That is perhaps a backwards way of putting it but, given recent posts ranging from thought provocation to sheer ostrich posturing at the news that pub life is collapsing at a faster pace than ever in Britain, it is one that needs considering. If the pub is disappearing faster than ever, where will the cask ale be sold? Consider this essay in today's Times of London:

My local, the Pear Tree in Hook Norton, Oxfordshire, is blessed by being owned by the village’s brewery 150 yards away – which still delivers locally by horse-drawn dray – but we are well aware how lucky we are and terrified that we might be living on borrowed time. Regulars include a jobbing gardener, a carpenter with a degree in earth sciences, the drayman who looks after the brewery horses, a nursery school teacher, a builder, a software writer, an optician, a lorry driver and one of the brainiest blokes I know who refills cigarette machines. Very few of us would know each other if it weren’t for the pub.

The counterpoint in the article is, of course, the alcopop and the supermarket shopper and the binge drinker at city centres. The thought needs to be extended for as the Pear Tree goes, so goes the cask and much of what is now considered the way craft beer is sold. Though CAMRA has been campaigning to save the pub for years, unless CAMRA and others come up with a radical and generally accepted new scheme for sales of ales - without the venue of the pub - there will be none of the blessed resurgence of the real. What would that look like?

The rest of the English-speaking world should serve as a warning. In Australia, the country pub is disappearing. If Ken Wells is to be believed at age 30 of Travels With Barley, in the USA, total sales beer in bars has from 75% of the total in the 70s to 25% now - concurrent with the shift from regional beers of this sort to the triumph of mega-industrial stuff Tremblay and Tremblay describe. Here in Ontario, the number of good interesting establishments in the 400 km between Ottawa to Toronto can probably be counted on one hand, the number of good brewers on a couple of thumbs.

If the UK cask ales are unique, they are unique - and as vulnerable - as much as for how they are sold than how they are made. Unless a new market is created, lose the pub and no number of annual county beer fests will be enough to keep the ale.