There are certain drinks that just belong to a place. Ireland has its stout, Belgium has its Trappist beers, Germany has its great lager tradition, and here in Britain we have something pretty special of our own: cask ale.
It is so familiar to us that we probably don’t think about it very often. Walk into a good British pub and seeing a row of handpulls on the bar feels completely normal, but the way cask is brewed, conditioned, looked after in the cellar and finally pulled by hand is a very particular part of British brewing and pub culture.
Right now, that tradition is under some pressure. Cask sales have been in long-term decline across the wider UK beer industry as drinking habits have changed and the choice available on the bar has grown. It is one of the reasons there is now a wider conversation about protecting cask, with CAMRA supporting a campaign for the production and serving of traditional British cask ale to be recognised as Intangible Cultural Heritage.
We think it’s a conversation worth having, because once you look beyond the pint itself, there is an awful lot we’d be losing.
Five handpulls on the bar
At Joule’s, we’re proud to still give cask plenty of room.
Walk into one of our pubs and you should find five Joule’s cask ales on the bar at any one time. Three are the beers at the heart of our range, Citra Blonde, Pale Ale and Slumbering Monk, with another two handpulls given over to our changing Batch and Seasonal beers.
Those rotating pumps are important. They give our brewers room to play with different recipes, ingredients and hops throughout the year, and they mean there’s usually something new for our regular cask drinkers to discover too.
Steve Wood, our Lead Brewer, probably puts that better than we could: “People sometimes hear cask and think it means one particular kind of beer, but there’s so much more you can do with it. We have the beers people know us for, then the Batch and Seasonal beers give us a chance to try something different. As a brewer, that’s part of the fun of it.”
And amongst those five handpulls is a beer with a particularly long connection to our own story.
A red cross and a pint of Pale Ale
Our Pale Ale takes us right back to Stone, the original home of Joule’s, and to a story that began long before our brewery did.
The monks of Stone Priory are said to have blessed barrels of ale with a red cross before they left the town. That cross was later adopted by Joule’s and became our trademark, a mark that still sits at the heart of our brewery and pubs today. The Joule’s Red Cross went on to become the sixth oldest registered beer trademark in the world.
It’s a story we’re very proud of, and one that still feels relevant when you see a pint of Joule’s Pale Ale being pulled through a handpump today. There is a thread running from the brewing history of Stone, through generations of Joule’s beer, to the pint sitting on the bar now.
But history on its own isn’t enough of a reason to keep brewing something. Pale Ale isn’t there as a museum piece. It’s there to be drunk.
And that gets to the heart of why we’re talking about cask now.
The brewery doesn’t do it alone
Cask is unusual because we don’t completely finish the job here at the brewery.
Our brewers brew the beer in Market Drayton and fill the casks, but the beer continues to condition before travelling out on our drays to the pub. Once it arrives, the landlord and their team take over. The cellar, temperature, condition and way the beer is looked after all have a part to play before somebody eventually pulls that pint at the bar.
For James Hunter, our Head of Production & Distribution, that’s a big part of what makes cask worth the extra effort: “With cask, what we do at the brewery is only part of the journey. You’ve then got the dray delivering it to the pub, the landlord looking after it in the cellar and the team serving it at the bar. When everybody gets their part right, you end up with a brilliant pint. That’s what we’re trying to protect.”
It also means a good pint of cask represents something we care about at Joule’s: good brewing and good pubs working together.
So, why does cask need our attention?
The decline in cask isn’t a Joule’s issue. It’s something being seen across the wider beer industry, and there are all sorts of reasons behind it. People drink differently now. There’s more choice than ever, and plenty of younger drinkers haven’t grown up with cask in the same way previous generations did. There are also lots of people who have already decided that cask isn’t for them, sometimes without actually having tried much of it.
We’re not interested in telling people what they should drink. If anything, we’d like to make it easier to try. That’s the thinking behind Cask Matters.
As our Brand Manager, Georgia Charlton-Briggs, explains: “Cask is part of what makes the British pub special, and it’s something we’re incredibly proud to put our name behind. At Joule’s we have five cask ales on our bars, three at the heart of our range and two that give our brewers the freedom to keep creating and experimenting. There’s so much skill and character behind a great pint of cask, and I think that story deserves to be told. Cask Matters is our chance to do that, from the people brewing it to the landlords looking after it and, ultimately, the people drinking it. Cask has an extraordinary history in this country and within Joule’s, but this campaign isn’t about looking backwards. We want cask to have a future, not simply a history.”
Cask Ale Week and Cask Masters
This September gives us a particularly good excuse to do exactly that, with Cask Ale Week running from 17 to 27 September 2026.
We’ll be joining breweries and pubs across the country in putting a bit more attention behind cask, but we’re stretching our own activity across September and October to give people plenty of time to get involved.
And Cask Masters is back.
Pick up a stampcard from the bar and work your way through the Joule’s cask range:
2 pints of Citra Blonde
2 pints of Pale Ale
2 pints of Slumbering Monk
2 pints from our Batch or Seasonal range
Collect all eight stamps and your next Joule’s cask pint is on us.
You’ll also find our Cask Masters booklets in the pub. They’re completely free and yours to keep, with tasting notes from the brewery, space to record and rate the beers you’ve tried, food pairings and the chance to enter our ongoing Cask Masters competition.
The stampcard is just for September and October, but the booklet isn’t. Keep it, scribble in it and bring it back when something new lands on the bar.
Most importantly, don’t feel like you need to know anything about cask before you start. If you’ve never had Slumbering Monk, ask us for a taste. If you always order Citra Blonde, see what’s on the Seasonal pump. If you haven’t got a clue what you’d like, ask the person behind the bar.
That’s what the next couple of months are really about. Not trying to turn everyone into a beer expert, but getting a few more people looking at those five handpulls and wondering what they might have been missing.
Because the simplest way to keep cask part of our pubs isn’t particularly complicated.
Enjoy a pint of it.