It’s not about cask vs keg, it’s about the beer

We need a more nuanced approach to "cask vs keg", an end to the keg rip-offs, and a wider recognition that in beer packaging, limiting your options is generally a bad idea... 

One of the things I learnt, talking to brewers at both the final London Drinker last week and Craft Beer Rising before that, is that some continue to talk down cask ale. Somewhat sadly, for a cask-focused festival, even one of the prize-winning brewers at London Drinker confessed to me that his brewery is doing less cask. What was perhaps more interesting was that his reasons were more nuanced. Rather than the wild generalisation we’ve heard before that "Cask is too cheap", his argument was that cask is too cheap for many of the beers he wants to make.

Because the thing is, cask is not too cheap, nor is it impossible to build a viable business model on it. For many of the brewers I’ve discussed it with, the reverse is true: cask can be the cheapest way into the market. Pubs already have the necessary hand-pumps and are well-used now to the idea of guest and seasonal beers, cask deliveries and collections can help maintain customer relationships, and you have those less tangible promotional benefits of tradition, ‘LocAle’ and ‘NaturAle’.

Sure, it needs investment in infrastructure – a cask-washer, for instance, and the casks themselves, while reusable, are not cheap – but so does keg, and that’s typically more expensive. And yes, Keykegs (and cans, for that matter) are recyclable, but aren’t we supposed to be reducing the use of one-way plastics and making more use of reusable containers?

The real pricing problem is more subtle, and it’s to do with how popularity and availability affects expectations of price. You can make cask ale pretty cheaply indeed, if what you’re making is relatively lightly-hopped brown bitter, using mostly English hops. What you can’t do is make a full flavoured and hop-forward craft beer at the same price, not least because the ingredients are so much more expensive. Prices I’ve heard for modern New World hop varieties can be three to four times those of English hops, for example, and something like a New England IPA uses way more hops than a Bitter does. 

Then again, the same is true of keg beer – the average Eurolager or German industrial Pils is also cheap to produce, compared to the properly-flavoursome craft equivalents. (Bigger production volumes help here too, of course.)

So, expecting to pay £3-ish for cask real ale is reasonable, as long as what you want is subtle, flavoursome bitter, an English mild or pale ale, maybe a decent Porter. And to be quite honest these are the beers that can be utterly sublime in cask when well-kept, but can equally well be one-dimensional when kegged.

On the other hand, expecting a Double IPA, a triple-hopped American Pale, or a Belgian Quadrupel of any decent quality for £3-ish in cask or keg is just taking the proverbial. And in many (though not all) cases, such high-powered beers will benefit from the lift that an appropriate degree of extra carbonation in keg can bring.

So no craft brewer should be talking cask down like it’s something that’s holding them back, or moaning that it’s "too cheap". If you can cost-justify the recipe at £3/pint, casking it can both show your skill and produce a better end-product. On the other hand, if the recipe won’t be viable at £3/pint, then by all means keg it at £5/pint.

But don’t pretend there is any inherent extra value for the consumer in kegging. Sure, there is value for the bar – they get a product that can stay on sale longer, which enables them to charge more while they wait for it to sell, instead of pricing it to sell promptly. That might be OK for slow-selling niche beers, but charging £1 more for the keg version of a cask beer is merely an ecologically damaging rip-off.

And no one should disparage ‘twiggy brown bitter’. Some drinkers prefer subtlety, properly done, to in-yer-face flavour. And many of us like both, depending on our mood, our budget, the occasion or venue, or whatever. 

What really killed Watney's Red Barrel?

Red Barrel reborn

People who remember the Keg Wars of the 1960s still talk of how keg bitters were pasteurised and fizzed-up, knocking much of the character out. Some of the stupider ones also talk of today’s keg craft beer as if it’s treated the same (they’re wrong – much of it would fit CAMRA’s definition of real ale), and a few will also trot out how keg bitter was supposedly brewed cheaply and “full of chemicals”.

Full of chemicals? For the pedant, pretty much everything is a chemical – salt is a chemical, even water – but that’s not what they mean. They mean additives and impurities, things that probably wouldn’t be permitted under food regulations. Again, they’re almost certainly wrong – unless you count “processing aids” such as PVPP*, which is permitted under the Reinheitsgebot for instance.

Yet they might also be sort-of right, in a weird way that they probably wouldn’t recognise, and for something that they would almost certainly not think of as a “chemical” – and that is sugar.

That review in Which?

I didn’t become a beer drinker until a while after the seminal 1972 review of keg beer in Which? magazine – its criticisms helped drive the growth of CAMRA and the rebirth of cask – so I didn’t experience 1960s keg bitter. I’ve read quite a bit though about the likes of Whitbread Trophy, Double Diamond, Worthington E, and of course the legendary Watney’s Red Barrel, including the interesting tale that some of these beers were also available in cask form in small volumes, and were considerably better like that.**

So when I heard that one of my local brewpubs, The Owl and The Pussycat in Northfields, had brewed a cask recreation of 1963 Watney’s Red Barrel to a recipe devised by beer historian Ron Pattinson, I knew I had to try it. Earlier this week, I did just that, and it wasn’t half bad! It was also by far the pub’s bestseller, selling almost an entire firkin on the first night it was available, which will have had a fair bit to do with nostalgia and curiosity.

As I sipped my Red Barrel, a fairly pale amber-brown beer of 4.4% ABV, I detected light malt, a moderate and slightly earthy bitterness, and touches of biscuit and fruit. Yet I also found myself thinking how unlike modern bitters it was, even the keg ones. There’s lots around the same strength, but even the golden ones tend to be fuller-bodied, a little sweeter, a little more flavour-forward.

It was when I spoke to the brewer that I got an inkling of what was going on. He mentioned that the Red Barrel recipe was very different from their other ales in two ways: it contained a significant amount of sugar, and was relatively highly attenuated, meaning more of the sugars were fermented out to leave a drier body.

Re-reading some of Ron’s writing on those 60s beers, it makes sense. The grists of the period – grist is the mixture of malt and other fermentables – were typically 10% to 15% sugar (although he notes that Red Barrel used less than that). The typical reason for adding sugar and other adjuncts (sources of fermentable sugars) is to lighten the body, in a milder easy-drinking, don’t-frighten-the-horses sort of way. It can also improve stability and heads retention – and yes, it can save money (though not always).

So maybe, just maybe, the real reason people found 60s keg bitter insipid wasn’t just the blandifying effects of pasteurisation and fizz – though I’m sure they were (and are) important – but the fact that it started out as a light-bodied and fairly dry brew. In cask, it could just about overcome its limitations, but killed and kegged, well the poor thing didn’t stand a chance.


*PVPP (polyvinyl polypyrrolidone, or Polyclar) is a powdered plastic used as a clarifier. Anti-Reinheitsgebot campaigners say that the rule is simply a marketing tool of the big German brewers – and that it lets them cheat by claiming the PVPP is filtered out after use, so it doesn’t count as an “ingredient”. The German beer purity law also failed to prevent a 2016 scandal when some beers were found to contain traces of glyphosate weedkiller at a level up to 300 times that permitted in drinking water. The beers had been made only with malt, hops, yeast and water of course, but the malt had been made from contaminated barley. 

**Around 20 years ago I sometimes drank a perfectly acceptable cask ale branded as Worthington E, but I'm pretty sure it was nothing like the 60s version!

Is real ale too cheap? Or is craft keg too dear?

Price hikes could be on the way for Britain’s cask ale lovers, if recommendations in the Cask Report 2018 are followed. According to the report, which is based on a survey of 2000 drinkers, 90% of cask drinkers say they don’t have a fixed budget in mind when they go for a beer.

I know that the lower price of cask ale versus craft keg has long been a bugbear for some brewers and bloggers. But rather than criticise the craft keggers for profiteering, they usually complain that cask is too cheap – after all, they say, the ingredients are the same. They do have a point of course, if we can compare like with like, but some craft keg beers use more malt and hops than the average real ale, so they will have a more expensive 'bill of materials'.

The distribution task is similar, too. Craft keggers whine that Keykegs and the like cost money and are one-way vessels, which might be a valid complaint if they weren’t thereby relieving themselves of the cost of buying, retrieving and washing casks for re-use. Plus, they do have the option of reusable kegs.

But there are also sound reasons for keeping cask prices lower at the point of sale, if possible. Quite simply, a cask goes off once it’s open, so you need to sell it as soon as possible (unless you resort to a gas blanket or other dodgy behaviour that can adversely affect the process of cask-conditioning). Keg on the other hand will stay fresh enough for weeks, so you can afford to keep it on sale longer, while you wait for enough mugs to come along and pay two quid a pint extra for what’s essentially the same beer as on the next-door handpump.

Cask Report author Paul Nunny is right that people will pay more for their beer if the offer is right – it’s just that it doesn’t have to be down to beer quality. I know two pubs in Hammersmith right next door to each other. In one, a pint of real ale is £4.50ish, in the other it can be literally half that – and there’s not much difference in variety and quality between the two – in fact the cheaper one probably has the greater variety .

The real difference is one is a Spoons and the other a Nicholsons, so you’re paying – or not – for the latter’s nicer ambience, with its trad pubby furniture and feel, significantly fresher air and bigger windows. Oh, and the different clientele, of course.

How much extra are you willing to pay for better quality ale? Is the craft keg premium fair and sustainable or just manipulation of markets and fashions?

Apologies for the delay in getting this post and the next one online – it's a few weeks now since the launch of the Cask Report and the accompanying seminar for licensees and pub operators on how to make more of cask ale, but work intervened and my reports fell through the cracks... Oops. 

A tale of Owls, Pussycats, Dodos and micropubs

The micropub revolution has reached West London – Ealing, to be precise, where in a week's time the population should have jumped from zero to two. The first one officially opened last Friday: called The Owl and The Pussycat*, it’s not too far from Northfields tube station, and even better, it has its own brewery.

If you’ve not been to a micropub before, they’re a relatively new phenomenon that was first recognised just over a decade ago, yet they embody ideals that are many centuries older. Typically, it’s a single room – often a former shop – converted into a small pub. The Micropub Association definition adds that it “listens to its customers, mainly serves cask ales, promotes conversation, shuns all forms of electronic entertainment and dabbles in traditional pub snacks.”

Mark, Roger Protz and Paul at the opening

The Owl and The Pussycat fits that to a tee. It’s the brainchild of two ex-teachers, Mark Yarnell and Paul Nock, and it took them almost a year to get it off the ground, what with finding premises and a brewing kit, and persuading the local authority to give them planning permission.

“I was teaching for 24 years, people said we were crazy, but a year later here we are,” says Paul. Fortunately the local support has been tremendous – as the letter-writing campaign that backed their planning application shows, locals have been fascinated by the project. Indeed, when the pair opened briefly before Christmas to test the waters, they were almost drunk dry and had to bring in emergency supplies from a friendly microbrewery.

In the long run they aim to be self-sufficient in beer though, thanks to having their own nanobrewery in the back room, working under the name Marko Paulo. Their UK-made 200-litre brewkit** took London’s tally of breweries to 92, and it allows them to fill five nine-gallon firkins (casks) per brew. Alternatively, they have 40-litre kegs for beers better suited to gas dispense – on my visit that meant an authentic German-style Oktoberfest-Märzen and a West Coast-inspired IPA.

The Marko Paulo Brewery

Rather unusually, they also have smaller casks: 4.5-gallon pins. Mark explains that the use of pins allows them to offer a wider range of beers – they have six handpumps and two keg taps, which could easily be a recipe for tired beer if it took too long for a cask to sell out. “Using pins keeps the beer fresh and let’s us keep variety on,” he says.

“We are brewing twice a week, and are pretty much at capacity now,” adds Paul. They’re limited not just by only having two fermenters – each brew takes about a week to ferment – but by how many filled casks and kegs they can fit in their cold-store.

The plan is to have two core beers, most probably their excellent Coal Porter and a best bitter, plus a rotating range of others. For example, at the opening event, which was kicked of by an entertaining talk on London’s brew history from Good Beer Guide editor and fellow*** beer-writer Roger Protz, we were treated to a mild, two pale ales (one of them ‘single hop and grain’ – I guess that makes for a more entertaining acronym than the more usual ‘single malt and single hop’!) and a hoppy bitter.

Mark says they hope to do collaboration brews with local home-brewers, and perhaps run a home-brew club. And they plan to run beer-and-cheese tastings/pairings with their next-door neighbours Cheddar Deli.

On top of all that, incredibly the local micropub population is about to double. One of the other guests at The Owl and The Pussycat’s official opening was Lucy, who is due to open her own micropub this coming Saturday. It’s called The Dodo and is in Hanwell, just up the road from Northfields. She’s not planning to brew, instead pouring a wide range of mainly London-brewed beers.


*The name comes from the bookshop that formerly occupied the site.
**made by Elite of Swindon, I noticed. 
***he’s been at it a lot longer than me, mind, and a lot more successfully too!

More stuff to read....

A few interesting reads from around the web. The first's an article from Craft Beer & Brewing, a US site that's mainly aimed at homebrewers. Many of its articles are too US-centric for my taste, but it does also carry some thought-provoking pieces, including this one, Do IBUs matter? Some drinkers – notably hopheads – are obsessed with IBUs, apparently believing the higher a beer's IBU rating, the better it is. This article explains why IBUs tell you something about a beer, but not everything, not by a long chalk!

Like CAMRA's technical committee, which has finally acknowledged that you can have keg-conditioned real ale, I've had more than a few of those cask vs keg discussions where you try to point out that today's kegs are a world apart from the Red Barrels of the 1970s, then someone says “Well, what about the xyz-keg?” and you have to admit that, actually you don't know that one. So it was great to read this long piece on the Ale is Good blog which is basically explaining from a distributor or server's point of view what all the different kegs are. He doesn't really cover the real ale aspects, but hey, there be dragons...

Original 1930s conetop beer cans

And then earlier today, I picked up an item on Jeff Bell's blog where he quotes a tweet from Fuller's John Keeling, expressing the latter's doubts over micro-canning – doubts which Jeff shares. It reminded me that I never really flagged up my own article on the subject of micro-canning, which was published earlier this year in Engineering & Technology, the magazine of the Institution of Engineering & Technology. I was very pleased with the way it came out in print, and the online version's pretty nice too.

This last one was sent in to me, it's an incomer's view of The Best Bars in Neukölln – a hip district of Berlin that is now gentrifying, after decades as a big Turkish & Lebanese area. I mention the article partly because it reminds me how different people have quite different motives for loving bars and pubs. Berlin is home to a bunch of great breweries, several of them in Neukölln including Berliner Berg which is one of the newest, and Privatbrauerei am Rollberg which is inside the old Berliner Kindl brewery building (and which seems to have overcome my initial misgivings to become very well liked). Yet in all his discussion of bars the only beer he mentions is Neumarkter Lammsbräu which is from Oberpfalz in Bavaria!