The big chill beckons
Has there ever been a better time for beer? With the press full of tales of woe brewery takeovers and mergers, binge drinking, rows over licensing reform, and brewers and pubcos locking horns over discounts you may feel the urge to call for the men in white coats if I speak with optimism.
But there are sound reasons for having a spring in my step. Last week, at the annual meeting of the Campaign for Real Ale in Glasgow, Steve Crawley of the Caledonian Brewery regaled the assembled beer lovers with the onwards and upwards march of his company's Deuchar's IPA.
Since it won the Champion Beer of Britain competition in 2002, demand for Deuchar's has taken off to such an extent that a beer that was once confined to Scotland and northern England is now a national brand.
Last week Fuller's launched Discovery, its first new regular cask beer for 25 years. You would think the west London brewery would be satisfied with the success of London Pride.
But Fuller's is a canny company. Unlike the global giants that want to flood the pub scene with massively-advertised lager brands, Fuller's knows there is a smaller but important sector of drinkers who look for flavour in beer and are constantly searching for new taste sensations.
Caledonian and Fuller's have one thing in common: they hope, with the likes of golden Deuchar's and Discovery, to appeal to lager drinkers as well as cask devotees. In Scotland Deuchar's is promoted as beer rather than real ale. It is also served colder than is the norm for cask beer, and I notice that Fuller's is also delivering Discovery on the cool side.
I have no problem with this approach. I don't want to downplay the term "real ale" but I appreciate that cask beer is far more of a minority drink in Scotland than it is south of the border. Deuchar's is served cool because Scots like their beer on the cold side.
And I am fully in favour of any attempt to woo lager drinkers to the cask-beer cause. I wrote a few weeks ago about a visit to Everards in Leicester where the company's cask ales are booming but are sold predominately to the over-35s and over-55s. Everards is concerned by what it calls "the ticking time bomb" under cask beer. As older drinkers go to the great saloon bar in the sky, will they be replaced by a new generation of beer lovers? Or will young pubgoers continue to "drink the advertising" and believe that beer has to be ice-cold, fizzy and tasteless?
The jury is out. But I applaud the efforts of Caledonian, Everards and Fuller's to address the problem. Beer temperature is critical. The view that real ale is "warm beer" is nonsense but such attitudes are deeply engrained.
But if younger drinkers are to be won round, we may have to follow the Caledonian and Fuller's example of lowering the temperature of cask beer a notch or two. The received wisdom of the industry is that real ale should be served at 11°C to 12ºC (52°F to 54ºF). Below that, brewers say, you run the risk of a "chill haze" in the beer.
Does that argument still stand? Modern varieties of malt and improved brewing techniques should be able to avoid haze in beer. In the US and Belgium, sedimented beers are served far cooler than in Britain without any loss of clarity or flavour.
Was I unduly optimistic at the start of this column? Perhaps Charles Dickens had it right: It is the best of times and the worst of times. Caledonian and Fuller's prove there is great potential in the cask-beer sector but we must redouble our efforts to reach out to the next generation of drinkers or risk losing the heartening gains of recent years.
