What used to be known as beer Twitter (do we refer to it as beer X now?) has often loved a good argument and whilst in my opinion X has become something of a negative cess pit good only for damaging your mental health, some good conversation does come along now and again!
This one is to be fair one beery people have had on a regular basis for as long as I’ve volunteered in CAMRA (about 25 years now probably) and the same points keep getting made. However the beer scene has actually changed in those years and I don’t think the cask ale scene is in any better or worse health, it is just different, in a positive way I’d argue!
The metrics that usually come into the discussion is the variety of beers on the bar, the proportion of national brands versus smaller local/regional brewers and interest from younger drinkers or diversity of drinkers choosing cask ale.
The absolute worse thing for putting drinkers off cask ale are quality issues – beer that has gone off and turned to vinegar will never give a good impression and if someone trying it for the first time has that experience and assumes that’s what it is normally like probably won’t give it a second chance. My personal experience is not having many such bad experiences in recent years and some of that ones I have had has been in a certain bar I won’t name that is simply making the mistake of putting a cask range on that is too big to turnover fast enough to maintain quality. I would suggest another common theme of pubs with poor quality beer are those owned by a chain where the manager has to sell specific national brands that aren’t popular with their customers. In contrast I’ve seen some excellent examples in our area of bars with only one handpump which has a popular local brand such as Abbeydale Moonshine or Bradfield Farmers Blonde at a reasonable price and it sells like mad to a broad mix of drinkers!
Back in my younger drinking days most fun places around town didn’t sell any beer worth drinking – you either went to a fun bar or a good beer pub, one or the other, there was no crossover. In the peak of the craft beer boom the number of venues with cask ale and/or good craft beer on keg increased, however that has started to move back the other way with faux craft brands owned by the likes of Heineken, AB Inbev, Molson Coors and Greene King muscling local beers off the bar. We still have a number of fun late night venues with cask to choose from such as the Washington and the Bessemer plus of course some more traditional places like Shakespeares Ale & Cider House that open fairly late. I’d suggest we still have an amazing choice of cask ale venues to choose from. The range of beers may have shrunk a little in some places to maintain quality but I think this reflects the economic climate and people going out drinking less, rather than cask ale being less popular.
So finally – are young people drinking cask ale? Well, the University of Sheffield real ale society is still going strong and their student union continues to run a very successful annual beer festival whilst in the pubs and bars they are like any other drinker – have the right ales on the bar in good condition and properly promoted – they will drink it.
The cask ale market is far from dead!