Asking for a casking
Hello,
A few days ago I noticed CAMRA’s current campaign, Handpump hijack.
Now, you know me. I’m the type of idiot that gives myself a really hard time for no apparent reason by insisting on doing cask ale. Yesterday I was trying to take a cheeky afternoon off (a whole day is an impossible dream) and then ended up with a finished cask so it was time for a line clean and hooking up a new beer. And tapping another one. And then cleaning up after I’d sprayed myself and half the cellar with ale because sometimes my mallet game is well off.
I do it because it’s how I like my ale to be kept when I’m drinking it and because it’s how I’ve always done it. And because I’m stubborn. I get actively upset by the one handpull that was in use before I took over the pub, which is hooked up to a Courage Best keg and which takes up a huge amount of my time tightening jubilee clips to exhaustion because a beer engine is designed to pull unpressurised ale through a tap, not through a spike as though it’s assisted by gas.
The Courage Best tastes perfectly fine off the line. Unless you came back every day for a week and noticed that it had no evolution you couldn’t tell it wasn’t off cask. Even then, the amount we run through you’d barely get any time for a cask to change much. Weirdly a lot of my customers for it think it’s a radically different product to the real ales when in reality it’s just a bitter that might as well come in cask, except it hasn’t.
It’s not a good way of getting the beer up, is the thing. It’d be much easier if it was actually cask. But keg is cheaper and as much as I’ve been allowed to get silly with my specialist stuff, I wouldn’t be able to find a way to undercut the price of this Courage line.
So I do understand why pub managers would be going for it. No stillage time, no faffing around trying to preserve the ale and make it good, don’t need to train or educate staff on how to deal with cask ale and it works like any other line, except that it’s drawn up to the bar with a handpull tap.
Is that deceitful? I don’t really know. You are getting the beer you’re asking for and plenty of craft beer bars and micropubs would tell you that ale from a keg is just as real as from a cask. I don’t agree with that, since a pasteurised, unchanging product is very different but I get that there is an argument to be made, there.
I’m covered anyway, since I do have really real, cask ales. And I’d never lie to anyone and say that the Courage was anything it wasn’t - the first time Bexley CAMRA popped into my pub they were about to update the listing to say that there was real ale and I had to say hold your horses for a couple of weeks, I’m still getting the cask back on.
The CAMRA campaign puts the blame for deceptive handpulls squarely on breweries, specifically Carlsberg Marston Brewing Company. I don’t actually have anything to do with them in my pub, except that I’ve got Britvic cranberry juice and apparently they acquired that last month.
But I suspect this handpull-off-a-keg thing that winds me up has been being done in a few places for a long time. I don’t see an advantage to it; we’re more likely to get told the last of the keg is coming up bad than we are my cask ales, which fly out fast enough they’re good to the final pint. In fact, I sort of have the opposite problem with some of my drinkers in that they’ve been led to believe Courage isn’t (or at least, couldn’t be) real ale and that other bitters are something else entirely, when that isn’t the case.
I don’t honestly know where the line ought to be drawn. I think there probably is a twilight zone that’s got to be considered between having ales at all and having proper ales looked after right.
But I do think if breweries are attempting to encourage hand-pulling off kegs they deserve to be shamed. It’s not how the beer is best kept, it’s not how it’s best sold and that’s where it starts to be a different, poorly-described product.
Some other interesting things I’ve been reading that are about pubs or pub-adjacent: let’s start off with this Londoner article about nuisance noise complaints that are being used to restrict pubs trading hours and what they can do.
I’m really lucky in that my neighbours are (mostly) not dicks and don’t mind that the pub’s loud some nights. The pub has been here longer than any of us have, at nearly 140 years old (at least) and if you somehow move next to anything as big as this building you can’t pretend you didn’t know it was here.
Other landlords are nowhere near as lucky. Noise complaints can lead first to constant monitoring of decibel levels in your beer garden and outside areas, then to restricted use of those, then to restrictions on what you can do in the pub (no amplified noise, etc) and finally to constrict your opening hours or close the pub entirely.
You’d think, for that to be happening, you’d have to be doing something pretty bad. But most of the pubs listed for having had restrictions placed on them really aren’t. One of the pubs in the article, the Globe in (extremely busy tourist hotspot) Baker Street faced literally getting closed because of “faint giggles” that just one nearby resident reported hearing from the pub. Complete madness.
What’s really obvious is how little councils value pubs - or the people who go into them. In a sensible world these nonsense complaints would get thrown out and the complainants would get a reprimand for harassment if they continued.
That they’re being held up or even enforced, especially in cases where it’s a single, persistent complainant that causes changes to a pub’s licensable hours or activities, is obviously really stupid. And gives a great strategy to, say, anyone who’d quite fancy buying a pub to redevelop it into a block of flats: just complain enough, persistently enough and you can probably close the place and get rid of it as a licensable premises.
Whether that’s something councils have considered (probably not) isn’t worth worrying about, compared to the fact at least some boroughs have decided to take the view that pubs are an inconvenience to their communities, not an asset.
Pubs are assets of community value, whether that’s formalised or not. I’ve said this before but: you might not like that pubs are an inherent part of community structure in the UK or think that pushes an unhealthy culture but it is, nonetheless, true. You can buy drinks in a bar, a pub is different.
I really like this short clip from a BBC news report about locals who, their estates having been demolished, travelled for hours in order to carry on going to pubs in the middle of piles of rubble. Why? Because they knew the community in their pubs, not in the ones where they’d been moved to.
That’s not just the UK’s tendency towards suspicion of anyone from further away than the next road. It’s that you pick a pub because you like it or it’s the closest to you or it has a particular drink you like and you’re not very likely to change allegiances on that. I reluctantly switched pubs where I lived last when the one we mainly went in put the absolutely disgusting chenin house wine up to nine quid a glass and I realised I just couldn’t afford to go in there, plus the vibes were dead.
But I think if you asked most of the people I lived near we’d probably still say the Vic was our pub, even though we haven’t been in for ages and always go to the Albert. It’s a bit like a football team, you assign yourself one and then that’s it, isn’t it?
A council committing to uphold the malicious intentions of one or a handful of residents over other residents who want to go to a local business is fucking ludicrous. The people in the pub are also people who live or work in your borough. Probably so are the people behind the bar. Definitely the landlord will be. So why pick the option of pissing them off and stifling something that, ultimately, makes an area more attractive?
Presumably it’s because in a lot of boroughs any licensed premises is regarded as an economically inefficient liability. This hub of community could be some soulless luxury flats if you only look at it on a balance sheet. Which is how you end up with disasters like the area between Canada Water and Deptford where you’re hard pressed to find an open boozer.
When I lived there over a decade ago it was annoying but I did tend to go out in central, after work, at the time. With working from home the actual local’s returned to prominence, the office local less of a thing. And if you don’t have that you’re robbing your residents; people want somewhere to go.
It’s well past fucking time councils started valuing pubs rather than acting as though they’re some sort of imposition. I’m lucky in that Bexley aren’t like that but clearly way too many boroughs - in London and across the UK - are.
The other thing I’ve read recently is this New Statesman article about James Watt, the Elon Musk of Brewdog. I doubt any of it’s particularly news to anyone given his transgressions have been well-publicised, in particular the collapse of BrewDog’s commitment to Real Living Wage, the documentation of how poorly workers and customers are treated in at least one of their bars and losing their environmental certification B-Corp status.
The thing I think a lot about James Watt is: how can I do everything I can to never become that way. What is the slippery slope to betraying anything you ever championed?
I think probably the fact I have actual values that aren’t marketing-based helps. Yeah, there’s a part of me that thinks it is possible to win at running a pub but probably in a sort of limited, getting-the-local-CAMRA-meet-here or turning a profit to reinvest in my staff sort of way not with some desire to crush anyone else. Maybe it’s just that my vice is pinot grigio not massive amounts of gear, which always seems to be hovering somewhere in the background of radical startup philosophies, whether it’s the case with Watt or not.
But it’s probably still worth checking in every now and then with what you’re letting slide. Had a migraine last night and nearly couldn’t be arsed to tell one of the regulars off for being a knob about immigrants, ambled round the corner of my bar (which has three corners) and had a word with myself until I went back and did something about it. It’s a fucking literal headache but if I start letting it go maybe one day I’ll wake up at Nigel Farage’s birthday party.
Or possibly I’m just not a dick. But I’d like to do more than cross my fingers on that one, 2025 feels like the only way to make sure you’re not in dick space is repeatedly putting distance between it and yourself.
Hazel