The unlikely, chic saviour of real ale

For years now, “real ale” has been regarded with the same indulgent fondness you reserve for your out-of-town relative who probably drinks it. “Cask ale” (to give it its less emotive, technically correct name) is an icon of traditional Britain, the unique selling proposition of an authentic pub. Even people who never drink beer are familiar with the foot-tall wooden handpumps that stand defiantly at odds with sleek, back-lit lager taps. Those handpumps hang heavy with clichés and stereotypes, some deserved, many inaccurate.

The problem is, our fondness has stopped translating into sales. In 2024, the market has lost one-third of the volume it enjoyed in 2015. The mood around cask is gloomy and bleak.

This demise has been blamed on the inexorable rise of lager, which now accounts for three-quarters of British beer sales. But since about 2011, there’s been an additional culprit: the global craft beer revolution.

If you’re not fighting the beer wars on a day-to-day basis, you could be forgiven for thinking that real ale and craft beer are the same thing. But for many, they are not just different, but foes.

Here comes the science bit.

Since the 1960s, most beer we drink in pubs is filtered and pasteurised, served from pressurised kegs with the addition of carbon dioxide (and, sometimes, nitrogen to create “smooth” pours such as Guinness). It has a long shelf life, and it’s consistent. We call this keg beer.

Meanwhile, cask ale is unfiltered and unpasteurised, and is packaged with live yeast that means the beer finishes its fermentation in the pub cellar. The skills of pub cellarmanship involve knowing how to get it into perfect condition just as it’s ready to pour. If you think real ale is warm, flat and tastes of dead badger, you have been drinking it in a pub where no one possesses these skills. Drink cask in a pub where the licensee is passionate and knowledgeable, and it has a beguiling depth and subtlety no other beer can get close to.

Towards the end of the 20th century, if you wanted ice-cold refreshment, you chose lager. If you wanted beer that had flavour and character, you went for cask ale. Then, the craft beer thing happened.

Small-scale American brewers worked out how to make good-quality, full-flavoured ales served from keg, combining the taste explosion of cask with the chilled consistency of keg. By 2016, not only were they being imported to the UK, but British brewers were mastering the style. You could argue that they were too fruity or bitter or overpriced. But not only did many drinkers love the flavour, the branding was young, punky and American. Traditional British real ale suddenly looked older and fustier than ever. Sales plummeted.

Craft beer — produced by small, independent brewers — re-energised the beer market, drawing in younger people and women and making beer look more inclusive and relevant. Naturally, the global corporations that control the British beer market wanted in, so they promptly bought up leading craft beer brands such as Beavertown and Camden Town.

Today, drinkers of these brands still think they’re drinking true craft beer. Meanwhile, the big corporations offer sweeteners and incentives for stocking them that struggling pubs can’t afford to refuse.

Stock a macro-brewed “craft” beer and you’ll get a big, shiny beer dispensing tower on your bar for free — but you might struggle if you want to put anyone else’s beer through it. You’ll get discounts if you hit volume targets — perhaps meaning you can’t afford to stock that local craft beer everyone is talking about, in case it’s “too good” and eats into your macro-craft sales, which it probably will.

In this way, draft beer taps are “tied” to the big brewers. But in the past few years, craft brewers have found a loophole. In a delicious twist, it’s becoming evident that “craft” and “cask” might save each other, united by a common foe.

You see, the global brewers really can’t be bothered with cask ale. Last month, Marston’s — the UK’s biggest cask ale brewer — sold its stake in a joint brewing venture with Carlsberg to its Danish partner, referring to cask as a “distraction” from its core business of running pubs. Molson Coors churns out Doom Bar, but apart from that, there’s hardly a flicker of interest in cask ale from any of the global corporations.

This means the cask handpulls in pubs are not as jealously guarded as the keg taps. At first, almost as a cheeky joke, darlings of the British craft beer scene such as Cloudwater and Deya started issuing releases of their star beers in the cask format. And every time they did, the beer flew out.

“Our drinkers go crazy for the likes of Cloudwater and Duration. So when they see these beers on cask, they get really excited about it,” says Mark White, owner of The Brewery Tap in Norwich. The pub began as a cask ale venue, but 10 years ago, the diversity of craft beers in keg took it in a different direction. The cask lines were reduced to make room. “Cask ale had become so staid,” White said.

Young drinkers who came of age with the craft beer revolution are perfectly happy to see how these hazy, juicy pale ales translate into the smoother, less carbonated cask format. And, now people are drinking cask, the brewers at places like Deya, Cloudwater, Five Points and Brew York can openly admit that they always had a passion for traditional cask styles, and start playing with brown ales, best bitters, milds and milk stouts.

“Despite being known for our cans and kegs of juicy IPAs, everyone at Verdant absolutely loves drinking great cask ale,” says Joseph Hurst, the brewery’s head of on-trade. “For the most part, we brew classic cask styles, mostly best bitters and clear pales. They’re not necessarily the styles of beer that we’re usually known for by our regular customers. But cask ale is a classic. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel.”

When these styles from yesteryear are reimagined by modern craft brands, it turns out there was nothing wrong with cask beer as a format at all. It had just become old and staid, and was being served by people who couldn’t be bothered to keep it well.

This cask ale revival is not being reflected in official sales figures for the overall market — partly because the brewers involved are so small, and partly because it’s happening in taprooms and small venues that are under-represented in sales audits. But it is happening. Casks of beer are selling out in an hour. Gen Z are drinking milk stouts and best bitters. What was once old and irrelevant is new and vital once more.

Pete Brown is a beer writer and author, most recently of ‘Clubland: How the Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain’. Jancis Robinson is away

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