On the brief lives of beer brands

How long can any beer brand expect to remain on the market? And what are the oldest cask ale brands in the UK today?

Carslberg-Marstons announced last week that it was ceasing production of a number of notable cask ales. How bothered you are might depend on how you think about ‘brands’.

Broadly speaking, we’re in camp ‘Who cares?’

None of the beers on the list were among our favourites.

They aren’t, as beers, especially interesting or distinctive. And most of them weren’t especially old brands, either.

Of course ‘Who cares?’ is a massively flippant oversimplification.

As Pete Brown sets out here, the importance of the story is in what it says about the market for cask ale, and the attitudes of those who supply it.

And as Matthew Curtis has observed, the loss of local brands has emotional meaning, too.

The thing is, if you study beer history, you get used to the idea that breweries – especially big ones – simply do not care about these things.

Beers and their brands come and go constantly as the market shifts. It’s subject to fads, trends, and changes in public taste. Beers that seem cool in one decade feel tragically unhip 20 years later.

Dating cask ale brands

Looking at the cask brands on the CMBCo axe-list we can see that most were relatively new to the market, at least with their current brand names.

• Jennings Cumberland Ale – launched as ‘Cumbria Pale Ale’, we think, c.1979
• Ringwood Old Thumper – 1979
• Bombardier (keg) – 1980
• Eagle IPA – c.1980 
• Ringwood Boondoggle – 1997
• Marston’s Old Empire – 2003
• Banks’s Sunbeam – 2011
• Marston’s 61 Deep – 2016

There’s also Banks’s Mild, a version of which was presumably first brewed in the mid-1870s, but that’s arguably not a brand. It’s a description: Brewery X’s Beer of Type Y.

45 years feels to us like a remarkably long time for a beer brand to survive, riding out the real ale revolution, the golden ale and guest beer trends of the 1990s, and the craft beer boom of the 2000s to 2010s.

When we think of cask ale brands that have been around longer than that a few contenders spring to mind.

Hook Norton Old Hooky dates back only to 1977. Adnams Broadside was launched in 1972. Fuller’s London Pride came to the market in 1959. And Marston’s Pedigree was introduced in 1952.

You might make an argument for Bass which is not only still available but also having something of a resurgence in popularity. But it’s also, really, just the name of a defunct brewery. And that famous ‘first trademark’ was actually for ‘Bass & Co’s Pale Ale’, which is not what’s on the pump clips today.

Branding cask beers in the modern style was, broadly speaking, a post-World-War-II trend, driven by the growth of the advertising industry and the volatility of the market. With breweries closing and being acquired at a startling rate ‘Bloggs’s Bitter’ no longer seemed to cut it.

Never mind the brand, what about the beer?

OK, so most of the brands are relatively new in the grand scheme of things – but what about the beer? Isn’t that what matters?

Well, we know that recipes and ingredients change. Many beers with apparent longevity are actually quite different products now than when they launched.

The 2024 model of Bass, for example, doesn’t bear much relation to the product people knew and drank in the 19th century.

Most beers have smaller tweaks throughout their lives, sometimes to retain apparent consistency, or to adapt to changes in consumer taste, or to take advantage of shifting beer duty thresholds.

Is the current version of Ringwood Old Thumper at 5.1% the same beer as the 6% strong ale released in the 1970s?

Then there’s the local connection, as highlighted by Matt Curtis. But the problem there is that many of the cask brands on the CMBCo list had already been cut adrift from the places to which they were nominally connected.

Jennings beers have been brewed in Burton since 2022, for example, and the Ringwood brewery closed earlier this year.

The circle of life

While we understand the emotion and concern these corporate manoeuvres prompt we still feel that, in terms of the big picture, it’s all part of the circle of life.

It also seems to us that it creates opportunities for newer, smaller breweries to fill a growing gap in the market. That so many have, in recent years, been honing their skill at brewing trad styles like mild and bitter puts them in a strong position.

Of course they need to overcome the difficulty of getting into pubs owned by pub companies which restrict which beers publicans can order and sell. But here in Bristol we know pubs do find a way around this so they can stock beers like Butcombe Original and Bristol Beer Factory Fortitude.

So, brands and breweries come and go. If they didn’t, what would we have to be nostalgic about?

For now, though, don’t take the beers you like, or feel fond towards, for granted.

Order ‘boring’ standards every now and then and take a moment to appreciate them – because you never know what news tomorrow might bring.