According to Beswick, he suggests that if you are getting in the critical school of though of beer husbandary, there is the longstanding, established point that suggests cask is harder to look after and with that, you run a bigger risk of having a ‘bad’ cellar manager ruining your beer, which was a big rationale from big breweries back in the 60s and as a result, we ended up big sterile beer, from big chemical factories.
“So, I think we are seeing more keg beers as a result from the consumer wanting more flavour and that is something keg is affording them. but the dispense is of course incredibly important, too. They are not mutually exclusive,” explains Beswick.
While an increasing number of breweries are looking to keg as a vessel to get their beers to market, the recent 2015 Cask Report from the excellent Pete Brown revealed that cask ale drinkers visit the pub twice as often as the average pub-goer and are responsible for an annual spend on food and drink amounts of £967.
Brown explains: “But the benefits of focussing on cask are not limited to income brought in directly by real ale drinkers. There are friends to take into account! Our research shows that 70% of cask ale drinkers take the lead when deciding which pub to go to with a group of friends. Till receipts may show cask to be a relatively small proportion of takings – but indirectly it significantly drives sales of other drinks.
“This means that cask-drinkers are more ‘regular’ than other drinkers, 50% of them going to the pub once a week or more, helping to fill the venue and create atmosphere. They are a quintessential part of ‘pubiness’, helping differentiate the pub from other food and drink outlets.”
The report showed that cask outperformed on-trade total beer by 1.3% and grew by 0.2% in 2014, against a decline in total on-trade beer of -1.1% with cask therefore outperforming total beer by 1.3%. It currently represents 17% of all beer sold in the on-trade, a figure that is growing, and will reach 20% by the year 2020. Also of note is that cask accounts for 57% of all on-trade draught ale, versus 43% keg.
“This increase is significant not only for pubs, but also for breweries,” says Pete. “Almost four new breweries are opening every week. There are now 1,700 of them, most brewing cask-conditioned ale and most supplying pubs whose sales are increasing – despite all the market challenges. What a great success story for British industry.”
Ged Carabini, business development manager a Kammac Keg & Cask believes that a lot real ale manufacturers are looking to move into keg to get a longer shelf life on their beer, and while volumes in real ale are still positive, as Brown backs up, it’s “obvious” that more are moving over.
“There are lots of microbreweries around and ultimately, the client is king. End users want seven weeks not seven days from their beer and in my opinion, it’s a brighter end format, that is what the end user is also looking for. As a result, I can see the ration between keg and cask flipping over the next few years,” says Carabini.
Since Kammac introduced its tailor-made production equipment last year, it has seen its client base in the UK and USA has double over the past twelve months.
According to Carabini, it is providing customers with personalised 9G Casks, 4.5G Pins and 30 and 50 litre Kegs.
The production equipment facilitates embossed top chimes, serial numbers and colour banding all within the seven-day time frame, and its lease-to-own option, over three to five years, allows its clients to adopt branding, ease of traceability via serial numbers, embossed top chimes and at the end of the term, an additional asset.
He says: “The growth in the business over the past year has been phenomenal; we have had to increase our sales team by fifty per cent to keep up with the ever-increasing demand. As our customers’ needs are changing, and with the increase of craft brewers, particularly in the UK, our business has aligned itself to those demands and we can offer a highly flexible approach in both volume and lead times.
“We don’t differentiate on service whether you are ordering 10 units or 10,000. We have enabled micro-breweries to be able to afford to build their Cask and Keg stock holding at a rate that suits their budgets and business growth plans and are in a position to offer even the smallest brewery a personalised grade ‘A’ stainless steel container. We are very proud that a large percentage of our client base is repeat business.”
On the manufacturing front, the Cask Force Cask Washer brand from Hugh Crane has enjoyed nearly 90 sales in the UK and US since its creation five years ago.
