The UK beer and pub industry is in terminal decline with sales falling rapidly. It started in the early nineties, at a time when operators all but turned their backs on the great British brewing industry (the only one in the world to have perfected the art of brewing tasty beer below 5%),
preferring instead to heavily promote Australian lager and Irish stout (highly profitable beer of minimal taste). And whilst this decline appears to have accelerated in the past few years, a surprising hero is emerging: cask ale. Form is temporary but class is permanent and cask is class (ask *any* brewer).
Fresh, tasty cask ale is beer that we are worthy of and, across the country, across the sexes and across the generations we're beginning to learn this. The surest way of getting a pint of fresh, tasty cask ale is in a local pub from a local brewery: this kind of beer does not suit extended supply chains and therefore does not suit centralised production.
The shape of the industry is changing, shifting towards the lower end, to the smaller producer, and for very good reason: the consumers' best interest. As with any rate of change though, it's too fast for some; regional producers, fat on the tied house system, have become too big, their supply chains too complicated and their beer ubiquitous and uninteresting to the growing band of enthusiastic cask ale converts. These producers will resist the change rather than embrace it and you, the consumer, will
persuade them otherwise, eventually.
So come on Mr & Mrs Regional Brewer, look at your business model, accept it needs to change and get on and do it, for your own sake. The people are finding fresh beer and loving it and you can't put that
Genie back in the bottle.
When we installed the new (old) brewery in February I didn't have the budget to upgrade the cooling required for the fermentations, relying instead on pub lager coolers sitting in a wooden shed. It worked though and, surprisingly, we sailed through the summer without a hitch.
