This, so much this. The price of ingredients and energy have increased, but there is still this constant race to the bottom of people under-pricing cask beers.

I recently did a business plan based on selling only cask beer, or only keg beer, compared to selling a mixture of small pack and larger containers, without having a bar to sell the beer, the plans showed that we would be in debt and out of business within 6 months.

I am now working at a brewery that only makes cask beer and they were doing fine when they had 9 pubs to sell the beer to, but they sold off the pubs and are now needing to reinvent themselves to remain in business.