(just drinking my bottle now)

Justin – there’s certainly a related discussion around bad, bland, cheap and nasty cask and bottle conditioned beer (the other side of the coin from good and characterful keg beer), and it’s one that I plan to take up at a later stage. And there’s certainly a challenge around routes to market, though some of the cannier small brewers are recognising there are ways to get your products out there besides the pub trade, particularly if you package or, indeed, keg.

Meanwhile I’m finding yet more examples of the unhelpful way in which the use of the terms “craft beer” and “craft brewer” is developing in Britain. The Pub Curmodgeon published the results of a poll, admittedly with only 48 respondents, showing few respondents identified established independents as craft brewers. The highest scoring brewer on a selective list was Timothy Taylor, which 10 people regarded as a craft brewer.

Then there’s Euan Ferguson’s piece in Time Out recommending “craft beer bars and pubs” in London. Craft beers, according to Euan, are “interesting, progressive beers made by small-scale microbreweries, and distinct from real ale… often explosively hoppy and quite unlike traditional British beer.” He goes on to list 14 pubs and bars – all of whom, of course, stock real ale, many offering exceptional selections. His top two recommendations are the Southampton Arms and the White Horse. The former stocks very little beer other than real ale. The latter built its reputation by dry hopping cask Draught Bass and now does very well from keeping Sloane Rangers lubricated with Harveys Sussex Best. How distinct from real ale and unlike traditional British beer can you get?

Some beer geeks have expressed the view that craft beer is beer brewed for beer geeks. If that’s the case, aspiring craft brewers could save themselves some time by filing for bankruptcy right now.

Comparisons with the US have their limits – and in response to Jon, it’s not just about scale but about commercial and cultural context. But it’s striking just how much narrower such views of craft beer are compared to the view across the Atlantic. European beer connoisseurs too easily forget that the sort of high strength, highly hopped, wood aged and Brettanomyces-dosed extreme beers that crash the servers at ratebeer.com actually account for only a fraction of US craft beer volumes. The impressive development of craft brewing in the US is founded not on beers like these but on much more everyday, straightforward and approachable brews.

The top three selling craft beers in the US are Samuel Adams Boston Lager, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and New Belgium Tire Biter. Deschutes, for example, hasn’t grown to its current size thanks to The Abyss and The Dissident, marvellous though these beers are, but through selling millions of barrels of the tasty but much more innocuous Mirror Pond, currently the 10th best selling US craft beer.

These beers are the real US equivalents of Fuller’s London Pride, Harveys Sussex Best, Timothy Taylor Landlord and the like, yet no-one doubts they are craft beers. Beers such as these, no matter where they are made, should be applauded and respected as products made with craft and pride that nonetheless appeal to large numbers of ordinary drinkers seeking a credible everyday alternative to industrial fizz.

I prefer a more simple and traditional approach. We sell GOOD beer. Every beer from every brewer we sell is something that I would personally be very happy to drink and enjoy. I can’t say the same of every product that I see and size of brewery or method of dispense isn’t always a key identifier.

I think that Brewdog, Camden, Cotswold and Jeff amongst others selling great beers in Kegs is FAR less dangerous to the Industry as a whole than certain Cask producers flooding the market with stupidly cheap products that are unfortunately and inexplicably popular with some Landlords.

More so, the Pubco Tie prevents Brewers from being able to trade in anything like a free market, they either have to abandon the tied house sector of the market, or enter into a deal with the devil that sees their product leave their door at a deflated price, and then ra-appear on the bar of a pub where the landlord has paid a massively inflated price SIBA included. In many cases the Beer itself has been transported through several sets of hands and stored/settled once or twice at least and for casks at least can be of ‘variable’ condition.

Beer bloggers seem fanboy obsessed with the minutiae between great brewers, and unbothered by the things that will see the Craft Beer business in the UK collapse if pressure is not exerted by all parties to make the situation better. There are simply not enough independent Publicans about to support the number of independent brewers that we have now.

My talk of another organisation that will promote keg beer is not directed at CAMRA or its members, but at the CAMRA bashers.