However encouraging the last couple of decades may have been for consumers trying to access interesting beers, around 90% of the beer we drink comes from a narrow range of relatively dull styles …

The same obsessive streak that a brewer must deploy when making an industrial lager is also needed, in a completely different way, when they aim is to create a lager brewed, fermented and conditioned in the older …

Back in 1975 the number of ales produced worldwide by commercial brewers was between five and ten thousand. Today, there is somewhere between a quarter and half a million. Ale brewing is where the craft beer revolution happened.

Certain types of beer are so different from the mainstream, and well known, that they deserve consideration in their own right, rather than simply as a type of ale or lager. They might even be both – though they can be neither.

Most beer styles can be said to have come from somewhere, even if their original form may have become obscured by time.  Some are far more clearly associated with an area, a region or a country, and a few remain specific to one place.

The modern brewing practice of making beers taste of other things by adding them, owes little to historical brewing and much to advances in food technology ….