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Ask if it's Cask
by Ted Bruning, editor of What's Brewing
CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, has launched one of its most ambitious projects yet. For the last two years we've been getting together a fighting fund, supported by many brewers, and now at last we're ready to run a nationwide advertising campaign promoting real ale and defending choice for drinkers.
Yet for all the effort we're putting into it, we won't be able to spend even a fraction as much on promoting real ale as a national brewer can spend on a single lager or smooth beer brand. And that says it all, really. Big brewers are interested in big brands. They'll spend millions on pushing their own brands and, hopefully, knocking out the brands of their rivals. Their ambition is to shoulder all others aside, and to freeze out the competition.
But what CAMRA is interested in is choice and variety. A pub culture where there are beers of all styles and characters to suit beer-drinkers of all styles and characters.
Big brewers have been yanking the handpumps out of pubs all over the country, to create the appearance of "consumer demand" for smooth beers - which are more profitable because they're easier to store and easier to serve, and they don't have any wastage. But it's bogus. Thousands of smooth beer drinkers only drink smooth because their pub no longer stocks cask ale.
We know the demand is there, because regional brewers are all reporting rising sales in the 20 per cent of the market they control. But in the 80 per cent of the market controlled by the big brewers, power over supply is being used to distort demand. That's why CAMRA is taking to the billboards. It's about defending choice and variety. It's not about knocking lager and smooth beer, or putting down the people who prefer them. It's about persuading people who prefer cask beer to demand it in their local pub, and to refuse to be fobbed off with something they regard as second best.
For only when every pub in the land has a handpump alongside the lager and smooth beer fonts will brewers and landlords be able to say - and mean it - that:
"THE CHOICE IS YOURS!"
So don't forget to 'ask if it's cask' next time you go to the pub!
Reproduced from the Full Pint, Issue 9.
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