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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

> cask ale - the preferred pint in Britain

Not really - according to 2018 on-trade numbers, ale is 24% by value of beer sold, and cask is 55% of ale, so cask ale is just 13.2% of all beer:

https://www.marstons.co.uk/docs/reports/2018/on-trade-beer-r...

(this is published by Marston's, but i believe the data is for the whole industry)

Train passengers who want a drink are not necessarily the same demographic as pub-goers, but i'm not sure i'd expect them to skew significantly towards cask ale.

> is ruined by movement

Which is why the cutting-edge high-technology solution of "bottles" has been invented. Honestly, i find bottled beers usually better than the cask equivalent, even when i'm not on a train, i think because cask is so sensitive to keeping, whereas bottles usually reach you in mint condition. Although it might just be because the bottled versions are sometimes stronger:

https://www.adnams.co.uk/articles/adnams-broadside-cask-and-...

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Those numbers are from 2018. The train-pub in question was from 1949, and at the time ale would have been overwhelmingly the beer of choice - I suspect pilsner/lager wouldn't have been widely available in the UK.

I'm actually surprised cask ale is as high as 13.2% of all beer sold. While "craft beer" (I hate that term) is en vogue and has made people curious to more traditional style beer, the default pint in most pubs will be something lagery like Carling, Tennents or Carlsberg (all three pretty bad, but Tennent's has a nostalgia factor for me).

> Tennent's has a nostalgia factor for me

Me too. I rented a flat right next to the cathedral when doing a semester as an exchange student in Glasgow 20 years ago. What I did't get was how someone, at some point, sold that plot of land next to a 1000 year old cathedral and cemetery, to the smelly Tennent's brewery! Every time I walked past I'd wonder who had agreed to that, and when. City planning disaster, that. I don't remember much from the semester itself but and I blame that on Tennent's too.

The Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh, which is right next door to the royal palace of Holyroodhouse, is on the site of an old brewery:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Parliament_Building#L...

If you think about our most notorious pub chain - 'spoons - they generally have a decent selection of cask, so I'm not that surprised that it makes up a decent amount.

Could never use them again after how they have reacted to the pandemic.

The reasons to boycott Spoons have been piling up for years. The strongarming of breweries, the use of the pubs as a pro-Brexit platform... and the bloke in charge is a notorious bellend.

Wetherspoons is cheap, but it's not a net good. (Truth be told I stopped eating there after being served a frozen curry - literally solid ice.)

Good point, I often forget about them becuase while they're not rare in Scotland, they're not quite as commonplace as down south.

> ale is 24% by value of beer sold, and cask is 55% of ale, so cask ale is just 13.2% of all beer:

Interesting that they separate out stouts into their own category at 7%. I guess maybe because Guinness dominates stout and that's not a cask ale. I'd have counted it as part of "ale", myself...

> Honestly, i find bottled beers usually better than the cask equivalent,

Aww no, couldn't disagree more. Cask beer is fresh, bottled beer not so much. Even in a bottle, the fragrant, lighter hoppy aromas disappear pretty quickly, so there are whole dimensions missing from the product...

IMHO of course, your preference is yours and not wrong.

They also usually add some gas to the bottles, if I remember correctly, which does affect the taste. Not necessarily for the worse, but it is noticeable. It's pretty obvious in Hobgoblin, but I still like the bottle flavour and it even survives being in a car boot in a French summer.

I imagine the only reason not to do bottles is because they're liable to being turned into projectiles, but I guess you could just serve it in one of those crap plastic glasses like they would from a cask anyway.

Real Ale in a bottle would continue to condition slightly so depending on the yeast strain I'd expect bottled beer to change flavour slightly.

Also because of the way cask ale is dispensed it's pretty much always oxidized after the first couple of pints are pulled so that might be the change in taste you're noticing, since it's in the bottle it doesn't get oxidized.

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