The case for low-alcohol cask

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.

Heinekin, Becks, Peroni - all the mainstream lagers are at it, and Adnams has managed to take the alcohol out of Ghost Ship without losing too much else. A success story, definitely, and possibly even some sort of victory for the nation's health and wellbeing. And these beers are genuinely a world apart from the non-alcoholic beers of the past. Kaliber, anyone?

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?

 

Cask-o-phobia strikes again 

The likely answer will not surprise you. 

Things are better these days...

Cask is seen as an inconvenience by most (not all) brewers. I strongly suspect that if they could do away with it altogether - as many brewers effectively have done - they'd do so. 

In the past there may have been people mumbling about how alcohol acts as a necessary preservative in cask, and LA beer would have such a short shelf-life that it wouldn't be viable. But even if that were true - which it isn't; it's a half-truth at best - it would only be a valid objection when such beers were a niche product, and not in 2026 when they're absolutely thriving. 

Some of us have known for a while that it's not impossible, because extremely weak beers have been put into cask and they've been fine. Just not very often.

People have long forgotten that the original Brewdog Nanny State from 2009 was a cask beer. It was 1.1% ABV, absolutely insanely hoppy to the point that any sense of balance was lost, and never brewed again - the name being used for a more sensible bottled beer at 0.5% the following year that was a lot more drinkable. I was pretty positive about the stuff.

The original version is perhaps best consigned to the historical records. But it proved what could be done. 

Brentwood brewery have been one of the leading exponents of ultra low alcohol cask beer. In the mid 2010s they introduced BBC1 (1.5%) and BBC2 (2.5%), both good, drinkable examples of 'table beers', though perhaps more hop-forward than they might've been in the past. Their Sleighride was also 1.5%, and in 2019 the same brewery gave us the Jellaini Baobab and Black Tea farmhouse ale, which was just 0.5%. I know most of this beer probably went into bottle, but they did cask some of it, because I drank it at the Pig's Ear Beer Festival that year. And it was pretty good.

CAMRA approved? It should be!

Kent brewery also got in on the 'Festive' extra weak beer act (were they trying to be ironic?) with Driving Home for Christmas at 1.8%. Also pretty decent. 

And there is a very longstanding example, from which brewers could've learned if they actually cared to do so: Kvass - not strictly speaking a beer, but a fermented, non-alcoholic bread-based drink popular in Eastern Europe. The more traditional varieties are sold on the street, direct from the 'cask' and have a mouthfeel strikingly similar to really good, fresh real ale. 

The argument about weak beers being unsuited to the format is particularly unconvincing, given that brewers are just as averse to putting their very strong beers in cask, even though this rationale would point clearly to the fact that strong beers last longer, can be aged for months or even years in cask (albeit without tapping them) and theoretically have a longer serving window.

(There are actually some brewers who deliberately age strong beers in casks for a long time, then transfer them to kegs for serving, which seems like the most deliberately frustrating form of madness to me!)

No, the message from most breweries is clear: If you're a cask drinker, you shut the fuck up and drink your 4% pale ale because pretty much everything else is going into keg. No strong beers for you, and no weak ones either!

  

Numbers don't lie 

Since I started keeping records I've sampled more than 13,000 different cask beers. My 'Every ABV' series details the interesting journey from weaker to stronger beers and I got to pick out my favourite at every different strength. But it didn't include low alcohol beers because of the complete lack of data. Hardly any very weak beer goes into cask - and believe me, I've tried to find some! The stats speak for themselves:

The number of cask beers sampled at 0.9% ABV or weaker: 2 (literally just the two 0.5 ones mentioned above)

Between 1.0% and 1.9%: 6

Between 2.0% and 2.9%:  54 - so even sub-3% makes up less than half a percent of the total.

To put these numbers into perspective, I've had 1362 different cask beers at exactly 4.5%!

Look, I love drinking beer. Absolutely fucking love it. I probably binge-drink too frequently, given that I feel the need to lie to doctors and nurses about the number of 'units' I get through. 

I'd genuinely like to include more LA/AF options into my drinking routines. But I'm not going to give up cask and I'm not going to give up ticking. It's on the breweries to brew options for people like me.  

The cask sector is obsessed with very specific certain strengths - the tax-relieving 3.4% pint has become ubiquitous, and 4.2% and 4.5% show no sign of going away either. Occasionally you'll find some fairly strong beers put into cask.

So, please, please, just do the same with the sub-3% stuff! There will never be a better opportunity or a more receptive market!