Longer, hotter summers are a serious existential challenge to cask ale – a product which already has its fair share of problems.
Last year we wrote about the effect of heatwaves on pubs and our drinking habits. But this year, it’s been worse again, with one heatwave after another, and 2026 is set to be the hottest summer the UK has ever known.
For our part, we’ve found ourselves treating drinking cask ale like doing our homework before we’re allowed to watch telly, or eating our vegetables before we’re allowed pudding.
We feel duty bound to drink at least some cask ale, however hot the weather. But our hearts have not been in it.
Great, lovely, enjoyed that… but can I have my pint of Tegernseer Helles or Lost & Grounded Keller Pils now, please?
We were interested to see that Tandleman has had similar feelings:
In London, of course, when we’d sorted out the post and established our flat was in one piece, we headed to the Aldgate Tap. It was Monday night and quieter than usual and we enjoyed our German lager. There was one cask beer on, but it was still around 30C outside, so I wasn’t taking that chance. No real gamble with Bitburger and Tegernsee Helles… Thirty odd degrees and cask – in London any – just don’t mix and looking around, I don’t recall a single pint being sold in my presence.
In Bristol, we haven’t had any pints of cask that were actually bad. And, in fact, we’ve had some very impressive ones, cool and in good condition despite the weather. Some publicans have clearly doubled down on protecting the beer from the elements. Nonetheless, we found ourselves wishing it was just a little bit cooler again, and maybe slightly more crisp, and maybe slightly more… lager.
You might, at this point, recall the long running and occasionally bad-tempered debate about cask versus keg that defined the craft beer era in the UK from c.2008 to c.2020. ‘Craft keg’, as it was sometimes called, was supposed to solve some of the supposed problems of cask ale, with a longer shelf life, cooler dispense temperatures, and higher carbonation. So why haven’t we found ourselves craving keg IPA or pale ale in the heat, rather than lager?
We think it’s that lager has less going on or, rather, that its complexity is fairly subtle. In hot weather, what you want is water but better, and a good lager can be like that. It won’t make you chew on anything, or overwhelm your nasal apparatus before you’ve even taken a gulp. It has enough bitterness to provide an invigorating bite but not so much that it takes even the slightest effort.
This is all perilously close to the language of beers that are ‘drinkable’ and ‘refreshing’ but in hot weather those qualities do become rather more appealing.
Tandleman mentions that he didn’t see any cask being bought or drunk. On our recent pub trips, it hasn’t been as stark as that, but there is a clue to be found in the number of cask ales on offer.
The Crown, as it did last summer, has reduced its range from 2 or 3 ales to a single pump serving Bass. At The Swan With Two Necks there’s been either no cask ale or just a single pump in action. One of our locals, The George and Dragon, was down from 3 cask ales to 1 on our most recent visit. Even The Kings Head got down to a mere 3 cask ales at one point last week, which is basically unheard of these days.
As one of our go-to people for insider intel on this sort of thing, we asked pub manager and barperson Michael Deakin for his readout. He says:
People’s drinking habits depending on weather isn’t exactly new, you often see people who exclusively drink real ale between September and May reaching for a lager when the temperature climbs. This year has taken that to the nth degree.
Pale Ales will always sell. But running a pub with both a permanent stout, and mild/brown lines is a struggle in summer. You are stuck. We tried to soldier on with them, but after the third cask of stout in a row that had to have at least a third of it thrown away, we had to face reality and take the line off until the heat eases off. Of course then you get abuse from dark beer drinkers but the half a pint that person drinks every four weeks doesn’t pay the bills!
I think the conversation is also more about the types of pubs that are known for real ale not being the types of venues that people associate with summer time. Real ale pubs tend to be cozy with lots of soft furnishings, which isn’t really what people want when it’s 35 degrees outside. They want massive beer gardens in car parks or trendy bars with air con.
Michael blogs at Caskapital and is also on BlueSky. You should follow him however you do your following these days.
The key line for us is that “this year has taken that to the Nth degree”. Dedicated cask ale fans will soldier on up to a point but everyone has a limit – and 2026 might have found it.
Play for Today: Shakespeare or Bust
Shakespeare or Bust is a gentle comedy about three miners from Leeds who rent a canalboat and pub crawl their way to Stratford-upon-Avon with the goal of seeing a performance of Antony and Cleopatra.
Ray has been working his way through a British Film Institute box set of films from the BBC’s Play for Today strand and Shakespeare or Bust is one of the 7 included. It first aired in 1973 and stars Brian Glover as Art, Ray Mort as Ern and Douglas Livingstone as Abe.
Within the first 10 minutes, it becomes clear that making it to the next pub is a key motivator for the three men, and insofar as the film has any dramatic tension, it’s created largely by frustrating their efforts to get a pint.
One pub is closed. Another is open but they feel obliged to boycott it out of working class solidarity when an elderly lockkeeper tells them he doesn’t drink there:
That used to be my pub until he took over for them… He knocked the bar wall down and made it into one of them new posh lounges. And he made it clear to the locals he didn’t want them in… Well, we used to play darts in there and he said, no darts, I don’t want no dart players, now I’ve started me scampi trade and chicken in the basket. So we took to dominoes and he said, don’t want no domino playing because the clicking of them drives my wife mad, so we said we’d play with rubber dominoes, and he says, no, it’d scratch his lovely tables, and the scampi customers don’t like it…
Art is furious: “No publican insults the working man and gets away with it!” So they spend a miserable evening stuck on the boat with nothing to drink.
There’s an extended sequence set in another canalside pub where cider is the speciality and the landlord doesn’t particularly like leisure boaters. Art and the crew think it’s marvellous and drink lethal amounts of scrumpy. They also fall prey to an old panhandler who tells stories of life on the canals on demand in exchange for drinks.
The film ends with beer, too – bottles of brown ale on the boat, shared with two members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as the theatre’s lights twinkle on the water.
It was one of a series of films starring the same characters written by Peter Terson. At times it feels like Last of the Summer Wine but there’s more political bite here. Art is a Marxist and a trade unionist; the three working class characters may be daft buggers but they’re also rounded human beings with deep feelings; and there are clear themes of gentrification, snobbery and access to culture. That’s summed up in Art whose thirst for the 10-pint session is equalled only by his desperate desire to see Shakespeare performed.
On the blog
We’ve had a busy month in real life, outside the blog, which meant that it took some effort just to keep up with our usual routine of posting once a week, plus news, nuggets and longreads every Saturday. But we did it. Even that soft commitment is quite motivating and reminds us to do this before we, say, go to the pub.
We wrote about Witbier and what a brilliant style it is to drink during hot weather. At more or less the same time, Tandleman mentioned in passing that he’d heard Hoegaarden is about to cease being distributed as a draught beer in the UK. Oh well! Also, making the illustration for that post took far too long.
We loved the revived Crown Inn in Stockport (“We don’t hesitate to suggest that this is one of the country’s great pubs”) and it got us thinking about what those pubs that pull off feeling both modern and traditional. (Hint: the answer is not painting everything grey.)
Most recently, we wrote about some good bar staffing we’ve observed, from giving out book recommendations to looking after tourists.
On Patreon, we posted footnotes alongside each edition of the Saturday round up, with additional commentary and bonus links; some ‘beers of the weekend’ tasting note posts; and some other bits and pieces: “Have you ever tried that giant couscous?” (You can now pay about £20 for a year’s subscription, by the way.)
And that’s it, that’s your lot, until next month.
Cheers!
Ray & Jess
