I again found myself in a pub with no cask beer last night. It normally has well-kept beer but is having its cellar rebuilt, hence the lack of cask. I was thus faced with the - thankfully rare - question of what to drink. It being a cold night in Manchester, I ended up drinking Irish whiskey.Looking at some of the early Good Beer Guides from the 1970's, they talk about bottle conditioned beers like Guinness and Worthington White Shield as the fallback choice in a pub that only serves keg beer on draught. At the time, there were only five bottled conditioned beers available in Britain. Now there are hundreds but how often do you see any of them in a pub? They seem to me the obvious answer for pubs which for whatever reason can't serve cask beer.
A CAMRA prediction from the early 70's, made for example by Christopher Hutt in The Death of the English Pub, also seems to be coming true: self-service.
With a bit of effort, he could have had a couple of casks on stillage behind the bar, perhaps serving by gravity, but you're right about bottles being suitable for places that don't want or don't suit real ale.
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