Planning a pub beer festival: the cask arithmetic nobody shows you

Cask Ale Week runs 17 to 27 September this year, with a record 10,000-plus pubs signed up. A beer festival is the best excuse of the autumn to fill the pub, and it's also the easiest way I know to buy twenty casks on enthusiasm and pour six of them down the drain in October. The difference is arithmetic done before the order goes in. Here are the sums.

Why cask deserves the effort, warts and all

Cask is now 8.1% of draught beer sales by volume, and the average cask pint sells at £4.54 against £4.97 for beer overall, so it's a small category that prices below the market. That's the unsentimental version. The better news is who's drinking it: 16% of cask drinkers are now 18 to 34, and the category's occasions and spend among younger drinkers are growing. A festival is precisely the format that recruits those drinkers, which is why a record number of pubs are bothering this year. Worth doing. Worth doing on numbers.

The container sums first

A firkin is nine gallons, 72 pints on paper. A pin is half that, 36 pints. You will not sell 72. Sediment takes the bottom of the cask, conditioning losses and the odd pulled-through cloudy half take more, so plan your revenue on the mid-60s per firkin and treat anything better as a bonus. That's my working figure, not gospel, but if you budget on 72 you've overstated your festival income by about a tenth before a single pint pours.

Duty is already inside your cask price, about 50p on a 4.5% pint under the draught rate, which matters for one specific decision later: beer you bin isn't just lost margin, it's lost duty you've already paid, and there's a right way to handle that.

How many casks to order

Cask Marque's festival guidance suggests around 20 ales for a festival of two to five days. For a big pub with a marquee, fine. For most of us that's the ceiling, not the target, and the honest method is to scale from your own trade rather than someone else's poster:

• Start with your normal cask week. If you sell three firkins in an ordinary week, a well-promoted festival weekend might do three to four times your normal rate while it's on. That's justified by your tickets, your bookings and your last event, not by hope.
• Order the range in pins where you can. Variety is what makes a festival, volume is what makes it pay. Six firkins of your proven sellers plus eight or ten pins of the interesting stuff gives you fourteen to sixteen badges on the board for around 800 pints of exposure, instead of 1,100-plus if everything comes in firkins.
• Anything over 5% goes in a pin. Strong ales sell in halves and sell slowly. A firkin of a 6% porter is a three-week commitment wearing a festival T-shirt.

The cellar timetable is the real constraint

Casks aren't kegs, and the timetable that governs an ordinary week governs a festival harder. Off the cellar card: casks want to arrive with time to settle and condition, get tapped within two days of venting, and be empty within three days once they're on sale. So twenty casks vented on Friday morning is not a festival plan, it's a write-off schedule. Stagger them: vent in waves, bring beers on as others go off, and let the board change through the weekend, which reads as theatre to the customer and is actually stock control. The cellar routine covers the daily checks; a festival just runs more of them at once. Mind your stillage space too, because settled casks can't be shuffled about on Saturday night.

Price in bands, not one number

Cask Marque's suggestion for festivals is tiered pricing by strength, colour-coded: one price below 4%, one for 4.1 to 4.9%, one at 5% and up. Do that rather than one flat festival price, because your costs aren't flat. Duty rises with strength and so does the invoice, so a flat price quietly gives your best GP away on exactly the beers people came for. Three bands keeps the blackboard simple and your GP% defensible on every tier.

Ask about sale or return before you order

Some breweries and wholesalers will do festival stock on sale or return, some won't, and the time to find out is before the order, in writing on the invoice, not on the phone in week two. Full, unbroached containers are what return terms usually cover, which changes your ordering logic: it's another argument for pins on the gambles, because a part-drunk firkin comes back to nobody. If you can get SOR on half the order, your downside on the range-stretching beers nearly disappears.

What to do with what's left

The morning after matters more to your stocktake than the festival did. Three jobs:

• Unbroached casks: back to the supplier if you agreed return terms, otherwise onto the board over the next fortnight inside their best-before dates. They're just stock again.
• Part casks: finish them fast at a last-day band price, and when a cask is genuinely done, the sediment and unsold remainder are ullage. Duty on beer destroyed properly can come back to you as supplier credit, the ullage guide covers the claim route, and every drop binned goes in the wastage log with a millilitre figure next to it.
• Count everything. Festival stock goes through the same count as everything else, ideally a quick extra count the morning after closing. Skip that and next month's variance turns into an argument nobody can win, because a variance you can't explain and a festival in the same period is a diagnosis problem you built yourself.

Do the sums before the order goes in and a festival does what it's supposed to: it fills the pub and leaves a clean stocktake behind it, with a few new 25-year-old cask drinkers as the bonus. The bunting is optional. The arithmetic isn't.