning. It might be amber, tawny, ruby-red, or as dark as the thoughts of a murderer. Whatever the colour, one vital force of nature unites these beers — this is beer that conditions in the cask, and it is the skill of the publican and his or her staff that brings this beer to the drinker in the finest condition. This is cask beer and this sense of the finest condition is not always the lot of the beer drinker, as I can testify from one recent experience. There I was, meeting a brewer in a pub that I visit at least once a week. A lot of keg plus some cask beer; I drink whatever I fancy. The last time I’d been in I’d devoured a keg Double IPA. This evening I fancied a cask beer from Oakham, but as soon as I sat down with it and took a sniff, there was a problem. There was a vinegary-like sourness on the nose; gingerly I took a small sip and this avalanche of acetic sourness continued on the palate. I took it back and the barperson changed it without a problem (as they should) and acknowledged that it had been on too long. A new beer was pulled through, but I was on a keg saison by then, unwilling to risk trying any more cask. I have had similar experiences elsewhere in different pubs, not only here in Exeter, but throughout the country. It has even got to the stage where I watch what the person before me is ordering and copy them. It is making me believe that ordering a cask beer in some pubs in akin to betting on a game of roulette. As you stand there at the bar, the questions flit through the mind. Will the beer be full of flaws, will it be under-conditioned, will it be tired, when was it last poured? The problem is that cask by its very nature is a wilful beast, almost like a show pony that can turn on the style when it wants to but doesn’t always. This then leads me to the question: is cask beer on the ropes? Is real ale going down the pan? This is not a question picked out of the air following my experience with the Oakham beer. Part of it comes from my continuing experience with cask and the other is a consequence of the big debate that kicked off 2017 in the rarefied world of the beer bubble. It all started with Manchester’s Cloudwater (a brewery I rate incredibly highly) declaring that they would be pulling out of making cask in 2017. Reasons? Managing Director and co-founder Paul Jones expressed concerns that their cask beer wasn’t in the best of condition when it was served at the bar. Then there was the issue of pricing: ‘Whilst there has been great appetite for our cask beer in bars and pubs up and down the country, traditional price points remain an increasingly compromising norm…where we can just about tolerate today’s market pricing for our keg and bottled beer, we see little sense in continuing to accept the labour of racking, handling and collecting casks whilst we make insufficient margin.’ Following on from this, beer writer Pete Brown declared in his Morning Advertiser column that he was drinking less cask because of quality reasons. All of a sudden cask was dead, especially in the fevered atmosphere of beer blogging. So let’s try and think a bit more rationally about it all. As well as the issue of quality the pricing of cask is seen as a torpedo running against the category; it is too cheap so breweries such as Cloudwater pull out of producing it. There are stories told of small breweries selling cheaply to hard-pressed licensees (mind you I’ve heard similar stories in the trade for the past 20 years). Yet I would like to see the reaction if you went into a pub and told people that the beer they were drinking was too cheap. Maybe some education about cask, stripped bare of its CAMRA ‘this is the best’ approach, might help people understand what its production entails and why it is different (not better than) from keg and why when it’s at its very best it is reassuringly expensive (hold on where have we heard that before?). When it is in its pomp cask represents some of the best in beer drinking. I have happy memories of drinking several pints of Hook Norton’s Old Hooky in a pub in the depths of Oxfordshire, that are up there with enjoying a freshly poured litre of Augustiner’s Helles in Munich or a West Coast IPA at a brewpub in Oregon. When it’s right it rocks. But it’s not always rocking these days and if something isn’t done about this inconsistency it’ll become a bit of a joke, confined to small areas where the licensees take care, while the rest of us carry on our merry way downing Double IPAs and treacle toffee stouts. Care needs to be taken, but I do think the price question is very much a non-starter. It might be something someone with a good job might like to do, but to a pensioner or someone on a low wage it might be more unacceptable. I suppose what I’m trying to say is concerns about cask beer are real but with a little bit more care at the bar top and information from brewers what they actually do to make cask beer such a wonderful drink, we could easily reverse this game of roulette. As for the price issue, I’m only a writer so I’ll leave that for the brewers and licensees to deal with it. Adrian Tierney-Jones Adrian Tierney-Jones Care for your cask beer! Adrian Tierney-Jones is a freelance journalist whose work also appears in the Daily Telegraph, All About Beer, Beer, Original Gravity, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, and Publican’s Morning Advertiser amongst many others. He’s been writing books since 2002 and they include West Country Ales, Great British Pubs, Britain’s Beer Revolution (co-written with Roger Protz) and the history of the International Brewing Awards Brewing Champions; general editor of 1001 Beers To Try Before You Die and contributor to The Oxford Companion to Beer, World Beer and 1001 Restaurants You Must Experience Before You Die. Chair of Judges at the World Beer Awards and also on the jury at Brussels Beer Challenge, International Beer Challenge and Birra Dell’Anno. 8_Layout 1 13/02/2017 10:38 Page 1