Cellar management
Over the next couple of pages, we focus on cellar management, with tips including how brewery courses are focusing on commercial benefits and the basics of keeping a cellar.
The story of the decline in on-trade beer sales is well rehearsed. Over the last two decades 14 million barrels have been lost - people are drinking four billion pints a year less in the pub than they were.
Behind that sobering statistic is an even more striking - and revealing - one. In the last eight years the average throughput of beer through the UK's 1.2 million draught beer taps has halved. This is not simply a result of declining volumes. Since 1994 the number of taps on bars has increased by 400,000!
Licensees generally have a wider choice, and there is a greater variety of products to choose from. But that hasn't been entirely fortuitous for the consumer.
Paul Arnold, the former technical director at Coors Brewers who as a consultant is now leading the brewing industry's drive for a unified quality initiative, believes that too many taps has been doubly detrimental.
Lower throughputs mean the beer is less fresh but, speaking at the Cellar to Seller conference in Birmingham last week, Paul identified a more insidious effect.
"There is a technical consequence as many outlets take longer than three days to sell a cask and five days to sell a keg," he said. "But it has also had a commercial consequence in so far as the real cost per barrel to serve beer has increased, especially in small outlets."
"Whatever the reason for the decline in sales, the end result is a declining spiral," he continued, pointing out that the average throughput of 13 gallons per tap per week is even lower in smaller pubs.
"Declining sales leads to attempts to save money by cutting corners and neglecting good practice," he said. "Over time this actually makes matters worse and damages future sales."
Bad practices which have crept into licensees' behaviour include:
- increasing the period between line cleaning and not sticking to a seven-day cycle
- buying ineffective detergents for both line cleaning and glass washing
- not maintaining cellar cooling equipment
- not varying container sizes through the week and year.
This is reflected, he said, in excess call-outs for brewery technicians and higher ullage returns, "despite the fact that - from a Coors perspective - the quality of the product coming out of the brewery has never been better".
As well as a closer partnership between retailers and suppliers - not just brewery technical representatives but more frequent visitors such as dray crews and gas suppliers - Paul believes the spiral of decline can be reversed by a more concerted effort on the part of brewers to drive home good cellar management practice in the trade.
Since April, funded by Coors and under the auspices of the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), he has taken a leading role in getting the major brewers talking about a common approach to cellar management.
The aim is that, some time next year, the results will be enshrined in a new British Institute of Innkeeping (BII) qualification and become a national standard for pubs.
The rise of the independent pub companies has, he believes, not only cut the umbilical cord between brewer and retailer that gave some guarantee of the quality of beer in the pub.
It has also caused confusion as pubcos have been faced with different advice and support from a variety of different brand owners and it has brought a bigger churn among licensees, threatening the continuity of skills they bring to the cellar and the bar.
"What we have to try to do is treat each retailer in the same way," Paul said. "There will be no razzmatazz about quality from us. It's about getting back to basics."
The difficulties that brewers have faced in recent years in their relationships with pubs have been experienced at Carlsberg-Tetley (C-T).
Phil Cross, the company's trade quality manager, is concerned that quality is not as high as it might be in the minds of the new pubcos and that the situation isn't helped by the fact that brewers have different standards for the different brands that you find on the bar.
"In some cases we have done a deal where we can take responsibility for all the beer sold by a pub group," he said. "In other cases we are working alongside other brewers and we have had to improve communications with our rivals.
"I keep a record of all the different nuances there are in keeping cask beers, for instance."
C-T looks to Cask Marque for overall specifications and standards on keeping cask ale and the quality accreditation body satisfies some of the demand for industry standards coming from the retail side.
Pub chain JD Wetherspoon, for instance, recently appointed Cask Marque to audit cellar management throughout its estate.
The major brewers, however, are more interested in pursuing a quality drive across the whole on-trade beer market, not just for cask ales.
They have already taken company initiatives, most notably Coors' Beer Reverence campaign and Interbrew's training programme for Stella Artois (see The Publican Brewers Report, October 7) but Paul Arnold's project, initiated by the BBPA, is the first example of an attempt to establish quality standards that are truly market and industry-wide.
Ironically, technological innovation aimed at improving the presentation of a pint has lately made the task more complicated. As Phil Cross points out, there are suddenly three different ways to dispense a pint of lager. Scottish Courage has introduced the HIT tap, which creates the head as a separate part of the dispense, while C-T is itself rolling out the Vortex Tap which aims to produce a creamier, longer-lasting head for draught Carlsberg and Carlsberg Export.
The Vortex Tap was invented by boffins at Birmingham University who discovered that offsetting the flow of beer inside the tap generates a low pressure zone which separates some of the carbon dioxide from the liquid.
Gas and liquid are recombined on leaving the tap bringing two advantages - barstaff don't need to swirl the glass to get a head and the beer can be poured much more quickly. At the moment it's set at 14 seconds for a pint but C-T is looking at the possibility of bring that down even lower.
All very ingenious and good for the quality of beer across the bar but somehow such innovations will need to be incorporated into the new industry standard.
Nevertheless, the basic elements of cellar management still constitute a craft which has changed little and there is plenty that brewers can agree on.
Through the BBPA's dispense panel, all the majors have an input into the new BII qualification, a much-modified version of the current Advanced Qualification in cellar management which is likely to be delivered by the brewers themselves.
"The course will focus on profit and be very practical, demonstrating a best practice that is geared to whatever level of technology a licensee might have available to them," said BII qualifications manager Gemma Bloomfield. "It will be designed to benefit everyone."
"There isn't a great deal wrong with the BII qualification as it stands, but it has become a bit outdated and is too technical," said Paul Arnold. "It has to be consumer-friendly and more generic so it can be applied to all situations.
"We hope that pub groups will drive it in their own houses and that the freetrade will be picked up by the brewers.
"There is a lot to do, but we have got to do it."
Pictured: Cask Marque assessor Mike Parkes checks out the cellar at Wetherspoon's Woodrow Wilson in Carlisle, watched by duty manager Helen Deans.
More on cellar management:
Phil Mellows looks at how the content of Interbrew's cellar training has changed, and at how Hall & Woodhouse sta
