Bullish about Cask ale? Bearly

Business was slow when I stumbled, thirsty and bramble-punctured, into The Bull in Wrotham, Kent, shortly before lunchtime last Thursday. I was the only customer. Good for me, less good for the pub - but by the looks of things, it wasn’t a typical state of affairs. The Bull is smartly (if a touch blandly) decorated, and the village is full of nice cars & other signifiers of wealth. Plenty of cash around for pub meals, you’d think. 

How much call is there for cask ale in such a place? Some. There was just one available: Old Dairy Red Top, from Tenterden, another reasonably affluent Kentish town 20 miles or so south-east of Wrotham. (It was delicious, which is sort of beside the point but nonetheless worth recording, so I’ve recorded it). 

I’ve been to eight pubs, in Kent, South-east and East London, since the end of lockdown. I thought that lockdown, and the subsequent slow drift back to pubs, might prove the perfect excuse for publicans to cut down on cask ale, which sells for less than high-end keg beer and is a bit harder to look after. Like the trainspotter I am, I kept track of how many cask ales were on offer in each. One pub had five cask ales on, one had three, another three pubs had two, two had one ale only, and one place had none (“It doesn’t sell fast enough”). All but one of these pubs had handpumps sitting idle. 

At the moment, it’s hard to conclude too much from this. Is cask in trouble? Possibly, possibly not. Would fewer ales be bad news? Perhaps not (better quality beer as all cask drinkers are drinking the same one, ensuring it gets sold before it goes off), probably yes (pubs focus on big brands; if you want cask, it’ll have to be Doom Bar.)

It could be worse; four miles or so westwards down the Pilgrim’s Way, I wandered past The Setting Sun, a squat old alehouse in the Downs above Otford. It closed in January, apparently because the landlady had had enough. Nothing to do with Covid-19, clearly, although plenty of other pubs look like they’ll end up in the same situation, with another period of national lockdown now looking inevitable rather than possible. The greatest risk to cask still lies with pubs closing rather than idle handpumps.