Trad styles might be back – but why?
If you're seeing more mild and bitter around, it might be because of tax, competition for taps, or simply our general tiredness.
Are we imagining it or are classic British beer styles, and cask ale more generally, making a bit of a cultural comeback?
For real, this time. Not just in the hopeful dreams of traditionalists.
What first put this thought into our heads was the announcement by local Bristol brewery Good Chemistry of a new series of cask-only beers, including a (spiced) mild and a porter.
In the past year or two, it’s generally become easier to get cask mild in Bristol.
Left Handed Giant’s flagship brewpub at Finzel’s Reach seems to have it on permanently as the single cask ale available.
The Barley Mow, near Temple Meads station, has also had one guest mild or another every time we’ve visited this year, we think.
There’s a bit more bitter around, too, we fancy, and the write-ups of our weekend drinking we post every week on Patreon back that perception up.
For example, on a recent pub crawl with the Bristol and District CAMRA ladies group (AKA the BAD Ladies) Jess was intrigued to find two bitters side by side at The Green Man, from the New Bristol Brewery and Lost & Grounded respectively.
Both breweries are very much 21st century craft beer operations more typically associated with keg beer and, respectively, with hazy IPAs and lager.
Good Chemistry’s bitter Time Lapse is another example.
At 3.4% ABV in its current incarnation, it’s also among the most ‘proper’, accomplished modern takes we’ve come across – think Black Sheep at its best, including the pleasing whiff of sulphur.
Market forces at play
When we raised this question on Bluesky (currently our go-to place for a proper chat) Steve Dunkley of Beer Nouveau offered the following insight:
“Had a chat with a local landlord about this the other day and he pointed out that the new cellar install he had coming out of the lockdowns restricted his keg offerings to the macro (Heineken) but he was able to buy cask from whoever he liked. No surprise previously keg-only breweries now so [keen to brew] cask.”
And, by the way, we continue to admire Steve’s industry insight.
He gets out and about and has connections, and is always thinking about the practicalities of how things work.
Do follow him in one or more places.
A question of duty
Another lever might be the change in alcohol duty that happened during the summer.
The lower band previously meant that less duty was paid on beers up to 2.8% ABV. For most British drinkers, and in terms of taste, that meant no ‘proper’ beer was covered.
Since August this year, that band has extended upwards to cover beers up to 3.4%.
That’s still weak, but it’s at the lower end of acceptability for bitter, and arguably spot on for 20th century mild.
The hype cycle
Finally, there’s the matter of craft beer fatigue, which we wrote about earlier in the year.
If we say that interest in craft beer in the UK began to increase from around 2007 (when we started this blog – a symptom, not a cause) and peaked in around 2014, when our book Brew Britannia came out, that’s plenty of time for a full cycle of hype to play out.
There’s a generation of people who have made ‘being into beer’ part of their identity. That includes people who used to blog; people who started breweries; and people who’ve ended up as middle-aged managers in the industry, having started on the frontline a decade ago.
Now, they’re getting old.
Speaking for ourselves, in our forties, we:
can’t really handle more than three pints in a session
need to be functional for work tomorrow
have become sentimental for the 20th century as it slips out of reach
are more appreciative of subtle flavours
With that in mind, mild and bitter are comforting, manageable, and delicate. (Or boring, weak and bland if you’re in a different place on the journey.)
We’re seeing fewer examples of ESB and porter but they’re around and certainly in autumn and winter suggest a certain cosiness – something else that becomes more important as you get older and your thermostat and boiler begin to falter.
Measuring the change
It’s surprisingly difficult to find a consistent, reliable dataset for the popularity of particular beer styles. SIBA’s craft beer report does, however, include a recurring chart with stats on the popularity of particular beer styles.
The past few reports (2020, 2022, 2023) show a dip in popularity for mild and bitter and then signs of a possible resurgence.
Mild, for example, made up 17% of on-trade (pub) purchases in 2020, 13% in 2022, and is now back to 14% in 2023.
Now, those numbers seem a bit unlikely to us – 1 in 6 pints sold in 2020 was mild? Really? But the point is, it’s a consistent measure and allows us to gauge ups and downs. If they keep the categories the same for the next few years, we should be able to track this trend.
The other thing to consider is that it’s not so much that there’s more mild and bitter around but that it’s changing venues. It feels significant to find mild on sale in craft beer bars and hipsterish pubs because, like it or not, they’re seen as arbiters of taste.
What do you reckon? Are trad styles actually becoming more popular, or is it just a matter of tax and commercial factors weighting the scale?
Poems about pubs
Stefan Mohamed is a spoken word poet based in Bristol whose most recent show and collection is called Farewell Tour. It’s a cynical, darkly funny take on contemporary Britain.
We’re mentioning it here because it happens to mention pubs more than perhaps might be expected.
In fact, 3 of the 37 poems and prose poems mention beer or pubs in the title, such as ‘Pub Grub’, which opens like this:
Queen’s Complaint
an upscale downmarket town
nestled in the cradle
of two separately disputed valley
boasts 1,066 individual pubs within the municipality.Notably
389 are called The Red Lion
while 346 are called The Royal Oak
and 331 are called The Crown.More notably
you have been banned
from all of them.
Another poem, ‘Traditional Pub Menu’, lists items like “Toasted poppy, served with poppy-fried poppy and fizzy poppy-cordial”.
It’s published by Verve at £9.99 and is available directly from the author.
On the blog
We reviewed Service, Please!, a new zine by and for people working in hospitality. When we published our review, their online shop was a bit broken, but it’s fixed now. Do grab a copy.
Off the back of our holiday in Germany we wrote a few travel pieces. Two were about Berlin:
One was an update on last year’s post about Cologne as we ventured beyond the centre into inner-suburbs and outer neighbourhoods.
There were also some footnotes about those posts on Patreon: “The earliest evidence of Wegbier we saw was on our train to Wuppertal where an empty Oettinger bottle was wobbling around on the table when we got to our seat at around 10am…”
There were also the usual weekly round-ups of news, nuggets and longreads. As we’ve said before, these increasingly feel like our most important contribution, highlighting other people’s hard work and insight and helping it reach a slightly wider audience.
And that’s it for another month. In December, it’ll be all round-ups and lists. See you then!
Cheers,
Ray & Jess
My tastes have reverted back to trad as you say - age - but also I like to have a good, juicy IPA now as a dessert to the main course. Great piece as ever