Last week, I drank a cask beer from Downton brewery at the Ealing Beer Festival. Secret Sobriety was the name.
There's nothing unusual about that in itself. I go to Ealing most years and drink a lot of cask ale when I'm there. Downton are a fairly well-established brewery and I've drunk 63 different cask beers from them. However...
It was a good beer. Dry. Hoppy. Easy to drink. What makes this beer so remarkably unusual is that it was only 0.5% ABV. And cask beers at that strength are incredibly rare.
We are told that the Low Alcohol / Alcohol Free beer sector is absolutely booming. Apparently it has grown 870% since 2013, which is quite astonishing growth, given that the overall beer market has been in long-term gradual decline. AF Guinness has become one of the most popular beers in the country in next to no time (I find it too sweet and malty personally) and lots of big brands now have a low- or zero-alcohol variant available. A success story, definitely, and possibly even some sort of victory for the nation's health and wellbeing.
But it's always a bottle, a can, or sometimes keg. The one thing that LA/AF beer hasn't traditionally offered us is that authentic cask experience. The unique quality and mouthfeel of a cask beer is what marketing wankers might call a 'key product differentiator' or something. There's something about it that you don't get when you drink beer that comes out of a keg, can or bottle.
So why is Low Alcohol cask still so incredibly uncommon?
