In article , Paul Sengupta wrote:
Young people now drink lager. Real ale has an image problem, it's
seen as the drink of old men sitting around in a near empty pub.

It depends. I've never been a fan of lager. My local (The Bay, Port
Erin) is a real ale pub.

I see plenty of teenagers/early 20s in there.
Drinking real ale.

Of course the pub itself caters to a young audience - there's live
bands, the staff themselves are all young. (There's plenty of old farts
in there too, it seems to have this magical thing that's attractive to
all ages).

Plenty still drink alcopops (which are evil) and lager (which doesn't
taste of anything but CO2), but that's up to them. Most seem to like
proper beer.

Of course, the Isle of Man isn't the UK, and Bushy's (IMHO the best
brewery out of the three we have, and it's not the biggest either) has
managed to project an image here that sells to the younger audience, and
have managed to get themselves strongly associated with the TT thanks to
their merchanidise (t-shirts and the like). It therefore doesn't have
the old-men-in-a-smoky-pub image. Somewhere like here, it's not too
expensive to market well to the locals. However, in the UK, how does
Archers of Swindon compete with the marketing muscle of Foster's? They
can't. But once you get someone drinking proper hand-pulled beer, they
often wonder why they ever drank lager. It's getting them that first
pint that's the trouble.

Most of our pubs have proper beer engines too, there aren't many places
(really just hotel bars and the like) that only do CO2-driven beer.
Chilled, fizzy bitter tastes like cat's ****, and if you're somewhere
where there aren't many pubs with proper beer engines, you'll wind up
drinking lager. There is no subsitute for hand-pulling proper beer.

The other problem with real beer is you have to keep it properly. Many
'non-real ale' pubs keep bitters improperly or don't know how to keep
them, and it tastes terrible as a consequence. Lager on the other hand
is difficult to screw up, so it's easy to get the same bland taste every
time and consistently.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"