CALLED TO THE BAR

Can we save cask beer from extinction?

I had my first pint of cask beer since March 16 — it was Old Peculier then and it was gorgeous — several days after the pubs reopened on July 4. The beer was a disappointment and I stayed with what we used to call craft keg for the next few pub visits. Towards the end of the month salvation came in a superb pint of Adnams Broadside at the Bridge Inn in Topsham — it was rich with malt character and earthy English hops and had an effortlessly unassuming side-helping of bitterness, dryness and subtle nuttiness. Since then the majority of glasses of cask beer I have tried have been fine, with several reaching a heavenwards peak of sublimity, though sadly there has been a noticeable amount of undistinguished ones.

The reason I mention what seems like an irritable outbreak of beer-ticking is that during the time when the pubs were closed, it seemed that a lot of people I knew through the world of beer were missing cask as much as they missed the confederacy of the pub. Cask, after all, is the beer that cannot be replicated at home because the natural and modest centre of its soul is the public house. It is also best drunk in the (socially distanced) company of like-minded souls with an assortment of benevolent views on the world.

Cask beer is many things to many people: to some it is the stout yeoman of England, the horny handed son of the soil, the noble working man and woman who once toiled down the pit or at the factory bench, yesteryear in other words. To others it is a unique part of the world of beer, a stubborn survivor, a robust and elegant dispensation of beer whose champions claim it to be unparalleled, up there with Stilton cheese, salt-marsh lamb and the Newmarket sausage, to be savoured and protected.

Protected. The word just shot into my mind as I concluded that last paragraph and it made me think a bit deeper about the nature of cask beer’s existence. It seems to me that it has always lived on the edge of extinction or, to put a little less dramatically, in fear of its existence, which is why its adherents have demanded a kind of protection for it.

In the 1950s bad bar practice (slops being put back into barrels and a lack of cellar knowledge which equalled stale beer) was a partial reason for the growth of bottled beer, and also created the gaps that enabled lager and keg-conditioned beer to sweep all before them in the 1960s. Then CAMRA came along and partially reversed the decline, only for the craft beer revolution (ok craft keg) to mute things again (though there are many other reasons for its decline).

According to my beer-writing colleague Pete Brown, the most recent figures for cask beer sales suggest a continued downward decline or in his words in an email he sent to me, ‘the worst performing sector in beer’. Naturally, three months of closed pubs and the current curfew cannot do anything but harm — and who knows, by the time this is published pubs might have been closed again, or they might have reopened as furniture stores or butchers’ shops given that this government has had more flip-flops than a flip-flop shop on a Cornish beach.

As well as the lockdown I would say from personal experience that one of the biggest challenges it faces is quality at the front line of the bar. If I return to that first post-lockdown pint I had in a pub back in July it didn’t taste very nice — its condition was slight, the flavour over ripe and there was a tannic like woodiness on the palate that suggested over-sparging in the brewery. Here both pub and brewery, for me, were at fault.

Continuing to draw on the evidence of my pub visits over the last couple of years, it does seem that indifferently kept pints have become the new norm (as the current fashionable phrase has it) and I have only ordered cask beer in places that I trust and know will keep a perfect pint. But as that first post-lockdown pint demonstrated there is also a lack of creativity or even accomplishment in some of the beers tasted. I am not asking for bucketloads of New World hops being added, or even a mixed fermentation bitter (though that is something I would pounce on like a wolf on the fold), but something like Anspach & Hobday’s Ordinary Bitter have for me refined what a bitter can be like. Having not being to London since February I have not had these beers on cask, but poured from a can they were superb so I can only relish and anticipate the time when I sit down in their tap room with a freshly poured pint.

It might seem mean and petty to complain during these perilous times for the pub and brewing trade. However, if cask beer is to be more than a protected species edging ever forward towards an extinction-level event what better time is there than now to re-boot that sense of taking part in a lottery whenever cask beer is ordered at the bar-top.

Adrian Tierney-Jones