Pete Brown: The pricing system for cask ale is utterly bizarre

Imagine walking into a decent, high-end food pub and reading the following on the wine list:

WHITE (BOTTLE):

• Blossom Hill Chardonnay £10
• Jacob's Creek Chardonnay £10
• Chablis £10
• Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc £10
• E Guigal Condrieu £10

If this were not some very strange promotion, you'd probably think that the person responsible had taken leave of their senses, or at least had no business sense whatsoever.

But switch this for a decent pub's ale range, and it's an entirely different story.

It's odd enough that cask beer, the most crafted, flavourful, artisanal beverage on the bar, is usually sold cheaper than mass-produced, commoditised standard lager brands that have few quality cues even in the eyes of the people who drink them.

Stranger still that this happens when cask beer drinkers are more upmarket and affluent than any other beer drinkers, and that 62 per cent of them agree with the statement "I'm prepared to pay more for good-quality beer".

The fact that pricing within cask beer is more or less uniform is, when you think about it, utterly bizarre.

Speciality beer bars charge a premium for rare beers — limited editions and hard-to-find imports. But apart from that, the only differential is between 'standard' and 'premium', and this is based solely on ABV.

We know this system is nonsense, because if it wasn't, Tennent's Super would be regarded as the most premium mainstream beer brand in the country. Compare this with wine: all the wines listed above are freely available most of the time, and yet everyone accepts differential pricing based on generally agreed quality perceptions that have nothing whatsoever to do with ABV.

All this occurred to me a few weeks ago, when I found a pub that may just be pioneering a different policy.

Among its range of cask ales was one of the country's leading brands, familiar to all cask ale drinkers, disliked by some because in their small world it feels too corporate and aggressive.

Next to it was Timothy Taylor Landlord, a beer with a global reputation as one of the finest cask ales brewed today, and more awards to its name than any other beer. The leading cask ale was £2.25 a pint. Landlord was £2.75.

Maybe this differential was based on the old standard/ premium split. Maybe the leading ale brand was on promotion. That's not the point. Landlord was outselling the leading ale brand. Drinkers were perfectly happy to pay more for it, because they believed it was a better beer.

Even lager has managed to shatter the old ABV rule regarding premiumness: Beck's Vier and Amstel are seen as — and charged at — premium to Foster's and Carling. And Peroni is sold for a whopping premium versus other five per cent lagers.

Next month, the 2009-10 Cask Report, (the independent report looking into the cask beer market, formerly known as Intelligent Choice), will reveal new data about the growth in the number of people wanting to drink cask ale. They have money to spend. Premium pricing according to generally agreed notions of one beer simply being better than another would immediately lift cask beer, making it look more interesting, varied and premium as a whole.

In a cash-strapped market, if affluent drinkers perceive one brand as more premium than another, why the hell would you not charge more for it?