No small beer

We were discussing beer. It is a cheerful subject so I made an appropriate point. In recent years, the quality of civic life in Britain has steadily deteriorated. Change has become synonymous with decay. But there is one delightful exception. In southern England these days, it is almost impossible to find a bad pint of beer. Matters may be different in other parts of the United Kingdom. From my limited experience, we Scots are not good at beer. It is something that is only drunk to eke out the whisky. North of the Tweed, bitter is known as ‘heavy’, which is a fair description and not an encouraging one. In the north of England, too, beer is often excessively sweet. As for Wales, I believe that there is a brew called sheepshag, in which the hops are mixed with mistletoe, but we should leave the west Celts to their… bardic… rituals.

No: ethnic condescension should not lead us to conceal the truth. Decent pints come almost exclusively from the southern parts of the Heptarchy. Hoppy, alkaline hints of flint and limestone, subtle, flavoursome, pleasantly light and discreetly strong: this is the sort of beer Tolkien’s gaffers would have saluted as a proper 1420.

Yet 40 years ago, many beer drinkers were being fobbed off with a gassy, chemicalised, insipid product, popular with idle publicans because it was easy to keep. That stopped, and the credit belongs to a Trotskyite. Roger Protz, as amiable a revolutionary as ever held aloft a banner, ran Camra: the campaign for real ale. He was as triumphantly successful over beer as he was an abject failure in politics.

Who would have thought that 40 years on, the campaign for real Trotskyism would have taken over Labour? But the comparison is appropriate.