It was a meant as a funny one-liner in a tweet but for me it pretty much sums up the status of Britishness in beer these days.

I was describing the list of outrageous ingredients in an upcoming BrewDog Abstrakt beer which includes (among other things) heather honey, wild raspberries and oats and as I rounded off my description I mentioned that a mountain of Fuggles hops had been added to the kettle.

And it is was this last point that triggered the tweet from a reader that headlines this post.

For an seemingly increasing number of beer enthusiasts traditional British hops like Fuggles and East Kent Goldings simply don’t cut it any more in a craft beer scene fuelled by alpha acids where bigger is apparently better.

Don't get me wrong. Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout is magnificent. But you can't really drink a pint of it can you.

You only have to check out the world’s top 50 highest rated beers to see that 34 of them have the word Imperial in their name (which means they’re packing more punch than a young Mike Tyson) and the others are no lightweights either, with 3 Belgium Quadruples, 4 sour ales and a bourbon cask aged wheat trippelbock among their numbers.

Let’s really thrust the knife into the side of the British beer industry by mentioning that of the 90 beers featured in the 18 categories of Ratebeer’s  ‘Best Beers By Style 2011′ not a single one of them emanated from the British Isles.

I’ll twist the knife by pointing out that of the top five beers in the ‘English Style & Pale’ category four of them came from the USA and the last one from Italy. An actual English beer (not just a beer styled on one) was light years away from winning and the unavoidable truth is that a beer that embodies the flavours, characteristics and drinkability of British beer is never going to feature in Ratebeer’s top ten. Ever.

It seems right now British beer is about as cool as listening to Beethoven while everyone else is chilling out to Robyn. If British beer ever was hip it seems in urgent need of a replacement in a modern beer culture desensitised to subtlety.

I’ve lost count on beer chat sites like BeerSweden Forum of the times people have referred to British beers as being ‘thin’ and ‘boring’. Comments like: ”It’s very British in its style and that can’t be good right?!”  (referring to Djävlebryg OrginAle DIPA) are sadly not uncommon.

Tempted as I am to go on and on about how the British brewing culture (along with that of other major brewing nations like the Czech Republic, Germany and Belgium) built the stage on which American and US-style beers are currently strutting around on, I won’t, as it might be interpreted as a cry for help for a beer culture that I honestly don’t feel needs saving.

Two beers I’ve drunk in just the past few days have left me totally convinced British beers and British styles of beers still deserve their corner in today’s ‘craft beer’ landscape.

This pint will never make Ratebeer's top 100. Thank f#€k for that!

The first beer I had in a small basement pub in the shadows of Edinburgh Castle. After two crazy days drinking high octane beers, some of which came out of the mouths of dead animals and nearly all of which were were hopped to the brink, dragged back and then hopped again we fell into the pub looking for an honest pint of session ale.

We desperately wanted a beer we didn’t have to analyse, tick, sip or debate. A beer we could simply drink, in huge, satisfying gulps from an old-fashioned pint glass. We found it in a pale ale whose name I don’t even recall and which doesn’t really matter anyway. It had the unmistakably earthy,  pithy flavour of British ale, was under 5% ABV and didn’t contain a single hint of tropical fruit or pine needles. A lot of people might accuse it of tasting thin but I’d rather call it balanced and utterly drinkable. It took less than a couple of minutes to drain the glass and I enjoyed every single bloody moment of it. In a trip that overflowed with fantastic beers the memory of this unknown, simple pint stays with me.

A fantastic seasonal beer from Dugges which gets 4 out of 5 from me.

The second beer is actually Swedish but embodies a lot of what I love about British beer. Dugges Höstbrygd Contemplative Ale is an English style brown ale of a modest 5% ABV that really does capture the flavours of autumn, with an appetising aroma of chestnuts, earthy brown leaves and chocolate and a wonderfully smooth taste that starts with blackcurrants and finishes with dry roasted coffee, is discretely bitter and most importantly leaves you wanting more.

These beers, and hundreds more like them, don’t rely on booze, cask ageing, exotic fruits or hype to get our attention. They’re just balanced, well crafted drinking beers.

You can call me old fashioned if you want to but what the Fuggles – that sounds pretty great to me!

With only a day to go before the Craft Brewers Conference kicks off and with my body struggling to work out if I should be awake or asleep I thought it might be sensible to reset my taste-buds to US beers.

After all, this is west coast country and in the world of beer that can only mean one thing. Hops – and one hell of a lot of them!

If you look closely you can just see Craig's head poking up from behind the bar where he's hooking up kegs at City Beer

To help me ‘transition’ I hooked up with two insanely knowledgeable and generous beer ‘guides’ Joe and Steve, who had both answered my desperate and lonely cry for help on the travel forum of Ratebeer and offered to show me around some of the city’s best beer bars.* As a token of thanks I stuffed a bottle of Närke Konjaks! Stormaktsporter and a ‘Hello My Name is Ingrid’ (come on, I had too right?) into my backpack and headed off to meet them at our first stop of the day – City Beer.

There’s a really cool, urban/industrial feel to this small bar and bottle shop run by friendly beer guru Craig. Here you sit and sup surrounded by kegs and cases of unopened beer bottles. Walking in my eyes were instantly drawn towards the hanging chalkboards displaying the handful of draft beers Craig was busy hooking up to taps on the small bar.

And then I saw it.

Sitting there, daring me.

A bottle of Pliny the Elder. The beer that’s on the list-of-beers-I-must-try-before-I-die of practically every beer enthusiast the world over, a defining example of a Californian Double IPA, a former World Beer Cup Gold Medal winner and at a whopping 100 IBUs not normally a beer I’d start a drinking session off with.

But this wasn’t just any beer session. Although I didn’t know it at the time this was going to turn into one of those beer sessions.

Looking at the label I saw the beer had been bottled only 14 days ago. This signed the deal and within seconds we had Pliny in our glasses. Beers like Pliny come with a lot of baggage. There’s the hype and the expectation of greatness that sets many excellent beers up to fall but this fresh bottle of Pliny didn’t wilt under the pressure. It shone in the glass a deep golden colour and the aroma of freshly squeezed lemon and limejuice backed by some edgy grapefruit pith underlined its pedigree.

It’s the way Pliny seamlessly shifts from sweet citrus fruit to a sappy pine dry finish that makes it so special. The powerful malts are quietly doing their job here, carrying the hops and softening the blow of the IBUs to precisely the point where the paths of extreme flavour and drinkability cross one another.

After such an amazing start could it, I wondered, get any better?

Next up was a Rockslide IPA from FiftyFifty brewery, which despite failing to step out from the long shadow cast by Pliny was a rich tasty IPA with less lemon and pine and far more mango and apricot flavour than its predecessor.

Taking a short detour from the IPA style Joe and Steve ordered up some glasses of Russian River Benediction, a Belgium ale loaded with dark fruit flavours and treacle flavours that were a little too heavy and flat for me.

Not to worry though because the day was young and it was time to move on. We jumped into Steve’s car and headed east across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, a district with an unflattering reputation for unemployment, drug abuse and one of the highest rates of crime in the US.

It also happens to be home to one of the most amazing beer bars on the planet, a place that is giving beer fans a reason to run to Oakland rather than run away from it and a place so overwhelming great that I’m going to everything in my power to visit it at least once every day I’m here in San Francisco.

The place is called Beer Revolution and I’ll tell you all about my crazy couple of hours there in my next post.

* (Ed note: This is one of the most rewarding features of Ratebeer. Whenever you go to a new place searching for beer there is normally always someone on Ratebeer who will be happy to show you around. Take the opportunity, because you’ll often discover places you’d never find otherwise and you’ll make a beery friend (or two) in the process!)

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.