Craft Beers

My favourite under-age tipple

American Craft Beer Classification Chart in Durango

Durango Brewery, Colorado

One of the most welcome developments in recent years has been the emergence of microbreweries in most parts of the UK and, as I discovered last month, with equal vigour in the States. They provide a staggering array of alternative ales to the big brewers. The same big brewers who had decimated the local breweries in the 70's and 80's. The big four: Scottish and Newcastle, Ind Coupe, Watneys and Allied had replaced local beers with homogenised corporate products that were heavily marketed and lacked any distinctiveness. They duped a generation to drink lager and keg beers with brand names that bore no relationship to place or reason. They then tied pub landlords into selling their beers and drove many independent pubs into bankruptcy.

The only opposition came from CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) but in the 1970s it was mainly a protest organisation campaigning against the takeover, and inevitable closure, of town breweries. My favourite beers as an 18-year-old were Dutton's (Blackburn) and Mansfield Bitter both of which disappeared at the hands of the big four. CAMRA also promoted the ever-decreasing number of pubs that sold real ale. Microbreweries were perceived as uneconomical businesses for cranks and obsessives.

My beer drinking diminished from the 1970s as drink and drive legislation, family life, and a desire to keep fit for competitive running all conspired with the tasteless offerings from the big brewers to restrict my beer drinking to the occasional social event. I would occasionally discover a remaining brewery when on holiday. Hartleys of Ulverston before it was taken over, Jennings of Cockermouth, Timothy Taylor's in Yorkshire and Thwaites in Lancashire all made a trip to the pub worthwhile and some of these beers travelled to real ale pubs in the cities.

How very different things are today and not just in Britain. The recent holiday in the States was notable for the universal availability of craft beers, most communities were served by several microbreweries. What was really helpful in the States was the referencing systems for beers that measured the colour, bitterness and specific gravity of beers.

• The Standard Reference Method (SRM)is a system breweries use to measure the colour intensity, or darkness, of a beer. 
• The International Bittering Units Scale, (IBU) rates the relative bitterness of beer. The bitterness of beer is provided by compounds from hops used during brewing. 
• Alcohol by volume (abv) measures the specific gravity and is the same as in the UK 

Accordingly, the American beer drinker has a set of measures that allows the drinker to choose beer by some known parameters. It worked well and over three weeks I found myself selecting beers not just according to the locality, the nearer the better, but also to some standards that matched my preferences. The blackboard in the Durango Brewery enabled me to select a Third Eye Pale Ale and it was the perfect choice.

A couple of weeks later a friend invited me to the Ayrshire Beer Festival and along with 3000 others, including quite a high proportion of males and females in their twenties, we sampled some of the 150 real ales on sale from all parts of Scotland and England. The event is run by CAMRA volunteers and held in the Council offices in Troon. The beer was gushing from 11:00am until 11:00pm over three days. I managed 4 sessions and sampled about 10 beers. Each day you could vote for your favourite beer. Highland Brewing's Scapa Special and Mobberley Ales RoadRunner were my choices and I have already been thanked and invited to drop in at the breweries when next in the areas. Localism is reviving beer drinking, once again conjuring up the reality that small is beautiful.