The new owners of Parish brewery, Bruce Cooper and Charlie Gamble, will warm the proverbial cockles of your heart. They’ve bought the company in Burrough on the Hill, Leicestershire, not as a result of any dip in sales but because, after 40 years of hard brewing, founder Baz Parish wants to hang up his mashing fork and take it easy.

Bruce and Charlie say they will carry on Baz’s legacy of brewing cask ales, including the legendary and awesomely strong 11 per cent ABV Baz’s Bonce Blower. “There’s a huge mileage and heritage in Baz’s products,” the new owners say. “We’re seeing a renaissance in cask-conditioned beer. If it’s well looked after, there’s nothing quite like a pint of real ale and we plan to expand our cask portfolio.”

Parish is not a lone voice crying in the keg wilderness. In Surrey, Hogs Back brewery near Farnham has launched a range of new seasonal cask beers to support its core range led by TEA (4.2 per cent) or Traditional English Ale.

The latest seasonal is Harvest Ale (4 per cent), hopped with varieties grown on its own farm – Cascade, Fuggles and White Bine. It will be followed by Ratfink and RipSnorter (5 per cent), a ruby ale, and Blackwater Plum Porter (4 per cent), made with the addition of real fruit.

MD Rupert Thompson says: “The debate about the future of cask ale has raged for as long as I can remember but among our core drinkers there’s still a strong demand for cask.

“We’ve rebuilt our on-trade presence post Covid and pubs across Surrey, London and the South East are stocking our permanent and seasonal cask ales.”

There’s equally good news from bigger players in the field. Simon Webster, co-founder of Thornbridge brewery in Derbyshire, says that “sales of Jaipur IPA and all our cask beers have rocketed since Covid by 30 per cent”.

Production director Rob Lovatt believes the success of his ales is due to using the finest ingredients: Maris Otter malt. “It’s a heritage variety and more expensive, but worth it. We use whole flower hops rather than pellets or extracts and our house yeast gives real depth of flavour. We prime all our casks with a dextrose solution to ensure the condition of our cask beers is superb.”

You’re in the Premier League with the likes of Timothy Taylor and Robinsons. Taylor in Yorkshire brews 70,000 barrels a year, of which Landlord Best Bitter (4.3 per cent) accounts for 80 per cent of production. It’s now the second biggest-selling cask ale in the country: fears for my well-being prevent me from saying which is number one.

Taylor reports that sales of Landlord and its other cask ales are now back to pre-Covid levels. The same good news comes from the other side of the Pennines where Robinsons of Stockport says sales of its cask beers have also recovered well from the pandemic and lockdowns. As Robinsons brews 80,000 barrels a year and owns some 250 outlets, that’s a lot of beer going into a large number of pubs.

This positive news on the cask beer front has been over-shadowed by the appalling behaviour of the national giants. Heineken has closed the Caledonian brewery in Edinburgh, home to the award-winning Deuchar’s IPA (3.8 per cent), while the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company (CMBC) has gone on the rampage, closing Jennings in Cumbria, Wychwood in Oxfordshire and most recently Ringwood in Hampshire, whose beers include Old Thumper (5.6 per cent), Champion Beer of Britain in 1988.

The closure of Ringwood is bizarre. CMBC says the brewery is in a residential area that makes expansion difficult.

But Ringwood is on the site of a 19th-century brewery called Tunks that was bigger than Ringwood. It’s set well back from a road junction, and I have no doubt that in Victorian times the residents would have made their views known if they objected to a brewery in their midst.

In spite of its concern for today’s home dwellers, CMBC is putting Ringwood up for sale and is perfectly happy for the brewery to remain in a residential area. The bosses of CMBC are in danger of disappearing in a cloud of ambiguity.

Both Caledonian and CMBC blame the need to close or sell their plants on the grounds of falling sales of cask beer. Sales would not be falling if these giant companies, whose main and over-arching interest is lager, had the commitment to cask shown by the breweries mentioned above.

Not just commitment but passion as well. Cask ale is special. It demands skill, professionalism and a little love, too, to make beer that leaves the brewery unfinished and reaches maturity in the pub cellar where it has to be nurtured and nurdled to reach perfection in the glass.

Baz Parish, for 40 years, devoted himself to cask beer. All brewers should honour him, follow in his footsteps and wish him a well-deserved retirement.