St Albans. Beer Heaven?

So St Albans in Hertfordshire is the best place in Britain for good cask beer. Those who live in the city (not a town, dear friends - we do have a cathedral, you know) have been aware of that for many a year.

Cynics who read the Cask Marque report on the best towns and cities for real ale recently will no doubt have snorted and said, "Well, St Albans would be named the best - it's the home of the Campaign for Real Ale."

There's a large grain of truth in that, although not everyone who works at the Camra head office lives in Snorbens, as it's affectionately known. But those of us who can just about afford a mortgage in one of the most expensive places in the country will have made an impact on the pubs and beer quality over the years and that has rubbed off on other drinkers who frequent the 60 or so hostelries in the city.

As Camra prepares to celebrate the 35th anniversary of its founding and I chalk up 30 years of writing about beer, it's fascinating to see how one small city's pubs and drinking culture has changed over that period.

When I came to work for Camra and eventually to live in Snorbens, the city's pubs were dominated by Ind Coope, a subsidiary of Allied Breweries, and Whitbread, which had long ago bought the substantial regional brewer, J W Green of Luton.

I can't recall any of the local Whitbread pubs serving cask beer at the time. As for Ind Coope Mild and Bitter on handpump from its Romford Brewery, if all cask beers had been that bad Camra would have found it difficult to get off the ground.

McMullen's of Hertford has a renowned pub in the city, the Farrier's Arms, which today carries a blue plaque as the birthplace of the first Camra branch in Britain. This is not strictly true, but the first ever branch of the campaign in the Midlands did not last long while the South Herts fraternity are still going strong. The Farriers was in the mid-1970s a lonely and welcome oasis for cask beer but it was run by an old curmudgeon called George who lived up to his reputation as the rudest landlord in Christendom.

By the time I arrived in Snorbens and had the temerity to cross the portals of the pub, George had banned Michael Hardman and Chris Hutt, respectively first and second national chairmen of Camra. When he sussed that I was also connected with the campaign, he told me in no uncertain terms to "Eff off back to Ardman and Utt".

So I was reduced to drinking Ind Coope's apologies for cask beer in the White Hart Tap, a pub that became well known some years later when it was run by the actor Melvyn Hayes, star of It Ain't Half Hot Mum.

In the meantime, Charles Wells of Bedford took over the lease of an Ind Coope pub, the Jolly Sailor, which for a time became the lunchtime abode and second home to Camra staff. Not surprisingly, perhaps, for a time the Sailor was the biggest seller of cask beer in the entire and substantial Charlie Wells' pub estate. Ind Coope had sniffed the changing beer market in the late 1970s and launched the phenomenally successful Draught Burton Ale. Suddenly Ind Coope pubs in and around Snorbens were no longer on the warning list, though DBA, at 4.8%, was scarcely a lunchtime drink. Improvements came thick and fast in the 1980s and 90s. Dramatic changes in the industry meant that many pubs became free of the tie. In the Lower Red Lion in Fishpool Street near the cathedral, I can drink micro-brewers' beers from all over Britain and in the Mermaid in Hatfield Road I recently supped delicious pints of Nethergate's Augustinian Ale.

The likes of the Jolly Sailor and the Farriers Arms remain in regional brewers' hands, as they did some 30 years ago. I hear there's a new tenant in the Farriers. If he's called George and tells me to eff off, I'll know the "good old days" have never gone away.