(The following article contains mis-remembered anecdotage)

When I left school in the summer of 1985, my friends and I decided to attempt to visit every pub in our home town of Doncaster. Thus equipped with whatever cash we had and a list copied from the Yellow Pages, we worked our way around town. Doncaster is a bigger place than you might imagine. The town itself was small enough to walk across in 20 minutes but the borough stretches east towards the Lincolnshire fens and south to the Nottinghamshire border. Our grand plan was reduced to the town itself, and I think we made a good go of it over a few weeks although there might have been a near-chinning one evening when we ended up in a less than friendly boozer with slightly too much pre-student waspishness in evidence.

Dimmed by dame memory though, what I am trying to remember is what we drank. We all drank bitter because it was what our Dads had taught us to do. Lager was usually Skol or Hofmeister or some variant - Stella hadn't reached our shores. Our local, the Roman Ridge in Scawsby, was a Whitbread house and as such had Trophy on hand pull but that was about it. Doncaster town centre was mostly John Smith's and Tetley country, but it was the variations that made it interesting. The St Leger Tavern was a Shipstone's pub. The White Swan, the first pub out of the North bus station, was a Ward's pub. There were other assorted outliers such as the Castle in the Market Place (Nottingham's Home Ales) and the inevitable strangely located Sam Smith's pub, the Corporation Brewery Taps, which is by the ring road next to a clump of flats, part of an excursion in the unknown territory of Hexthorpe. We were young though and didn't know much better, apart from maybe being happy when Old Museum was on at a Sam's pub (a rare thing even then) or Home Brewery would send something other than best bitter to the Castle. This, I think, was the state of beer in much of the country in the mid 80s. The small breweries were being absorbed into larger groups - Wards was owned by Sunderland's Vaux, Home Ales was taken over by S&N, Hardy Hanson by Greene King and the beer industry seemed to be heading towards the bland singularity that CAMRA was attempting to fight against. There was an independent real ale pub, the Hallcross, run by Stocks Brewery, the brainchild of one of the family who owned the local bakers, Cooplands, which inevitably became one of the popular haunts of leaving and returning students.

I left for Middlesbrough in the September of that year, taking the train two hours north to another declining post-industrial town that had seen better days, albeit one with a polytechnic - yes, I am that old. The SU bar was an inevitable early visit and included some familiar faces with different names: there was the Tetley huntsman, for example, but what was this Imperial all about? Where was Castle Eden and why were Whitbread so keen to promote it? I was 80 miles up the East Coast Main Line, but the town looked north to Newcastle, Durham, Sunderland and Hartlepool: their beers were stronger and darker, often the wrong side of 4%, and giving remarkable hangovers if you had a couple too many. The call of studentdom was too much though, with hideous cocktails served in half- or pint glasses, and connecting with the goth crowd which brought with it far too much snakebite, sometime with Pernod and worse, blackcurrant, and other delights from the dusty shelves in the off licence. As my drinking career progressed, the world changed too: Newcastle Brown became briefly fashionable, partially driven by the success of Viz comic, and then the dance culture arrived, just as I was leaving, and brought with it not just the drugs, but a change in the beers of choice. Brown booze just wasn't fashionable any more, and I returned a year or so after I left to find a solitary Tetley Imperial tap on the bar overshadowed by a Stella Artois riser which did more business than the huntsman ever did, and thus the 1990s started for me and went in much the same way.