Draught beer sales 1980-2010

Discussing "craft keg" on another blog a couple of days ago, I guessed that there was a 70-20-10% split between lager, keg bitter and stout and cask beer in pubs.  The table below shows that I wasn't that far out.

There are a couple of interesting things to pull out of the figures. Although cask beer sales have declined in absolute volume, so have those for other draught beers in pubs. Maybe I'm being a bit too"glass half full" but cask beer's twelve per cent of a smaller market for draught beer seems pretty encouraging to me (there's some evidence that since 2010 cask beer has risen to about 15% and is the only part of the draught beer market that's growing).  Without CAMRA, it's probable that the percentage for cask beer would be in single figures (if it hadn't disappeared completely).

What the figures do show of course is a move away from pub going over the last thirty years.  I'm not dismissing other factors - alternative leisure options, the expansion of supermarkets - but the rising cost of beer as more tax and duty is added at every Budget must have something to do with it too.