Let’s hail the beer for all ages

The launch of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide 2012 and the PMA’s Cask Report (in September) combined to show that in a declining beer market real ale is holding its own. No fewer than 99 new breweries have opened in the past 12 months, almost all of them dedicated to cask beer.

This is a response to genuine consumer demand. A few days ago I paid £3.50 for a pint of Doom Bar in a pub in north London. Friends who live in the capital tell me that’s cheap — they can pay as much as £3.80. Punishing levels of excise duty have been heaped on the brewing industry. The high price of on-trade beer means that drinkers prefer to buy two pints of ale booming with malt and hop character rather than four pints of mediocre global fizz.

During one of the radio interviews I did for the launch of the new Good Beer Guide, the presenter suggested there was a growing gulf between young drinkers happy to consume mass-advertised brands and what he impolitely called beer bores sipping half-pints of microbrewed cask ale.

I told him that he’d got it completely wrong: it’s younger drinkers who are setting the trend for cask beer.

This is where the supermarkets come in. In recent months, standing at the check-out of my local Morrisons, I’ve been agreeably surprised by the number of young people with bottles of London Pride and other delights in their trolleys and baskets. A few years ago, I have little doubt, the same people would have bought global lager brands.

Recently, studying the shelves in Budgens, a young male shopper next to me enquired: “Do you know anything about ale?” I was tempted to reply: “How long have you got?” but merely responded in the affirmative.

He asked me what I recommended and I pointed to bottles of Hobgoblin. “Um,” he said, “I’m not into dark ales yet” and went off cheerfully with my next suggestion, Marston’s Old Empire, an India Pale Ale.

Climbing out of the grave​

Cynics may say we’ve been here before. Cask beer has a habit of climbing out of the grave, making a spirited recovery, then slipping off the cliff edge again. But this time I think the revival is different.

Go to any CAMRA beer festival and watch the young people flocking in. Last September I spent four days at the St Albans Festival and was staggered by the number of young people in attendance.

When I attended the opening of Moorhouse’s new brewhouse in Burnley earlier this year I was very impressed by managing director David Grant’s assessment of the brewing industry.

Burnley is a town that’s lost all its traditional industries, with many boarded-up pubs. But Grant said out in the suburbs and the countryside pubs are doing well.

He felt strongly — and he’s a man with a long career in brewing — that it’s younger drinkers who are driving the cask-beerr evival and that revival is not a flash in the pan.

Moorhouse’s almost went out of business 20 years ago, was saved, and now has the capacity to brew 50,000 barrels a year. That’s not a flash in the pan, either.
You can mix in to the revival the concern that many consumers have for the nature of modern food and drink. You
can brew something called beer from rice, maize, starch, chemical enzymes and hop extract.

But many drinkers prefer a natural drink made with locally-grown barley and hops, a drink that has not been trunked hundreds of miles by giant trucks pumping exhaust fumes into the atmosphere. The ‘green generation’ is a potent force.

East-End​

And don’t write off cask beer as a ‘middle-class’ drink. I’ve written a colour piece for the guide on good pubs near the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, east London. As the organisers of the Games seem to think visitors will be satisfied with Dutch lager within the stadium, I felt I should highlight a few East End pubs serving good old traditional English ale.
The first pub I visited was the Black Lion in Plaistow, just 10 minutes’ walk from West Ham United’s football ground. It’s packed with fans on match days and you might expect them to be typical lager drinkers. But the Black Lion offers a wide variety of cask beers, including Cottage, Mauldons, Sharp’s, Taylor’s, Young’s and the full range from Adnams of Suffolk.

In Walthamstow, the Old Rose & Crown has so many pumpclips on the walls showing the cask beers it has sold that it’s a wonder this Victorian boozer doesn’t topple over.

The beers constantly rotate but on my visit I found Adnams and Woodforde’s from East Anglia along with Dark Star, Fuller’s, Kelham Island and Redemption.

Forget the old stereotypes of real-ale drinkers. It’s the beer for all seasons, all ages and all sections of society. It’s the beer of the moment and, if I read the runes a-right, it’s the beer for the future.