Looking back, it seems astonish-ing that the metropolitan middle classes took so long to embrace beer snobbery. The craft beer habit combines the characteristics of three long-established sources of small-scale social distinction: the farmer’s market, the tasting, and the sweet little café one knows.
Take the farmer’s-market side first. Even in the age of climate change, and after all those competitions in which some unlabelled bottle from Sussex defeats the best of Champagne, very few places in Britain can claim a local wine. But if you live in a city, or even a large town, you are by now guaranteed to have several local microbreweries.
It’s more than ten years since the arrival of progressive beer duty, which made tiny breweries an attractive economic proposition, but the growth in their numbers shows no sign of slowing down. The beer writer Pete Brown reckons we now have more breweries than at any time since the 1940s. My slice of south-east London, which is admittedly rich in both railway arches and foolishly trendy people, is up to at least eight. Each has its own specials, small batches, open days and seasonal experiments — endless opportunities to discover new locally sourced flavours, and to display your neighbourhood solidarity and savvy. Repeat after me: ‘I was going to bring a bottle of wine, but the brewery around the corner has just done a batch of these…’
There’s even a craft-beer equivalent of the vegetable box scheme: Deskbeers (www.deskbeers.com), which from £36 a week will send you a weekly Friday-afternoon selection from ‘the best of small and independent breweries in London and the UK’. It promises ‘an event in your office that enables conversation, bonding and companionship to happen each and every week’, which summons a mental image of a very specific sort of office, especially once you notice how keen it is to promote its Twitter handle and that it so far only delivers to London and Brighton postcodes.
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