In Praise of Cask Ale
Through the small foggy window behind the bar, I can see twilight stretch across the pastoral valley of Slad. To my left, a small fire in a cast-iron stove. To my right, a table of old codgers sipping their pints. I'm writing this from The Woolpack, a country pub outside Stroud, England, where the man behind the bar just grabbed a clean glass, angled it, and worked the handpump in a steady rhythm. My order? A Best Bitter, naturally.
The first swig tells you all you need to know. Unlike every other beer, cask ale—also called "real ale"—is alive when it reaches your glass. It's unfiltered and unpasteurized, meaning it's going through a secondary fermentation in the cask before it's pulled into your pint. There’s no added carbonation, just a playful effervescence from the fermentation itself. It’s stored and served at cellar temperature, meaning it’s cool, but not cold. It’s fuller on the palate. The hops are present, but the bitterness is restrained, balanced by the faint bready sweetness of the malt. The ABV runs low, around 4.3 percent, so if you enjoy a pint or two you're still a few away from drunk-texting an ex.
Most other beer in the world has been engineered to travel: pasteurized, carbonated, canned, stacked on a pallet, driven hundreds or even thousands of miles, plucked off the shelf of a grocery store, and cracked open alone in front of a screen. Cask ale, on the other hand, is a fussy old soul. It can't be bottled, canned, or shipped very far before it turns on you. This means the brewery, the pub, and the drinker are in the same ecosystem, all dependent on one another. And because it can only be served in a pub or taproom, cask ale requires social drinking in a shared space surrounded by your neighbors.
Back at The Woolpack, the squeak of the old wood floors began to crescendo as muddy boots spilled into the country pub for the night. Eventually, that window behind the bar was fogged over as the small room filled to standing room only, with men and women, young and old alike. Spend enough time in a busy pub and it’s inevitable that you’ll talk to strangers. For me that night, it was Paul.
Paul had lived around the corner from The Woolpack in Slad for twenty-some years. I was on my second pint of bitter when Paul started telling me about the forest conservation group he’s a part of, caring for the village's nearby woods and educating people about proper forest maintenance. Part of their duties include, when necessary, felling some trees. There's one stipulation, though: They don't use power tools to cut down any of them down, only hand tools. He explained that if you have to put in some effort, you'll pause and think carefully about which tree you cut. What happens if I cut down this tree? Or that one? You end up evaluating the tree not only by itself, but also in the context of the forest.
Were we still talking about trees? I don’t know if it was the beer, but it made sense to me. As I listened to Paul and nursed my pint, I wondered if there was something else at the bottom of this glass. Or Paul’s glass, for that matter. Were we bonded by our Best Bitters? Would we be here without the cask ale? If this could cure modernity, why aren’t we all drinking it?
For hundreds of years, cask ale was the dominant form of beer drinking in England, until the endless preference of capital for efficiency won out. By the 1960s, six large brewers had consolidated their way to dominance, bought up the pubs, killed the small breweries, and stifled innovation. By 1971, cask ale consumption had declined to such an extent that four journalists founded CAMRA—the Campaign for Real Ale—to save it from extinction. They succeeded, technically. But the generation that kept it alive became associated with a certain kind of drinker: older, male, probably in a tweed blazer, spent too much time in the pub. Younger drinkers wanted something that didn't remind them of their dads and granddads. But that might be changing.
Not far from The Woolpack is Stroud Brewery, one of the only taprooms in England that predominantly serves cask ales. The focus is on craft, so the tap list changes by season and isn't limited to the usual Best Bitters or English Milds. Greg Pilley, Stroud's founder, views the taproom as exactly what a pub should be: a community hub. There's beer, of course, but also dedicated spaces for events nearly every day of the week. Flyers and posters cover every wall announcing live music, yoga, language learning — whatever the community has going on.
"If we are talking about a sustainable future that is embedded in our culture, cask is a really great example of sustainable beer drinking that has evolved over the years to fit with our climate, our crops, and our social conditions," Greg said as we sat down for a pint. He opted for the Organic Pale Ale (OPA), and I followed his lead. The taproom was buzzing for a Friday afternoon, full of people of all ages. Halfway through our conversation, a group of local musicians walked in for a pint and a rehearsal at the table next to us. It's hard not to view the beer as partially responsible.
If you find yourself in England, get to a good pub and order a cask ale. Sit with it. Talk to whoever's next to you. Buy them a round and a second one for yourself. Stay longer than you planned. That kind of drinking shouldn’t feel countercultural, yet somehow it does.
Skylar Renslow is a writer and photographer based in Seattle. His work has appeared in Eater and various publications across the Pacific Northwest. He writes The Daily Grog, dispatches from the road, the bar, and somewhere in between.
