The best pint you’ll ever have is whatever you can find at 5 p.m. on a Friday. But close behind, and available wherever there’s a willing bartender, is whatever your local brewery has a fresh keg of.

That, at least, is what I’ll tell anyone who can’t make a speedy exit. I am a craft beer bore. Dismissed as an early cause of the male midlife crisis, craft breweries have revolutionised beers. Where once you were trapped between mass-produced European lager and lukewarm old man ale, British craft beer has proved more flavourful than anything that came before it – and only occasionally in a bad way.

You can imagine my sadness, then, in reporting the decline of the Gipsy Hill Brewing Company, my own local. While the brewery won’t be filing for bankruptcy any time soon, my sense is its heyday is behind it, and with it the heyday of many great independent breweries.

I discovered........

© The Spectator