I LOVE CASK BEER – by Denny Rogers, age 30

I often think about drinking my first pints in the pub at 16… ermmm, 18, usually either out for food or watching United in the pub with my parents.  It was a 50/50 chance that what I was drinking was either some sort of macro lager (usually during the match) or a pint of whatever my dad had on cask (usually with food).  I always loved beer poured from a hand pump, it just made sense to me, it just tasted better.  Even though I didn’t quite know why yet, I had a sense of pride in the drinks I drank, I always wanted to drink the “best” thing that I could.  I remember how awesome it felt the first time I tried a beer that was starting to turn and being proud I knew it didn’t taste right, being the one of my mates who was asked what we should drink ’cause I was the one who “knew my shit”, and always spending more time than anyone else before I made my decision. I remember pints of Greene King IPA with my mixed grill (before I packed in the meat) in the pub we went every week as a family, my first pint of Arbor in the old Font in town, and countless pints of Moonshine in the Nursery Tav in Sheffield at uni.

I joined Fell in August 2024.  At this point I hadn’t really dealt with cask since before lockdown so I couldn’t have been more excited to get back to the thing I loved most.  Coming in, I already knew a couple of the Fell beers – in particular Tinderbox – from drinking down in Chorlton, and I knew just how good the beer was, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in.  So, to my dismay when I finally arrived, I remember there being one line of cask on, and it was OLD… I knew that I needed to change something and fast.  I wasn’t willing to put my name behind sub-par cask beer; the pub would change what we sold and how we sold it.  At the time there were 7 hand pulls here, but only 4 of them were real… the 3 on the front of the bar were fake ones to display what was on the back of the bar, so we changed that, and put the real ones on the front bar – people noticed them being poured finally and wanted more.  We took a hit on cask at first also, putting more beer on, and wasting more beer as soon as it started to go, to make sure that people didn’t get anything resembling a bad pint, and people kept coming back because it tasted good.  Finally, came the introduction of Cask Club, two full days of discounted pints of cask beer (and BiB cider) on our two quietest days to make sure the beer kept moving on them days.

IT PAID OFF!

All of a sudden people were coming to us specifically for our cask beer – what a feeling!!  At this point we were able to have more fun with it, get more guest beer, get some weirder things, do events where cask beer was a central theme.  Week after week in 2025 at least 4 or 5 of our top products would come out as cask beers – the only things we were guaranteed to sell of at least one whole unit were St Sunday, Session IPA and whatever we had on cask.

All the now great sales, the returning and new customers drinking with us, and the countless rotation of beer, then accumulated in one thing – an inclusion in the Good Beer Guide 2025 in our first year as a bar.  We were ecstatic, and all it meant was EVEN more people were coming to us for cask beer.