Short version: the average cask pint in the UK is now £4.91, cask volumes are down 7.1% year on year, and if you’re still pricing cask the way you were in 2024 you’re either giving margin away or about to lose regulars to the pub down the road. Here’s what’s actually changed and what to do about it this week.
What the numbers say
The Morning Advertiser’s Beer Report 2026, published 23 July, put the average cask ale pint at £4.91. That’s not shocking on its own — pint prices go up every year, mate, that’s not news. What’s interesting is how uneven it is brand to brand, and that unevenness is where the margin conversations actually live.
| Brand | Avg pint price (2026) | Year-on-year change |
|---|---|---|
| Timothy Taylor’s Landlord | £5.42 | +30p |
| London Pride | £5.22 | +40p |
| Tribute | £5.07 | +48p |
| Category average | £4.91 | — |
| Wainwright | £4.57 | −18p |
| Greene King IPA | £4.26 | −10p |
Meanwhile CGA by NIQ’s data (same Beer Report, 23 July 2026) shows cask ale volumes at 1.28 million hectolitres, down 7.1% on the previous year’s 1.37 million. Value’s dropped too — from £982m to £974m to £947m over the period covered. Translation: fewer pints being poured, and even with prices rising, total cask revenue across the trade is shrinking, not growing.
Why this matters more than it looks like it does
If you sell cask, you’re now in a category that’s contracting in volume but where individual brand pricing is all over the shop. That’s a recipe for two things going wrong quietly: you either underprice a brand that’s moved up 40–48p elsewhere and eat the difference for months without noticing, or you overprice a brand that’s actually softened and wonder why that line’s not moving.
Either way, the fix isn’t “put prices up” or “put prices down” — it’s knowing, line by line, what your actual cost and actual sales velocity look like right now, this month, not what they were when you last did a proper review.
The bit nobody tells you: cask variance eats the margin gain before you even see it
Here’s the thing that never makes it into these trade press roundups. Say you’ve correctly followed the market and put Landlord up 30p in line with the national average. Great — except cask is also the beer style most prone to wastage: pin dropping, cloudy pints tipped, vents that don’t quite seal, a barrel that goes off two days before it’s due to kick. If your cask variance is running at 4–5% (which is common and rarely questioned) you can lose that entire 30p uplift and more before it ever hits your till roll as profit.
This is exactly why “what should I charge” is the wrong first question. The right first question is “what’s my actual variance on this line,” because a price rise on a leaky line just means you’re subsidising more expensive waste.
A quick worksheet — do this for each cask line this week
- Take your invoice cost per firkin/kil for each cask beer you stock.
- Divide by the number of saleable pints (allow for the standard ullage — roughly 8–10% of a cask is generally accepted as unavoidable, more than that and you’ve got a problem).
- Compare that to what you’re actually charging against the national average above — are you 20–30p behind Landlord’s £5.42, or ahead of Greene King IPA’s drop to £4.26?
- Then check your actual variance: pints sold on the till vs pints the cask should have yielded. If the gap’s bigger than that 8–10% ullage allowance, the price rise is being eaten by wastage, not banked as margin.
That last step is where most pubs are flying blind — not because they don’t care, but because doing it by hand across six or eight cask lines every week is a slog nobody has time for.
This is exactly what StockTap was built to catch automatically — line-by-line variance against expected yield, flagged the moment a cask starts underperforming, not three weeks later at the next full stocktake. First 50 pubs get it at £19/month, founding rate, no long tie-in.
Try it free →What to actually do with this data
- Re-price against the brand, not the category. If you’re carrying Tribute, you’re 48p behind the market if you haven’t moved. If you’re carrying Wainwright, you might already be overpriced.
- Check variance before you bank any price rise as margin. A price increase on a line that’s wasting 6–7% isn’t a margin increase, it’s a more expensive habit.
- Watch the volume trend, not just the price trend. Down 7.1% nationally means fewer people are choosing cask full stop — if your cask sales are falling faster than that, it’s not just “the market,” it’s your range, your condition, or your cellar management losing you regulars to keg.
- Don’t panic-drop prices to chase volume. Greene King IPA and Wainwright dropping in price hasn’t stopped the category volume decline — cutting price on a well-run line rarely wins back drinkers who’ve genuinely switched to lager or moved pub.
Common questions
Is cask ale actually dying, or is this just a blip?
It’s a genuine multi-year trend, not a one-off. CGA by NIQ’s figures show value falling from £982m to £947m across the period covered in the Beer Report, alongside the 7.1% volume drop. It’s contracting, but it’s not disappearing — cask still matters to a loyal core of drinkers, and MA’s own reporting (7 April 2026, “Younger drinkers emerge as cask ale’s new saviours”) suggests some younger drinkers are actually picking it up. It’s a smaller market, not a dead one.
Should I drop a cask line that’s underperforming?
Check variance before you check volume. Sometimes a “slow” line is actually fine on sales but bleeding margin through waste — fix the cellar management first, because dropping a well-loved brand to solve a cellar problem just annoys regulars for nothing.
How often should I be checking cask pricing against the market?
At minimum twice a year — trade press updates like the Beer Report tend to land around Q1 and Q3. But your own variance should be checked weekly, because that’s the bit that erodes margin between pricing reviews.
What’s a reasonable ullage/wastage allowance for cask?
There’s no single official figure everyone agrees on, but 8–10% is commonly cited as the range for unavoidable cask wastage (settling, first pull, occasional off pints). Anything meaningfully above that per line is worth investigating rather than accepting as “just what cask’s like.”