There are four pubs within a mile of where I live. They are all dining places to a greater or lesser degree and only one, a Holt's house, regularly serves cask beer; in the others, which have it on occasionally, it's normally represented by a single handpump for Sharp's Doom Bar.
As a national brand of bitter, Doom Bar is often dismissed as a boring brown beer, despite being the UK's best selling cask ale and favourably reviewed by at least one blogger. I drank, and enjoyed, it on a CAMRA stagger around the area last summer, and saw it on the bar of a couple of pubs while on another of Cheadle Hulme on Friday night, although it was either unavailable or overlooked in favour of better cask options
I popped into the largest local pub, which also has a hotel attached to it, the other afternoon (most of its trade comes from Manchester Airport, whose runways lie a couple of hundred yards to the west). Unlike on my last visit, Doom Bar was available, but the bar was completely deserted and, wanting to avoid the first pint out of the pump, I swerved it and had half a Guinness instead, which being the normal rather than Extra Cold version wasn't actually a bad drink. I'll call in at the weekend when it's a bit busier, I thought, and duly did yesterday afternoon, only to find a pint pot atop the handpump again, so had another half a Guinness.
Guinness is a bit of a thing itself at the moment, overtaking Carling Black Label as the best selling UK beer brand, a position the latter had held since the early eighties (although it's still top in volumes rather than revenue, and the market for stout is still much smaller than the overall lager one). Anecdotally, I seem to have seen more people drinking it in pubs recently, including younger ones. Could keg lager become a declining beer style favoured by older drinkers like cask bitter and mild before it?
I've been in ten different pubs so far this year, the same as the first two months of 2020, compared to only half a dozen last year, and thirty-eight in 2019.
Boak and Bailey have written a very useful summary of Doom Bar's rise from regional beer to national brand.
Carling Black Label is an older beer than you might think, having been brewed in Canada since the late twenties and available here in bottles since the early fifties and on draught since the mid sixties, as explained in Ron Pattinson's excellent, and typically comprehensive, history of British lager.
