Scotland's true new Irn brews

Scotland has undergone a real ale revolution in recent years. Dominic Roskrow reports

What a difference a decade makes. At least in the story of cask ale it does.

In the mid 90s there was more chance of seeing scantily-clad rah-rah girls doing the conga on Scotland’s beaches than finding a good selection of real ale in its bars.

My, how times have changed.

On one occasion way back a Carlsberg-Tetley rep led a small press party to a waterside pub in the port of Leith in the days when it still attracted some of the area’s more colourful characters and not every city resident with an income of more than £100,000.

The purpose? To taste draught Tetley’s because, she said, cask ale was taking a foothold north of the border. A fledgling pub company called Wetherspoons had recently opened its first Scottish outlet and intended to promote real ale, we were told, and the Scottish branch of the Campaign for Real Ale was growing.

How we scoffed. Leith was nearly Edinburgh, we reasoned, and Edinburgh wasn’t Scotland.

Scotland was a land of lager and of heavy. Its tastes were sweet, not bitter.

There were breweries in Scotland then, of course, a few of them very good. And once upon a time, before industrialisation, commercialisation, lageration and rationalisation, beer had positively flourished.

And when you think about it, it would have done – after all, Scotland is the home of whisky, and how do you make whisky?

But like many other parts of Britain a traditionally plentiful and vibrant nation of local brewers had been swallowed up by bigger companies, some natio.....

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By Dominic Roskrow

Section : Regional Focus

Page number : 34