I don’t know if this is true, but – again, anecdotally – I’ve noticed Cask Marque being more and more reliable as an indicator of quality after what was, all told, a shoddy start.

But even elsewhere, I’ve noticed better quality. I wonder, to some degree, if increased interest in cask has pushed volumes in decent pubs. As we all know, and as Tandie says himself “volume encouraged good beer” – and good beer encourages volume. A virtuous circle.

I think we were reflecting on our own experience in the early ’00s when we got the opportunity to drink, say, Harvey’s Sussex Best maybe twice a year, and so it took us ages to work out what it was meant to taste like and when it was off/on the turn. If you lived in London and only saw Thwaites as a guest beer at the Dive Bar every now and then, would you have known it was bad? And would you have been so excited to find something new you wouldn’t care much anyway?

Not at all. In the late 70s / early 80s cask beer was standard in the pubs of Allied, Bass, Courage, Greenalls and others. Can only really speak for the North, but a bad pint was rare indeed. Volume encouraged good beer. Whitbread who were much more laggardly in cask was where you’d sometimes get a bad pint as they didn’t have so much of it. When you got a bad pint then people would know it. I remember in a Higsons pub putting three pints of bitter down on the table only to have them snatched back by the landlord, who’d spotted a haze on the beer from the bar. End of the barrel – pints exchanged. There was generally higher standards of cellarmanship then.

Apart from these observations, what Martyn says.

Hmmm – I’m not sure tolerance of bad beer generally has declined. But I’m not sure standards have improved, either: my recollection, looking back down four decades, is that in the early/mid 1970s, while choice was vastly poorer than today, where you found cask ale being served, it was more likely than in later times to be of reasonable quality, because the landlord had to actively want cask ale to get it from his supplier, rather than his supplier insisting he take it. Only when, eg, Watney/Grand Met acquired Ruddles and rammed cask beer into thousands of pubs did average standards decline sharply. That, however, may be an old git looking back at his youth through gold-coloured binoculars …

There’s a whole raft of food-oriented pub company pubs that tend to have the fashionable beer of the day (currently Doom Bar) but never seem to keep it well. I had some really poor Landlord in such a pub recently, btw

That said, I’ve had very well kept GK IPA and never enjoyed it.

It may just be subjective, but I would also say that the more widely available a beer is, the less well it is kept on average.

Martyn — we have this suspicion that, in the 70s, people were much more tolerant of bad beer and beer in bad condition than they are today. What do you reckon?

Beer Nut — that’s interesting. Are you looking forward to 2011?

PF — ‘beer minimalist pub’ is a nice turn of phrase — it implies a conscious decision to sell few beers, but good ones, in good nick.

Pete — we’re not ashamed to admit that we’re suckers for novelty. We like Tribute, and we’re always happy to drink it, but that doesn’t mean we’re not excited when we find something else on offer. It’s an emotional rather than a logical thing.

Simon — think we’re probably in the same boat, especially since moving to Cornwall. Wonder if a future version of this chart might show a return to a happy medium between multi-tap madness and Watneyesque monopoly?