My wife and I took a cottage at the southern end of Coniston Lake for a week of walking, exploring and sightseeing. Oh, and the chance to sample a few local beers of course.

On our first night we had dinner at the Black Bull in Coniston, home of the Coniston Brewing Company, so I accompanied our spinach and ricotta cannelloni with a pint of Old Man, their 4.4% ale. It's subtly complex, definitely a modern 'traditional' ale, where everything is in balance, but with notes of orange and rum 'n' raisin gradually becoming apparent. That is pretty clever. The brewery were quietly celebrating their No 9 Barley Wine being awarded Champion Beer of Britain.

I took a couple of their bottles back to the cottage, Bluebird XB, and their top-fermented lager (is that even possible?) Thurstein Pilsner. XB is their take on an American pale ale (the bottle I had was labelled up for US export) and was pleasantly citrussy with that same understated complexity which seems to mark their beers. As for Thurstein, well, yes, it's a lager and I've yet to find a British cask lager that I genuinely liked, and that's another one. Sorry. I promised myself a pint of original Bluebird before the week was out but didn't end up in another  pub that had it on.

The availability of cask and craft ale was heartening though: every pub we visited in the week had a couple on, even if they were sometimes from larger breweries, and there were even suggestions there that they're trying - Robinson's Dizzy Blonde showed that Cheshire's old warhorse can compete with the new bucks convincingly. I was put off from entering Robinsons' pubs due to my experience of their beers in the past but this one, hopped with Amarillo, worked remarkably well.

Amarillo was a common theme in the week: Dizzy Blonde had it, I believe Coniston use it, subtly, and the two properly local brewers, in the area, the Ulverston Brewing Company and Stringer's seem to love it too. I sampled Stringer's IPA and Ulverston's Laughing Gravy , courtesy of the new(ish) Booths supermarket in Ulverston, which carries them and many other Cumbrian ales.

Stringer's IPA was a random pick: I've never had their beers before and  I went for the strong one, and to be honest I was a little disappointed. The first hit was of Chivers Extra Thick Marmalade, that jaw-achingly bitter orange which is lovely on hot buttered toast but was rather cloying in a glass.

Laughing Gravy, which is possibly the best beer name ever on so many levels, is different again: still with a generous slug of amarillo but tempered by chocolate malt to give an aroma of Terry's chocolate orange which makes it a very drinkable dark ale.

As I was driving mostly and our cottage was a couple of miles from the nearest pub (which we didn't go to in the end) I was generally having a pint with dinner. As vegetarians we tended to have a rather limited choice in terms of pub food, but one winner was The Wilson's Arms at Torver, who had a few good meat-free and locally sourced choices as well as a couple of different beers, although I settled on Cumbrian Legendary Ales' Loweswater Gold, 2011's champion golden ale and a beautifully drinkable pint. We even let them off running out of falafel burgers when we went back for the second time.

Our other nearby pub was the Farmer's Arms at Lowick. Again a couple of veggie options that were better than the ubiquitous lasagne but in a more formal setting, although the ancient Stable Bar served basket meals (I chose the soup) and Unsworth Yard's Cartmel Peninsula  next to the couple of Bateman's and Theakston's casks. This was a fortunate find and probably the beer of the week - fruity and dry and only 3.8% so I could have happily drank it all night if we'd arrived in time to do the pub quiz.

I probably couldn't call myself a beer geek if we hadn't made an excursion to at least one brewery so we made it Hawkshead's shiny place in Staveley. A lack of planning and no phone signal meant that we missed the brewery tour by a few minutes (and it's only on three days a week) but made up for it with the Beer Hall's tasty macaroni cheese, accompanied as suggested by a pint of Brodie's Prime, two excellent things at once. The brewery is a lovely shiny thing, and the conditioning tanks in the beer hall were shinier too. My wife pointed out that they wouldn't fit in the garage. Hmm, I might be onto something though...