OPINION: There’s a storm brewing

I was very honoured to speak at Brewery Hall in London at the Cask Marque Seminar recently and share the stage with some real ale enthusiasts.

What an amazing place Brewery Hall is. It made me very proud to be associated with the pub industry since the age of 16. I am not telling you how many years that is, of course.

Our company has recently joined Cask Marque as a corporate member to help support its mission of ale consistency and pint perfection.

I have also recently rejoined the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) as an individual member. I had ceased being a member some time ago when I found this independent body was rewarding me and the rest of their members with beer vouchers to use in chain pubs that didn’t really need the business.

Thankfully, a fresh approach has been taken. I do believe we desperately need both Cask Marque and CAMRA in our business… we need as many ale champions as we can get right now, according to everything I am reading.

All I seem to see presently is how cask ale is in decline. I know our Cheshire Cat Pub & Inns business is reasonably lucky –16 years ago as we set up the business, having started with a tied pub in Weymouth, Dorset, we made local ale our mantra.

Ales outsell lagers​

We said all those years ago that we would only sell cask ales brewed from within a 35-mile radius of each pub we opened and we have never gone away from this, except when we were forced to by tied arrangements.

Our pubs average five cask ale pumps per bar and, today, we serve around 166,000 pints of cask ale. Our ales outsell our lagers. Cask ale is over 6% of our annual net turnover and is one of the five ‘pillars’ of our business.

Cask ale is the most sustainable drink we serve, it is the only ‘living’ beer we serve on the bar, it is the freshest beer on the bar and, most importantly, the more we sell, the more we can support local businesses and local jobs.

We can develop new ales with local brewers and adapt quickly, should we need to. Plus, they don’t put their prices up annually like the big brewers. We work together and we are in it together, and the variety of ales to choose from is amazing. The customer to our pubs is the ultimate winner – as it should be everywhere.

Cask ale as a mass-produced drink is suffering because either it is in the hands of international brewers who do not understand the heritage, the history and the ‘tribalism’ associated with the ale they have acquired or with brewers who own lots of pubs and cannot see beyond their own ales. Ale is declining here largely because the customer is getting bored with the same old beers on the bar and badge on the pub.

So many wonderful ales have been demised by acquirers who think making a famous ale a national brew is a great idea. Tetley’s of Leeds, Boddingtons of Manchester, John Smith’s of Tadcaster and, latterly, Doom Bar of Rock (to name but a few) have all been acquired and then ripped out of their regional roots, stripped of their heritage and ruined by being ‘mass’ brewed with cheaper recipes at a characterless brewery somewhere accessible.

God help the cask ales that have recently fallen into the hands of international brewers where the focus will always be on their core lager brands… sadly ale has no hope here.

Soul searching​

I believe large international brewers are destroying our heritage and their long-term plan is to switch our ale drinkers to lager by buying up and phasing out our best ales nationwide. It has been going on years and I really fear for the likes of London Pride and Marston’s Pedigree.

Then you have Greene King announcing they have spent £2m on introducing pins. Pins were in our pubs 15 years ago. The problem for Greene King is that customers are bored of their core beers or indeed, never liked them in the first place, because great ales left the bars of many pubs that Greene King acquired to suit the Greene King Brewery.

When you put yourself ahead of your customers, you shouldn’t be surprised when customers turn their back on your ales. There needs to be a lot of soul searching. Brewing cask ale is something to be proud of but one has to realise the tide is turning, our customers want something local, something sustainable and something that tastes great… craft cask ale is definitely that drink.

If you didn’t know it by now… I love pubs. I love everything about them, the people, the individuality, the history, the heritage, the atmosphere, the cask ale at the centre of things and the comfort they bring to our lives.

A pub is not a pub without a variety of cask ales. We should be puzzling our customers with ale choice consistently – long live local cask ale.

Finally… I pulled my first pint of cask ale as a barman aged 18 at the Bull Hotel in Long Melford in Suffolk. It was Greene King IPA, a well-respected local ale with a porcelain badge. I still have a badge like it that was given to me by a very proud Brewery rep. Those were the days.