Beer Quality: Cask's worth the hassle

Last month's Cask Report prompted some well-deserved and much-needed backslapping among Britain's cask ale brewers and supporters.

But behind the smiles and the clinking of pint glasses, a few industry figures with long memories were hiding nagging feelings of unease.

"The thing is," one chief executive confided in me, "we've been here before. After the guest ale provision in the Beer Orders we saw cask ale volume booming in the early 1990s.

"And it went into too many pubs, stocking too many beers, and the quality suffered. People tried cask ale, found it horrible, and never tried it again. Poor quality pints killed that boom. We've got to make sure that doesn't happen again."

There's an old saying in advertising that 'nothing kills a good product as quickly as a bad ad'. Drive lots of people to try something, and if it's no good it'll be killed off far quicker than if it was simply ignored. Does such a fate await cask beer?

At the risk of killing the suspense - probably not.

But we can only say that thanks to the constant vigilance of those who spend their careers obsessing about quality.

Because cask ale does have a bit of a reputation. It's a living, breathing product. Comparing it to other beers is like comparing fresh milk to UHT. It's better, but you have to be more careful with it.

Cask ale requires a bit more work, a little more care and attention than other beers. It's harder to keep in top condition. And it's surrounded by a mystique that simply puts some licensees off selling it.

But it's not that much harder either. It simply requires standards that any decent pub should be implementing anyway.

And if you're not sure what those standards are, there are plenty of people who can help make you an expert.

Symbol of quality

One huge difference between the cask revival now and the doomed charge of the early 90s is Cask Marque.

In 1997, in response to the sharp fall in cask sales, four brewers combined to send inspectors to 1,000 pubs. In 23 per cent of them, the quality of cask beer was so bad that the inspectors said they would not buy the pint again.

So Cask Marque was formed, with the aim of improving cask beer quality in pubs and giving drinkers a symbol of quality they could look out for when choosing pubs.

Today, Cask Marque runs over 200 cellar management training course a year, and employs 45 qualified assessors who constantly visit pubs to check beer quality. More than 6,800 pubs have won the right to display the Cask Marque plaque, which is recognised by 46 per cent of cask ale drinkers.

Paul Nunny, Cask's Marque's executive director, is relentless in flagging up the big problems.

"The first issue is cellar temperature," he says. "It should be kept constantly between 11 and 13ÞC. That's the temperature the beer should be served at, so it's important to use pythons to keep it at that temperature right up to the point of dispense.

"The second big issue is line cleaning. Pubs should be cleaning their lines at least once every seven days."

Brian Yorston, head brewer at Wadworth in Wiltshire, agrees. "Our best landlords clean the lines every time a barrel is changed," he says. "And they don't just go through the motions - the really good ones taste the beers themselves every day, before they go on sale.

"As brewers we have to see it through all the way to the customer."

This is why brewers invest heavily in cellar support for their pubs. Greene King runs BII-accredited courses in beer and cellar quality for 1,500 lessees, managers, tenants and freetrade customers every year, and employs quality managers to give one-on-one advice.

Greene King managing director Justin Adams is obviously keen that his beer is served at the pub in the same high quality it leaves the brewery. But, of course, it's not just the brewer who benefits.

"If every pub serving cask viewed the effort spent on quality not as a nuisance but as a wise investment with tangible returns, the sector would compete even better with all the other businesses trying to get a share of the pound in the consumer's pocket," he says.

Finishing the brewing process

If this all seems a bit of a hassle, for publicans who care about beer there's an inspiring way of looking at why this effort is necessary.

"Cask beer leaves the brewery in perfect condition," says Richard Westwood, Marston's director of brewing, who employs 45 trained quality auditors to inspect Marston's pubs.

"But when cask reaches the pub, the brewing process isn't over. The last part of it happens in the cellar, and it's at least as important as anything that happens before then."

The basics of cellar temperature and line cleaning can be picked up with a day's training. But Westwood is referring to the fact that beyond this, the publican has to tap and vent the beer, which starts the secondary fermentation in the cask.

This is the final part of the brewing process, and takes around three days, depending on the style of beer. It means a licensee can make a real difference to the quality of the beer.

If he or she understands that particular beer and how it conditions in that specific cellar, they can make it taste better than another barrel of the same beer kept perfectly adequately at a pub just down the road.

Having mastered this, there's just one more hurdle for the cask beer licensee: getting the right number of beers for the level of throughput.

"It's great that the consumer has so many beers to choose from now," says Westwood, "but in all but the very best cask beer pubs, the more beers there are on the bar, the slower the throughput of each beer.

"The beer stays longer in the pipes, and that's when you start to get issues with quality.

"Once tapped, a beer has to be served in three days. I think we're going to start to see four-and-a-half-gallon pins become much more common to deal with this."

Massive improvement

For all the work, the hassle and risk though, there is a unanimous feeling that the effort is paying off.

"There's been a massive improvement in beer quality in the last 15 years," agree Nunny, Westwood, Yorston and Adams.

Cask ale has a long memory. And the mistakes of the 90s are unlikely to be repeated. This time around, the idea of 'a lovely drop' looks like it's here to stay.