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.
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