What if CAMRA Had Valued Quality Over Romance?
Note: post updated at the end in response to a large, collective “you’re wrong!” from British cask fans on Twitter.
John Keeling worked for one of the most important traditional British breweries for 37 years, making classic cask ales like Fuller’s London Pride and Chiswick Bitter. Last Friday, he wrote a column for the Brewers Journal titled, baldly, “Cask Beer is Dead; Enjoy the Wake.” The title functions as the moral of the story, and here he provides the autopsy:
“In my travels up and down the country I can confirm that most family brewers who are the backbone of cask beer are […] reporting a decline in sales. Indeed, cask beer sales are now less than 9% of all draught beer sales and around 4% of total beer sales…. The reason is the old elephant in the room – that of quality. I have long said that the worst beer you can drink in Britain is cask beer. Cask beer that has been on serve for seven days is no good to anybody never mind what the latest new hop you use.”
I am currently working on an article about cask ales and the wonderful way they are evolving, particularly in the way they use modern hops and American techniques. Cask ale has always been one of the world’s great treasures, but it’s not solely a legacy of the 19th century. Cask is evolving and growing with the times, and some of the best examples seem as fresh and interesting as anything happening in the world.
These beers should be vying with lagers as the new growth style in the US, and they should be the pride of Britain. Instead, they’re unknown here and on life support there—or receding into the background as boutique beers. Keeling, picking up this point, laments the loss of the tradition that was once dominant in Britain. “Cask in the future will be brewed by specialist brewers for specialist pubs to be consumed by beer drinking specialists.” As we enjoy a minor renaissance of cask ale here in my region of the US, I am especially distraught at this situation, and I wonder—was it inevitable?
As I review the case file on this tragedy, I can’t help going back to an important decision CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) made and defended for decades. CAMRA was an important consumer group that rallied to save cask ale when the first signs of trouble arrived in the 1970s. They have been great advocates for cask, and have tens of thousands of members across the country. But the founders were beer fans and in particular writers, not brewers, and their minds were built for telling good stories. They were unsophisticated about how beer was made and sold, and they didn’t think deeply about solving real-world problems that might have helped cask ale compete with the consistent, if bland, keg ales (and later lagers) that were replacing them.
One decision in particular was pivotal in driving the industry away from technologies that would have elevated quality above romantic stories: defending at all costs the quality of these finicky pints, and especially the method of drawing cellar air straight into casks. That practiced causes the beer to lose its pep in mere hours, and spoil in a few days. Would cask be a robust market today if CAMRA hadn’t been wedded to a romantic story?
CAMRA’s Origins
Where food and drink were concerned, the 1960s and ‘70s were unimaginably dismal. Anything that could be canned or processed (or best of all, both) was, all in the service of “convenience.” That was true of beer as well, and in the UK, the traditional manner of serving beer, where pints are drawn from a naturally-carbonated cask, was being challenged by artificially-carbonated American-style keg beer. A lot of rhetoric has been devoted to the relative scale of horrors offered in these kegs, and we don’t need to adjudicate that here. It is enough to note that it was the late 1960s, when everyone was organizing to protest something, and a cadre of English drinkers were passionate about cask.
For anyone even passingly interested in beer, I highly recommend Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey’s Brew Britannia, which documents this era. I pulled out a copy to refresh my memory, and was reminded that the four men who founded the Campaign for Real Ale were both young, fervently idealistic, and also largely ignorant about beer. Boak and Bailey luxuriate on the organization’s early history, digging into the how and why CAMRA was founded. It’s a wonderful story well told, but revisiting it was bittersweet.
The founders’ initial complaints were poetic rather than practical. They had to be led down to a cellar and shown casks before they even knew what they were defending. In 1972, as the organization was taking shape, they came up with a definition (quoting here from Brew Britannia):
“[Real ales] are living beers, kept in their natural conditions and not pasteurized… They are dispatched and kept in casks and barrels without the addition of extraneous CO2… They are drawn from casks and barrels by methods other than those requiring CO2 pressure… They should taste pleasant and wholesome.”
CAMRA told a compelling story and captured the hearts of their fellow pub-going Britons, 30,000 of whom joined within a few years. I don’t think anyone doubts that this was hugely important in reviving interest in traditional ales and forestalling the assault of industrial-scale lager. But man, there was a cost.
The Mistake
Cask ale is a version of a very old way of serving beer: letting beer naturally carbonate in a container and drawing it out by gravity or by pulling it on a beer engine. The traditional British process involves drawing ambient air into the space left each time publicans pulled a pint—air from cellars that are often centuries old and filled with all the mold, mildew, bacteria, and yeast that collects in such places. The air from those cellars goes into the beer—even today!—and of course, begins spoiling it almost immediately.
At some point early on, CAMRA’s leaders understood how the process worked, but instead of finding a hygienic solution, they defended it. They reasoned that any technology that replaced old mildewy cellar air with pure gas was a larger risk to cask ale and the mildewy air itself. They even spun it as a feature rather than a bug (and used the word “feature!”). Here’s a passage from the Good Beer Guide, 1974: “Another feature of real ale that you ought to welcome is that it can vary from superb to undrinkable; even in the same pub. Every brew has its good days, its bad days and its indifferent days. Learn to accept the off moment and revel in the times when you hit on a really excellent pint.” Somehow they didn’t appreciate how damaging it was to celebrate “undrinkable” beer.
This was a critical inflection point, and had CAMRA been an industry organization, I’m certain it would have made different decisions. There were many very good reasons big breweries wanted to move to kegs: it was far simpler and didn’t require special expertise by someone at the pub; it was way more efficient in the supply chain; and most importantly, it gave the brewery more control over the final product and eliminated those “undrinkable” pints. Breweries committed to cask would have tried to figure out how to gain some of the benefits of kegs while preserving the character that makes cask ale unique. Men were literally walking on the moon; improving cask ale quality wasn’t impossible.
Indeed, there was at least one solution: the cask breather (or “aspirator”). It’s a device that fills the empty space in a cask with pure CO2. A breather is pressurized so the gas sits like a sterile blanket on top of the beer, rather than entering it. Consequently, the beer doesn’t get infected by the ambient cellar air, and the cask lasts longer without spoiling. CAMRA opposed the breather. They argued it would alter the flavor, somehow impugn the character of their “living” beer, and was probably a slippery slope to artificial carbonation.
Even as cask was collapsing in volume and people were being permanently turned off by gross pints of mildew beer, CAMRA held the line on this. Amazingly, they held the line even though they knew their position was ridiculous. In the late 1990s, CAMRA decided to compare cask served with and without a breather. They stacked the deck, too, comparing pours of cask “in the peak of condition” with cask that had been on a breather 8-10 days. It didn’t matter. “The trials proved that even experienced beer-tasters could not tell the difference,” they wrote of their own findings. Of course, in the real world, drinkers didn’t always get pints in the peak of condition, and that, not the breather, was the real problem.
Although CAMRA knew the only thing breathers did was extend the life of their beloved beer, it would take them two more decades (until 2018) to sanction their use—or at least no longer object. (“We have a neutral position on the use of cask breathers,” they still maintain.) So for more than fifty years, members of CAMRA prevented a technology that might have saved cask ale from a problem that was very, very real because their sense of romance in old-timey methods was so extreme they feared a problem they knew was not real.
Epilogue
The small-brewery revival in the US was initially inspired largely by British styles. Many attempted cask programs, and they fell in line with CAMRA’s dictates—shives, spiles and all. It did not go well, and they ended up dumping sour casks, and cask ale never took off here. A small renaissance has brought cask ale back to places like the Pacific Northwest, but with improvements. They have abandoned the silly romantic fixations of CAMRA, and they use breathers. At this point, no American under 45 knows about CAMRA or its weird orthodoxies—and they mostly don’t know about cask, either. Drinkers ordering cask ales in 2024 are meeting it on its own terms, which means they get a fresh pint they can evaluate as a beer, not a game of “find the fresh pint.” They seem to be enchanted by it, too.
I suspect John Keeling is right that cask ale will become a niche product. Breweries committed to cask are going to have to serve it in a targeted way, fresh, to their fans. If they want consumers to taste that delicate, lemony cloud of Citra scenting their modern bitters, they must take control. Cask is awesome, but only when it’s fresh.
Update, 6/11, 7:15am.
My, that was bracing. Cup of coffee in hand, I checked my social accounts and found that British cask fans had discovered this post and did not like it. The health of cask is an ancient and fraught debate—it was, after all, what sparked people to form CAMRA in the first place. I don’t need to weigh into the fine points of those debates here—and I agree with many of the arguments that fill out the tale of cask’s decline. The quality of cask ale isn’t the only issue.
But I will push back, if gently. I do think my friends across the pond may be blind to how serious a problem poor quality is. If you are a cask fan, you have opted in to a lifestyle choice in which variability is a given and bad pints are a tolerable downside. Many on Twitter seemed to hand-wave this away, arguing that it’s not a problem if you go to the right places, or the bad pints aren’t that bad, or some other justification.
Consider those who haven’t joined you in this lifestyle choice, however. Most drinkers are not avid fans. They flow like water to the easiest, most pleasant glass of booze. Choices are legion. What is the value proposition of a form of booze that is unreliable and occasionally horrible? There’s a reason 91% of the time Britons buy a pint of beer it is not cask—what to speak of those who choose wine or a cocktail instead.
From my perspective, it’s astounding that an industry wouldn’t take quick action to fix this obvious and damaging problem. Defending it is indefensible.