By Richard Davies

FORTY years ago, I bought a copy of the original Good Beer Guide. At 75p, it cost as much as half a dozen pints of Banks’ Mild in the Midlands, where I was living in 1974. I still have it.

Compiled by the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), which had been founded three years earlier, this was the first pub guide to focus exclusively on the quality of the beer.

At the time, there were fears that traditional, living, cask-conditioned ale could be wiped out by gassy keg beer or, at best, confined to some quaint corner of “Olde England”, alongside traction engines and horse-drawn ploughs.

Back then, the “Big Six” conglomerates owned 60 per cent of the nation's pubs, and dozens of local breweries had closed. Fewer than 140 breweries were listed in the 1974 guide, but since then, there has been a remarkable revival.

The 2015 edition of the guide contains an astonishing 1,285 breweries, the highest number since the 1930s – there are now 44 independent breweries in North Yorkshire alone, and 15 in County Durham.

Of course, many of Britain’s new breweries are tiny, and the overall beer market is declining. But cask beer – “real ale” – is booming, with sales increasing.

For this renaissance, we have Camra to thank for launching the revolt against keg all those years ago. The last Labour government also helped by cutting the duty paid by the smallest breweries, and there is a growing enthusiasm for local food and drink. Innovative young men and women have entered the business, experimenting with new beer styles.

(A personal plea here. More women and young people are enjoying cask beer – and that’s terrific, with many of them attracted by the current vogue for “blond” ales flavoured with foreign “citrus” hops. But please, brewers, don’t forget the drinkers who prefer our ale copper-coloured, brewed with English hops and not tasting of grapefruit – there are a lot of us).

The number of breweries may be at a post-war high, but the poor old pub is up against it, with about 30 closing a week. The reasons for this are complex: soaring rents and other costs, more choice of leisure pursuits, more people drinking at home rather than in the local pub and – whatever the impression given by some of the new Puritans – Britons are drinking less. UK alcohol consumption has been falling for several years.

Ralph Wilkinson, who has been in the licensed trade nearly all his working life, owns the award-winning Number Twenty2 ale bar in Coniscliffe Road, Darlington – where he has just installed a mini-brewery as an added attraction – as well as The Crown in the nearby village of Manfield.

He said: “Thirty years ago, people used to use the pub out of habit four or five nights a week. That doesn’t happen so much now. The Facebook generation have no need to go to the pub on a Tuesday or a Thursday to catch up with their mates – they’re in contact all the time.

“With the fall-off in business, pubs also became more expensive to run. Most of the pubs that survive now are the ones that concentrate on food.”

While food has been the saviour of many country pubs, there are a few that thrive on the traditional ingredients of good beer, dominoes, darts, a coal fire and conversation. One such is The Red Lion at Cotherstone, in Teesdale, which Richard Robinson bought in 2002 when he was 21. He’s a qualified chef, but only does food on special occasions for parties of 12 or more.

“I suppose when I bought the pub, I thought it was going to be a big food place,” he said. “But I moved away from that and found I enjoyed the pub for what it was.

“It’s always been the local pub and I fell into that role. I found a lot more passion in the beers and the bar and just what village life was about, rather than being stuck in the kitchen all the time.

“It’s not the easiest thing in the world running it without food, but you cut your cloth to suit and reduce you overheads.”

Richard, who runs The Red Lion on his own, apart from a bit of help on darts nights, is full of optimism about the future, particularly as he is attracting younger customers – most members of his darts team are aged under 25.

“I love it here,” he said. “For my customers, it’s familiarity and simple pleasures. There’s no music or TV and the art of conversation isn’t dead. You can chat and enjoy good local beer.”

Perhaps one of the keys to a successful country pub is just that – simple pleasures. An enthusiastic landlord or landlady who concentrates on quality, whether it is food, beer or both, with the pub at the heart of the local community.

As for the future, unless we all lock ourselves away at home, drinking supermarket lager and watching The X Factor, the British pub will adapt and survive as it has done down the centuries.

In his highly-entertaining book, An Inebriated History of Britain, Peter Haydon describes the pub as “a remarkably resilient old dog”. He writes: “When the ice caps melt and the nation disappears under the waves, we should take comfort in the fact that the last Briton clinging to the last rooftop will probably be determined to be sitting atop a pub.”

I’ll drink to that.

* The 2015 Good Beer Guide is published by Camra at £15.99.