Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got warm cask ale, cask in decline, and booming cask sales.
First, some news: campaign group Women in Beer is launching its own awards for, well, women in beer. There are a bunch of categories including brewer of the year and ‘industry icon’. People can nominate themselves or you can nominate someone else whose work you particularly admire. The deadline for nominations is 7 September 2025.
Tandleman has conducted one of his tours of inspection of London pubs and found, not for the first time, that the pubs were good but much of the cask ale wasn’t – especially considering the asking price these days. Still, it’s not all bad news:
On Saturday we went out to Jack Duignan’s new gaff, the King’s Arms in Bethnal Green. No issues with beer quality there, and the Charrington IPA went down well. Another positive tick for London cask. We took the long route via the Peacock, another Will Hawkes recommendation. We were the only customers for a few minutes in this splendidly renovated pub in a housing estate. Very pubby, and the guy in charge was great as he explained he had very few beers on due to the cellar dispense equipment suffering a losing encounter with an untethered gas bottle the previous night. I didn’t fancy the cask choices of Five Points Pale and Landlord, but the Guinness on an 80/20 mixture was rather good as a substitute. We will be back.
Another thing that’s notable about Tandleman’s post above is that it highlights his tendency to drink lager or kegged beers almost tactically, rather than stick religiously to cask ale. The Pub Curmudgeon mentions this, too, in a post about the long decline of the market for cask ale and the tendency for modern drinkers to switch what they drink from session to session:
The alternative to cask is now not keg ales, but Guinness and international lager brands, mostly British-brewed. We even now have accounts on X celebrating British pubs praising the availability of Cruzcampo or Staropramen “in the right glass”. More and more people are now repertoire drinkers who will vary their choice of beer depending on the venue and the occasion. They are not dogmatically wedded to one particular category. “I like cask, but I find myself drinking Guinness more and more”, said one person. The challenge for anyone wanting to promote cask is how to encourage people to include it within their overall drinking repertoire. Simply denigrating other beers comes across as snobbish and is a poor tactic to win people over.
Counterpoint: it’s only big multinationals who are struggling to sell cask ale, argues Roger Protz, with regional independent breweries doing quite nicely, thank you:
Heineken says it shuttered the Caledonian Brewery in Edinburgh as a result of the slump in cask beer sales. The same argument can be heard from Carlsberg for its closure of four breweries when it was running the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company… One of the breweries it axed, Jennings in Cockermouth, has been bought and re-opened by local entrepreneurs who have faith in such fine beers as Cumberland Ale and Sneck Lifter. I wish them the very best of luck and look forward to visiting them soon… I’ve mentioned before that Theakston, the family brewery in Yorkshire, has recorded strong sales for its cask beer. That news has been underscored by the publication of its annual results for the past financial year… Managing director Richard Bradbury reports a third year of growth and singles out for special attention his cask ales Best Bitter, Old Peculier and XB along with a new low gravity beer Quencher (3.4 per cent)… “Volumes are up eight per cent,” Bradbury says. “Demand for high quality cask ale is on the increase and consumers have renewed interest in the category.”
And, by way of a chaser, over at What’s Brewing, David Jesudason has some observations on the continuing success of Batham’s: “As others ponder the fate of cask, here’s a great example of how dispensing two core beers well (from kilderkins at a reasonable price) to a loyal fanbase frequenting beautiful pubs is all that’s needed…”
Peter Brissenden – now that’s a name we haven’t heard in a long time. He’s worked at various breweries over the years, with occasional blogs on the side, and has now popped up on Substack. His first post is a sharply observed account of a session at McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York City:
Beer is unceremoniously plonked on the table, two chubby half pint glasses, half froth, half dark beer each. You order one beer, you get two half glasses, you don’t ask why. The barman, resident for the past 53 years is riffing with the customers, taking the piss, but with an edge. ‘Decided what you don’t want yet?’ he shouts at a confused and indecisive table to tourists who have staggered in to get out of the 39 degree heatwave New York is experiencing… An octogenarian couple enter the bar, on holiday from Florida. ‘She old enough?’ the barman says. ‘What for?’ the husband replies. ‘I’m not fussy’ the barman counters. They look panicked and order light ales. And so it goes on.
In writing about “beer’s persistent romantic facts” Jeff Alworth has highlighted a key tension in beer writing: you can’t get published without a good story… but many of the most satisfying stories simply are not true. He writes:
In 2012, Sally and I were lunching with Matthias Trum, the sixth-generation owner/brewer of Bamberg’s famous Schlenkerla rauchbierbrauerei… At one point in our conversation, I made reference to what I thought was a fact—that medieval brewers didn’t know what yeast was. Writers and brewers had passed this bit of “wisdom” back and forth so long that many of us accepted it without much critical interrogation. Trum pounced. I could tell I wasn’t the first American to mention this to him, and he had the real story at the ready. “In the middle ages, they had a profession called the ‘hefner’ (hefener?). The hefner’s job was to harvest the yeast from the batches, to press out as much remaining beer as possible, and then the yeast was added to the next batch. So they knew exactly.”
Finally, from BlueSky, a smart bit of marketing from Duvel…
These continetals and their daft beer pouring rituals 🙄
— The Beer Nut (@thebeernut.bsky.social) July 6, 2025 at 5:58 PM
For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.
