If you’re not involved as a brewer or licensee in Cask Ale Week already (?), make sure you take a careful look at how your local competition is getting involved – and winning sales. The 2012 Cask Ale Week is shaping up to be the best ever in introducing new drinkers to the joys of cask-conditioned ale, generating additional traffic and sales.
Cask ale is a fresh, natural, wholesome drink bursting with flavour and aroma – and it’s unique to Britain as well as to the on-trade. People may be able to offer hospitality at home – and they do – but they can’t offer cask-conditioned, hand pulled beer. So it’s surprising that the pub and beer trade have made so little of it over the years. If ever there was a good time to make the most of it, now is the moment. There is a growing buzz about cask ale – and Cask Ale Week provides a terrific platform for outlets to ‘PR’ their offer.
There are beer festivals, tutored tastings, meet the brewer nights, beer and food matching sessions and around 8,000 pubs will be offering ‘Try Before You Buy’ sampling. Some pubs are recommending ales to go with particular dishes on the menu and others are ordering in different beers for people to try. In addition, the Campaign for Real Ale is helping to promote it, and Punch Taverns are giving away a free pint of real ale in approximately 900 Punch Taverns pubs around the country.
Given the revival of interest in quality food and drink produced in this country from fine ingredients, and the need of the hospitality industry to prize people off their sofas for an eating and drinking out experience, Cask Ale Week provides a fantastic opportunity for the industry. And those taking part (pubs and drinkers) are supporting: British farmers and breweries, British Pubs (you can’t buy cask ale in the supermarket), British tourism (visitors come here specially to try our cask ales), and – overall – the local and British economy. How good does that make you feel!
The CaskFinder app
Cask Marque’s CaskFinder app gets over 50,000 hits a month, and allows smartphone owners to find pubs with a quality ale offering. Anyone registering on “The World’s Biggest Ale Trail” can win a T shirt after scanning just 12 Cask Marque QR codes during Cask Ale Week.
For more information click here