Once upon a time when you wanted to learn about a beer or a brewery you’d go down to your local pub and ask the landlord. Now you can just go online.

The virtual bar these days is always open, with plenty of global beer brands to choose from served to you from countless websites.

Beer review sites such as Ratebeer and BeerAdvocate are your modern-day landlords, happy to provide you with some words of wisdom about which beers to try and blogs such as this one are places people can now come to for a bit of virtual bar-room chit-chat.

There are lots of breweries that understand that the Internet is where its customers now hang out. They’ve understood the importance of exciting, informative, engaging and stylishly designed websites. They’re already tweeters and enthusiastic social networkers, constantly mingling and exchanging email addresses over at community sites like Facebook and MySpace.

I’ve just come back from a virtual pub-crawl of some of the most popular Swedish breweries to see what they’re doing right now to attract their ‘virtual share of throat’ . What I discovered is giving me something of a real-life hangover.

With a few exceptions Swedish breweries seem to be stuck in the dark ages (that’s the 90s in ‘Internet time’) when it comes to their websites and online activity. You only have to compare them with craft brewers from the US – who discovered the power and reach of Twitter and other online communities years ago – to see what I mean.

Although the US leads the way in terms of Internet marketing of beer brands they are by no means alone. BrewDog, a whacky microbrewery from Scotland realised the importance of winning supporters for its extreme beers from the get-go and is a text-book example of how to harness the power of the Net. The brewery’s edgey website/blog/viral activity/online stunts have unquestionably been a major factor behind its explosive growth since it was founded just two years ago.

Clever craft breweries can punch well above their weight if they know how to leverage the internet. It’s never been more important to put your beer online and as bloggers and beer fans we need to do our part to encourage our favourite brewers to go cyber. Therefore here’s my list of the best Swedish brewery websites and most active online beer marketers of 2009:

BEST OVERALL WEBSITE

My current personal nomination is Åbro, which not only looks great but is packed with useful information about brewing and beer facts).

MOST ACTIVE ONLINE BREWERY

My current personal nomination is Sigtuna, whose Head Brewer keeps Facebook fans up-to-date with his choice of hard rock music while he’s mashing in. (They MUST do something about their website though!)

BEST USE OF NEW MEDIA

(this category recognises the use of the internet and other ‘new’ mediums such as mobile phone applications to reach the beer drinking public)

My current nomination is www.norrlandsguld.nu. This brand site is bulging with cool apps and clever ways to interact with the brand and other NG drinkers.

It would be great to get your feedback and personal nominations so we can recognise the efforts of the category winners and more importantly encourage the other breweries who may be virtually lagging behind to update to beer drinking version 2.009.