MORE REAL ALE!

Well, more on the subject, anyway.

Further to my last posting, I read a story in yesterday's Independent, entitled "We'll drink to that: pubs hail the return of real ale." I had written that real ale sales were reported as holding up better than "cheap lagers". The latter will apparently suffer further in the long-predicted event of a Tory victory, because of today's announcement of plans to appply minumum pricing.

The Indy's real ale story was simply that 2.3 million more pints were sunk in the first half of this year than the same period; the last time that full-year consumption rose was in 1982, so if the rise is maintained that's going to be good news for the traditional brewers, the number of which is growing.

That volume increase, by the way, is 1%:in the current climate that's a healthy rise.

One oddity: the last line of the report states that Britain's beer market is worth £18.3 bn; of that real ale represents very much the minority, at £2bn. However, elsewhere in the piece a large graphic shows the the number of pints of real ale sunk last year as 237 million. Unless I'm missing something, that values the wonderful stuff at £8.44 / pint. If I were a brewer, I'd say it's worth that much, but round here I pay an average of £3 a pint. I'm surprised that nobody at the Indy noticed the discrepancy.