I went to a beer festival the Saturday gone and I began to ponder how did Britain get itself into such a state where we enjoy such boring beers. Go into any pub in Britain and you'll get the same old 5 offerings - Kronenberg, Stella, Fosters, Carling, Carlsberg and if and only if you're lucky you might get some sort of ale offering. I'm more an ale man myself. Living up North in York for 3 years and opposite a Fullers pub in Bristol for 1 year has educated me to how beer can be more interesting, and now I am being educated on the wonders of Belgian beers. So it was good to go to a beer festival with just English ale and Belgian beers. What I don't understand however is those same old 5 offerings are not even good lagers from those countries. If you go to Belgium and ask for a Stella I am informed you will be thrown out the pub (seriously you will). We in Britain however are led to believe that Stella is reassuringly expensive, however I promise you in France it's a reassuringly cheap price for the reassuringly awful taste. The same goes for Kronenberg. French beer apparently, but I've not seen it in any French bars! I can't comment on Carling and Carlsberg apart from I'm not a big fan, but Fosters is advertised as an Australian drink, however go to Australia and you will find them drinking Coopers Ale. For a country with so many genetic links with ours, why is it that they've maintained their love of ale, and in Britain ours is dying out in favour of a lager country. We now have to rely on organisations like CAMRA to keep the ale industry here alive.

Is lager popular just because it's cheap and can get you drunk OR do Britains actually prefer it to ale OR are we just a bunch of uneducated chaps who need to go outside our drinking comfort zone for a change? Whatever the reason it worries me.