COUNTDOWN TO CASK ALE WEEK

National Cask Ale Week 2010 runs from 29^th March – 5^th April (up to and including the Easter Bank Holiday weekend).  It is backed by SIBA, Camra, Cask Marque and many of the regional cask brewers and is a great focal point for everyone who cares about our national drink. 

For cask ale brewers, Cask Ale Week is an opportunity to capitalise on the increased interest among licensees, drinkers and the media to increase interest in, and sales of, your own beers.  So, if you haven’t already made plans to capitalise on this celebration of cask, read on for ideas, advice and a template press release. 

Cask Ale Week – background

The first National Cask Ale Week ran last year, with POS, tastings, ‘meet the brewer’ evenings and other events taking place in 8,000 pubs. This year, the organisers are aiming to reach 10,000 pubs, with the same goal of encouraging new drinkers to try cask ale.

SIBA is one of the main sponsors of Cask Ale Week 2010. 1,000 DDS customer pubs have taken one of our SIBA-branded Cask Ale Week kits, which means our logo will be on display on bunting, flags, drip mats, pump clips, posters and banners. 

Cask ale – the ‘rising star’ of the UK’s beer market

Recent years have seen a revival in cask beer’s fortunes and it is now the only sector of the beer market in growth. The Cask Report, published last October, showed:

·         1.5 million new cask ale drinkers in 2008  (around half of them women)

·         Distribution in 3,000 new pubs between June 2008 and June 2009.

·         CAMRA membership hit the 100,000 mark

·         A record 64,000 people visited the Great British Beer Festival  in August 2009

·         71 breweries opened in the UK last year, taking the total up to 660 – the highest level since World War II

What you can do for Cask Ale Week

• Open your brewery for brewery tours – perhaps a group from your local CAMRA branch, or one of the pubs selling your beers might like to offer it to a group of interested customers?
• Talk to local pubs that sell your beers about activities that could be good for both of you – driving traffic into the pub and raising awareness locally of your beers.
• Suggest a ‘meet the brewer’ evening, or perhaps some simple beer and food matching, working with a local food supplier?
• April 1^st is FemAle Day – an opportunity to introduce women to cask ale. According to Camra’s research, the number of women drinking cask ale doubled last year. And it’s a topic that always attracts media interest.
• Contact your local CAMRA branch to see what they have planned for Cask Ale Week as there might be opportunities for you to get involved.

Information sources

• The Cask Ale Week website: www.caskaleweek.co.uk has a list of all pubs that are marking Cask Ale Week in some way.
• You can find contact details for your local Camra branch on their website: http://www.camra.org.uk/page.aspx?o=100283
• For cheering facts and figures on the renewed consumer interest in cask ale, visit www.caskreport.co.uk

For the template press release Click here

Award-winning beer writer Jeff Evans is the brains behind a new website dedicated to the wonderful world of beer.

Inside Beer (http://www.insidebeer.com) is aimed at beer lovers all around the world, with its mix of breaking news, essential facts and topical features.

Regular items recommending the best places to drink, classic beers and new releases are joined by insights into breweries (big and small), book reviews and a retro section, exploring events that have shaped the brewing world in years gone by. Invaluable information, such as listings of excellent beer shops around the world, a calendar of festivals and events, and major awards results, adds another dimension to the innovative site.

Jeff, an eight-times editor of the Good Beer Guide and a former UK Beer Writer of the Year, is confident that Inside Beer will prove to be a valuable addition to the online beer community for both consumers and those involved in the trade.

“I’m very excited about Inside Beer,” he said. “It allows me to continue the work I’ve been doing for more than 20 years, which involves highlighting the very best beers and showcasing the people behind the world’s most interesting breweries. I hope I can bring a degree of authority and experience to the web community, to complement the zeal and enthusiasm drinkers all over the world put into existing beer websites.”

“There are big plans for Inside Beer and what you currently see online is but the first stage of our development. As the beer world becomes ever more diverse and fascinating, so I hope Inside Beer will reflect this and become increasingly influential.”

The biggest brewing trade bodies have formed a company that will attempt to persuade more breweries to register their beers on the Cyclops tasting notes scheme.

Cask Marque, The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and The Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) last week launched a new partnership with Everards, the Leicester brewery that founded Cyclops, to try to attract more of the circa 600 UK breweries to join, and to raise the scheme’s profile among consumers.

So far, 150 brewers’ beers have been registered.

Each of the four parties owns a 25 per cent in the company, which will be run as a not-for-profit organisation.

Cask Marque will take responsibility for the scheme’s administration, CAMRA for promotion to consumers, and SIBA for promoting it to brewers, while Everards will continue to produce the notes based on beer samples.

Brewers must pay to have their beers put on the scheme, but SIBA last year began offering to subsidise members’ applications. Members have to pay £100 for notes on upto five beers, a 60 per cent reduction on the standard charge.

A new consumer-facing website for Cyclops will be launched in mid-2010.

Francis Patton, Cask Marque chairman and Cyclops company secretary, said: “Each of the organisations involved has a complimentary skills sets. If we have a position where the consumer is demanding Cyclops notes and the breweries are buying into it, then this can only help the growth of cask ale.”

Taken from:  The Publican

The Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) is expecting a sharp increase in members applying for subsidised Cyclops accreditation following Enterprise Inns’ move to make this a service requirement for all beers bought through SIBA’s Direct Delivery System (DDS), from February next year.

Around 80 members have already had their beers “Cyclops-ed”, taking advantage of the generous subsidy offered by SIBA. Currently, SIBA funds 60% of the Cyclops accreditation fee, meaning that brewers have to find just £100 to put up to five of their beers through the process.  

Nick Stafford, managing director of SIBA DDS, says, “Cyclops is becoming more widely-used as a staff training and consumer education tool, and this latest endorsement from Enterprise Inns clearly makes accreditation more compelling to all members of SIBA DDS. We expect more brewers will see the subsidised fee as a small price to pay for the distribution gains that having Cyclops- accredited beers can bring.”

At Enterprise Inns, head of drinks category Grant Simpson adds, “Cyclops accreditation is a way for us to offer greater quality assurance for SIBA beers, to both retailers and customers. We’ve increased the number of SIBA members’ beers available our pubs, in response to growing consumer demand, and we now want to ensure they can be served and retailed in the best possible way. Cyclops, with its consistent and easy to understand taste descriptors for beer, can help us to achieve this.”

Getting all SIBA DDS members ‘Cyclops-ed’ by February will require accreditation of around 900 beers, something that the Cyclops team are confident of achieving comfortably. 

The Cyclops subsidy is one of SIBA’s ‘Access to Market’ initiatives, which help members to bring their beers to market.  Earlier this year, it launched  SIBA Technical Services, which enables its members to offer a more tailored dispense service to its pub customers.  The first ‘Access to Market’ scheme, DDS, has helped countless smaller brewers extend distribution of their beers. Sales of DDS-supplied beers grew by 11.9% in the 12 months to end June 2009, compared to the same period last year.  Over the same period, the number of pubs buying beers through DDS grew by 5.8%, and sales per pub of DDS-supplied ales were up by 5.7%.

Cyclops was developed by a group of industry bodies as a way of demystifying beer, through simple, objective, industry-standard taste descriptions that are easily understood by bar staff and consumers. The Cyclops scheme, initially devised by Everards, is now operated as an industry-wide initiative by Everards,  SIBA, Cask Marque and CAMRA. For more information, visit  www.cyclopsbeer.co.uk/

Mustard-Sage Glaze  Lucy Saunders, Grilling with beer

Cotswold Beef Stew  Wickwar / Chef Mark Sandell, Coaching Inn

French Onion Soup  Wickwar / Chef Patrick Le Mesurier

John Dory Fish recipe    Adapted from Rupert Ponsonby, Beer Academy Newsletter

Oysters Pairing Tip  Rupert Ponsonby, Beer Academy Newsletter

India Pale Ale  Rupert Ponsonby, Beer Academy Newsletter

Raspberry or Cherry beer with a hot chocolate pudding  Rupert Ponsonby, Beer Academy Newsletter

Cooking lager – http://cookinglager.blogspot.com/