On a plane to Prague some years ago, I found myself sitting beside a young Dubliner who was returning to the city after a holiday at home. What kept drawing him back - the beauty of the Czech capital, the excitement of living in a country awakening from Communist oppression, the opportunities? No, the real attraction was simple: "The best beer in the world, at ten pence per half litre."
We Irish are widely rumoured to love our beer, and we certainly drink a fair amount of it (though not as much as the Germans or Czechs). But a lot of what we drink is awful stuff, pasteurised, flavourless and over-chilled, produced in huge factory-style automated breweries by multinational companies. In Britain, organisations such as the Campaign for Real Ale defend the diversity of regional brewing styles and traditions, but here most of that diversity was squeezed out of the market more than a century ago.
More than 80 per cent of the beer consumed here now is produced under the aegis of Guinness, with Heineken/Murphy and Beamish and Crawford taking up most of the slack. But, just as Irish consumers have awakened to the virtues of handcrafted, naturally produced foodstuffs, now a small but burgeoning chain of independent micro-breweries is springing up across the country, patterned on the success of similar operations in the US. In parallel with this phenomenon, it's finally getting easier to buy some of the world's great bottled beers in our off-licences and supermarkets.
On an investigative excursion around some of Dublin's more fashionable watering holes last week (it's a tough job but someone's got to do it), it was clear that in most places the Big Three's stranglehold remains as strong as ever. The line-up of pumps proclaimed the usual litany of Guinness, Heineken, Carlsberg, Caffreys . . . The chill cabinets were worse - packed with so-called "premium" brands, mostly Budweiser and Miller, surely two of the most bland and boring beers ever made. These are the kind of tasteless products which spurred the microbrewery revolution in the US, and yet they're still sold here as expensive, glamorous products.
Many of Dublin's newer cafe-bars may aspire to a certain level of cosmopolitanism in their decor and menus, but their most fundamental product remains resolutely generic and mass-produced. It was in the Victorian splendour of the Stag's Head - which features so strongly in the new Guinness commercial, after all - that we found Beckett's Irish Ale, brewed by the recently-established Dublin Brewing Company. After all that fizzy blandness, this unpasteurised golden ale was a revelation, full of body and well-rounded flavour, like freshly ground beans beside the big brands' instant coffee.
Also producing its own naturally-brewed beer is The Porter House, on Parliament Street, which offers about eight different types, ranging from light lagers to Oyster Stout (with real oysters). On a clammy summer's evening, we stayed away from the heavier brews, sampling instead the Porterhouse Red, a flavoursome red ale with hints of caramel, the Hersbrucker Pilsner, which was too hoppy for our delicate palates, and the Temple Brau lager, a milder, less distinctive pilsner which is closer in taste to the likes of Heineken or Carslberg.
The Porter House also makes Chiller, a "North American style lager" which is almost as uninteresting as the mass-produced brands it's copying. Most agreeable of all is the current "guest beer", the Irish Brewing Company's No. 1 Brew, described enthusiastically by my quaffing companion as having good, immediate taste and a full flavour (the bottled version of No. 1 is also available in many of the multiples and several of the major off-licence chains).
All the beers on offer were a step up from the usual fare, although for the regular Dublin pint-drinker, The Porter House is probably too touristy and theme-pubbish to appeal as a regular haunt.
"What creates the market for what we're doing is a general sense of diversity," says Kieran Finnerty of the Dublin Brewing Company. "We're trying to help everyone else who's setting up." There may also be strength in numbers - the brewing establishment is rumoured to indulge in some nefarious practices to ensure exclusive deals with public houses. Finnerty is deliberately avoiding the so-called "super-pubs" with their multiple bars and huge banks of pumps, concentrating on established Dublin premises like the Stag's Head and the Palace Bar on Fleet Street. Premier Worldwide Beers, one of the major wholesalers of imported beers into the country, has also opened its own brewery, Celtic Brew in Enfield, Co Meath, and is building up outlets for its Finian's Original Gold brew in the Meath-Kildare area.
When it comes to imported beers, Premier imports beers from everywhere from Russia to Barbados into Ireland, with some of its most popular brands being the potent Belgian beers like Chimay, an unfiltered, unpasteurised and powerful (7 per cent volume) beer brewed since 1862 by the Trappist monks at Chimay monastery, and Radegast, a popular Czech beer which shares many of the same characteristics as the better-known Pilsner Urquell and Budvar Budweiser (Budvar is widely available in the UK, but is injuncted from selling here by Guinness, the licensees for the immeasurably inferior American Budweiser). Other beers well worth trying are the classic, award-winning Keo pilsner from Cyprus, and the slightly spicy Bajan lager from Barbados.
John Mulvaney of McCabe's off-licences in Blackrock and Clontarf stocks a wide range of international beers, but believes that "it's very much a specialist market". It's a measure of the small size and undeveloped nature of that market in Ireland that, while Premier distributes about a dozen beers here, in the UK its sister company deals in over 100 brands.
"It's much more developed in the UK," agrees Conor Neiland of Premier. "You have a much more varied society over there. But I would compare the beer market here now with the way the wine market was 10 years ago. There's a lot of scope for expansion, both in the imported market and the home-grown microbreweries."
The growth in both the microbrewery and imported beer businesses signals some welcome cracks in the monolithic Irish beer industry, which can only benefit the consumer. Unlike the lime-stuck-in-a-bottle craze of the late 1980s, this isn't just a yuppie fad - these are all very good beers. Other brands worth looking out for are the highly malted Brooklyn Lager and the deliciously dry Sapporo from Japan (now brewed under licence at St James's Gate).
You'll be pleasantly surprised by the variety, complexity and tastiness of what's on offer for a few pence more than the usual yellow fizz. Most brands cost around £1.20 for a 33 cl bottle, while 50 cl bottles range between £1.60 and £1.80, with the higher alcohol volume Belgian beers costing between £2.20 and £2.60.