Has Lockdown 3.0 saved cask ale?

 I'd rather (not) be picking up bottles and cans

The Foghorn, Portslade - where else?

It's the morning when Lockdown 3.0 ends and people the length and breadth of the country are, like me, in a state of suppressed excitement at the thought that, in just a few hours, we'll all be able, finally, to go to the pub. It's not quite back to normal, of course, because we won't be able to go indoors yet. We'll be huddled against walls, cowering under awnings, braving the crappy English weather and all for what? For a pint of cask ale.

Let's be clear - apart from being able to talk to other people outside of the house without risking the frowns of passers-by, the thing that we've been deprived of these many months, is cask. Bottles and cans, from a bewildering array of breweries, both UK and beyond, have been easy to come by, and takeaway containers of keg beer don't taste markedly different from the same brew served in a pub. But cask is different. Even takeaway cask isn't the same. The first pint is usually fine but unless the second one is drunk immediately afterwards there is a rapid dropping off in quality. There is no way around it - cask, as CAMRA keep reminding us, is a living thing and needs to be consumed fresh, preferably straight out of the barrel.

Will people remember this when pubs finally reopen? The sad truth is that cask sales have been in decline in recent years, although the Cask Marque cask report for 2019, the last year that pubs were open as normal, points to a small increase. However, the challenges for cask, the report states, are the same as they have always been - problems of poorly-kept beer and ignorance of what makes cask ale different from other forms of dispense. 

Is there a way out of the situation? It's ironic that, now that CAMRA is showing signs that it is willing to acknowledge the changing beer scene, we need their passion for cask more than ever. Perhaps their new, expanded style guide for beer can be used as a way of focussing their expertise. As an example, imperial stouts and double IPAs are not serious options for cask in all but the busiest pubs. They're not session beers and so sales are going to be lower. By contrast, session beers are lighter in flavour and benefit from continuing to develop in the cask.

But we can't leave it all to CAMRA. Now that we can get out of the house, let's all make a pact - let's support the pubs and bars that care about cask. I'm not going to be giving up my imperial stouts and those heavily hopped American IPAs but I shall be going out for some old-skool cask ale and I'm going today. 

Yay!

CAMRA - looking good at 50?

Where would we be without CAMRA? I ask the question semi-rhetorically, on this historic occasion, the 50^th anniversary of the drinking holiday that turned into a movement. That movement was never meant to be political or ground-breaking but it grew into an organisation often described as the most successful consumer campaigns this country has seem. But is CAMRA still relevant in 2021, now that craft beer has taken over?

Just in time here comes what looks suspiciously like the official biography, 50 years of CAMRA, published by CAMRA themselves. As such, can we trust it to be objective? Well, yes and no. There is some criticism of the organisation, there is of course much praise, there is even self-congratulation but yes, author Laura Hadland does address the still live controversy around the status of craft beer.

The problem for me is the overall tone of the book. The table of contents makes the whole enterprise sound suspiciously like the Annual Report of some large and long-running organisation and a lot of it has the dryness that you’d expect from an in-house document. Is this what we want from a book which should surely be a celebration?

Of course, CAMRA has had its share of hilarious and embarrassing moments and the author includes plenty of these. She also covers the ground very thoroughly, tracking CAMRA through its different changes from a scruffy, back-street operation, capable of making headlines and changing the policies of major breweries, into the massive enterprise it now is.

But somehow, the book fails to do much more than list CAMRA’s still extraordinary achievements and its many key figures. Given that this is an organisation devoted tothe pub going experience that feels like an under-achievement.