Ten years ago, I wrote:
My local Spoons … [currently has] six decent guest beers, plus the usual suspects. On my way to the Spoons’ I stuck my nose in every pub or bar I passed, making a mental note of how many beers were available & which breweries were featured. And I can report that the [four] places I passed on that ten-minute walk were serving 22 cask beers from 15 different breweries … This evening I tried the experiment of walking ten minutes the other way, to find another three bars and another eight beers [from as many breweries] … I think this has to be a bubble, speaking economically (as well as culturally) … Realistically you’d have to bet that we’re going to lose one of those bars and/or two of those breweries over the next year.
The other day I tried the experiment again. The Sedge Lynn is still there, and currently (according to the app) has five decent cask beers from four breweries – not a huge change from ten years ago. On the way there, though, I passed four bars, which between them offered seven cask beers from five breweries; “22 cask beers from 15 different breweries” seems like a very distant memory. Ten minutes the other way took me past the same three bars as ten years ago, now offering seven cask beers from six breweries (instead of 8 from 8). Putting it all together, if you’d walked from the Nip and Tipple to the Beer House (the last stop before the Sedge Lynn) ten years ago, you could have had the choice of 30 cask beers from 22 different breweries; if you did it last weekend, the choice would be half that, 14 cask beers from 11 breweries. I didn’t include the Beagle on either occasion, because (a) it’s just past the Sedge Lynn and (b) you’ve got to stop somewhere, but it wouldn’t have helped the comparison – at the weekend they had all of one handpump operational, and it was serving one of the (two) cask beers that were on at the Font.
What’s changed? Well, many things have changed – I’m comparing April with June, apart from anything else, so it may possibly be that some of those bars were running dry due to warm-weather demand. Other than that, I was expecting to see little change among the (seven) bars of 2013 – six of them still are bars, after all – and carnage among the (22) breweries, but if anything it was the other way round. As far as I can make out, only three of the 22 breweries have closed outright, even after ten years (Bristol Beer Company, Hornbeam and Liverpool Organic) – although both Dark Star and Magic Rock have been taken over, twice. Three breweries – Brightside, Marble and RedWillow – wereon both lists. That leaves another 14 breweries whose cask beers you could find in that run of bars in 2013, vs. 8 that were there at the weekend:
2013: Art Brew, Beartown, Bollington, Buxton, Green Mill, Mobberley, Phoenix, Pictish, Redemption, Robinson’s, Salamander, Tatton, Thwaites and XT (plus Brightside, Marble and RedWillow)
2023: Arbor, Blackjack, Brewsmith, Hophurst, Neon Raptor, Settle, Squawk and Thornbridge (plus Brightside, Marble and RedWillow)
So that’s two breweries on both lists and five that aren’t on the second list because they’ve closed or been taken over, plus another fourteen that featured in 2013 only and eight in 2023 only. Adding the three on both lists back in, that’s 17 in 2013 vs 11 in 2023 – which is certainly a drop, but I’d call it substantial rather than dramatic. Put it this way, there doesn’t seem any obvious reason why we shouldn’t be seeing beers from Beartown, Pictish and Tatton on handpumps in Chorlton, bar space allowing.
But that’s the catch. The scale of the change is much clearer if you look at the bars involved and at which, or how many, cask beers they’re serving. (‘Beers’ in this table refers to cask beer.)
| 2013 | 2023 | ||
| Name | Beers | Name | Beers |
| Nip & Tipple | 2 | 2 | |
| Hillary Step | 4+ | (new owners) | 4+ |
| Jam Street Café | 2 | Jam Street | none |
| De Nada | 2 | closed | – |
| – | Mary and Archie | none | |
| Font | 4+ | 2 | |
| Pi | 2+ | 99 Reasons | none |
| Beer House | 4+ | (new owners) | 4+ |
On the plus side, both the Beer House and the Hillary Step have changed hands without much change to the character of the bar, and in particular while continuing to offer a good cask range – and the Nip and Tipple has carried on doing whatever it is they do, complete with a couple of interesting cask beers. (Never go in, I must admit. Bit middle-class for me.) That’s about it for positives, though. De Nada turned into Keg and Cask, then closed, and eventually re-emerged as a Korean restaurant; I didn’t think the Thirsty Korean would last either, but it’s weathered the pandemic and is starting to look like a fixture. Not really a bar, though. Whether Jam Street has had a change of owner or just a change of decor I’m not sure, but either way it now seems to be managing without cask beer; there are three handpumps on the bar, but nothing on any of them (although WhatPub still lists it as having two cask beers). Pi was a real loss; 99 Reasons, in its place, has a nice café-bar vibe and a decent range of keg, but no cask beer (I think they had a couple on when they first opened, but I may be imagining it). Not sure if I’ve ever had real ale at the frankly-not-really-aimed-at-me Mary and Archie’s (don’t know why people go there, it’s so crowded!), but they certainly don’t do it now.
And then there’s Font (the Font?), which had a really impressive lineup of eight cask beers, sixteen kegs and eight real ciders back in 2013. That range was scaled down over the years, and they’ve currently got five handpumps, one of which is dedicated to cider. On reopening after lockdown the cask beer selection was minimal (i.e. 1), but subsequently they’ve built it back up again. Or so I thought – recent visits suggest that two cask beers is the current maximum. (I don’t know whether this has anything to do with the recent unexpected closure, after which the bar first reopened without any alcohol on the menu and then disabled the ‘ordering’ section of its app – all very odd.)
Seven bars in 2013, seven in 2023, but in 2013 three were serving four or more cask beers and the other four were serving two; now there are two with 4+ cask beers, two with two of them and three not serving any at all. I think we’re looking at two factors, one of them a long-term process and the other a short-term change – or rather, at a long-term process accelerated by a short-term factor. The long-term process is the mainstreaming of ‘craft’ in general, and the consequent fraying of any ties with a smaller community of drinkers with concerns about beer condition and brewery ownership: it’s become increasingly clear that you can do the craft thing without doing the CAMRA thing, in other words. (As for the awkward business of selling a perishable product to punters who are half connoisseur and half cheapskate, leave it to those bars that have a reputation for it (and/or are run by real ale geeks).) I don’t need to name the short-term factor, except to say that a lot of pubs poured away a lot of beer towards the end of March 2020; on re-opening, a lot of people must have found the keg-only option looking more attractive.
There may be other factors – the cost of living is one, although you wouldn’t think lack of spending power would work in craft beer’s favour. Either way, it looks as if the cask bubble in Chorlton and environs has pretty well burst, with “4+ cask beers” bars moving into the “2” bracket, and “2 cask beer” bars moving to “0”. While the cask/keg split means something very different from what it did back in the 70s – I drink a lot of keg myself, and by choice – it is starting to look as if cask beer may need defending, again.
Oh Good Ale 
3 Comments
Very interesting analysis Phil. It does suggest that leaving cask to those that handle it well is good policy and the points about addressing a mixture of beer expert and cheapskate are well made.
Reductions in handpumps and choice can be wise, if subsequently you sell better beer and throw less away. Less clear is the spending power thing, but although craft beer is now ubiquitous, its share of the market, if not declining, is ceasing to grow. Mainstreaming with the likes of Heineken’s Beavertown is eating craft beer’s lunch and that will continue. For local craft beer brewers it is already dog eat dog and as we have seen, some have closed as a result, and more will have to.
Back to spending power. Where does the ceiling lie? Supermakets are in the craft game and I notice in London, where I am at the moment, folks are buying craft cans for street drinking in the lovely weather – and not quite mingling in the top spots with bar goers – but very close.
Cask is a volume drink, which as a perishable product has to be priced to go. It may well suffer in places where in all likelyhood it isn’t central to the main offer. So, is cask in danger? Yes. But it always has been and some repositioning is probably a good thing.
Finally, this all depends on what part of this island you are looking at. It varies a lot.
The craft beer trend is nearer the end than the beginning so yeh, it’s in decline, and with it the trendy gaffs, vanity breweries and high margin brand building.
Stockport has seen many of it’s pub based beer geek outlets disappear with the local CAMRAs favouring a single mediocre micro pub these days. A pity, Porters railway, the Hope, the Crown were all decent boozers with a fine pint. The mainstream pubs have a wider choice, though you need deep pockets.
Your problem for campaigning for cask beer is campaigning for beer is a bourgeois concern and you lost a generation of bourgeois beer drinkers to craft beer. Tandlemans reform attempt failed and you told the craft kids to go form their own campaign. Which is why most of your beer festival volunteers are old boys.
Not to matter. The craft kids are growing up and with kids to feed no doubt appreciate brewdog slabbed up on a pallet in supermarkets as they can only go out these days if they can find a sitter.
Interesting points. One of the things that strike me is that ten years ago – and maybe even five years ago – there was no question that having a good beer offering meant having a couple of cask lines, even if what you were selling most of was Neck Oil or Camden Hells. That sometimes meant cask was a token presence, as it was at Jam Street IMO, but usually the bars could sell enough of it to make it viable. That assumption’s completely gone now – and, presumably, the drinkers that were keeping those cask lines viable have gone with it. While I wouldn’t like to see cask confined to those pubs and bars that sell a lot of different beers (and/or just sell a lot of beer), it’s true that if it goes that way we’ll have fewer worries about quality.
What does concern me is seeing bars that used to sell a lot of different cask beers (six or seven at both the Font and the Beagle) either not wanting or not being able to sell more than one or two. I’m not sure what’s going on there – and there may be specific factors at work for both those places – but it doesn’t look good. And it’s not as if we can reassure ourselves that at least this time round keg beer goes along with diversity and independence – as Tandleman says, the buyouts at the upper end of ‘craft’ are leading to a much narrower and more macro-dominated ‘craft keg’ landscape. (There’s no necessary connection between cask and small scale – a new Doom Bar pump in a keg-only pub would still be a win for cask – but at the moment the giants are much more interested in (craft) keg than in cask.)
All this and a stir of the pot from Cookie – it’s like old times! As it goes, Porter’s Railway was new in 2009 and the Hope in 2013, so they weren’t ancient Stopfordian institutions by any means – and their closure didn’t have anything to do with the changing preferences of CAMRA members or anyone else. Perhaps the Crown is more to the point – I’ve never seen it busy since it reopened (although I still wouldn’t blame CAMRA!). But there’s still a decent range of places in Stockport even if you’re unaccountabily limiting yourself to Proper Pubs: the Magnet, the (other) Railway and the Angel, plus the olde Vic if you’re there at the right phase of the moon, and the Cocked Hat if you’re local.