A champion of beer in all its forms and varieties throughout the world, as an accompaniment to food as well as a refreshing enjoyment in its own right, Michael Jackson was a prolific author and broadcaster on his subject. The title of his popular television series of the 1990s, The Beer Hunter, perhaps most comprehensively described his mission in life.

The spacious pleasures of the Weizenbier of the house of Thurn and Taxis, supped with bratwurst by the fast-flowing waters of the Danube; the dark, silken riches of Belgium’s Trappist Tripel; the thirst-quenching qualities of a classic English “ordinary” (though nothing of the sort) bitter, quaffed gratefully outside a Thames-side pub on a warm summer’s evening, were all grist to his catholic palate.

The stimulus to what became an eclectic taste (which also embraced whisky and was no stranger to wine) began, apparently, not with his contact with the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), founded in 1971, although he became an ardent supporter, but a year or two earlier.

A sojourn as a journalist in Amsterdam in 1969 had served only to make him weary of the sameness of the Pilsener-style beers too copiously on tap in that city. One weekend he caught a train to a village in the south of the country on the border with Belgium, ostensibly to cover the uninhibited merriment of a rural carnival. There for the first time he tasted in a small inn one of the monk-brewed marvels of which Belgium is capable.

The next day he crossed the frontier and was soon sampling the delights of Belgium’s beer culture, with its De Konnick, Westmalle Dubbel and Gueuze Lambic, to name but a few. In subsequent wanderings by the Rhine, Main, Inn, Ilz and Danube, the centuries-old German tradition of Reinheits-gebot (“purity law”) also made a deep impression on him.

Jackson returned to Britain with a fresh conception of what the simple word “beer” might be capable of. He became aware of the threat posed to many a fine English ale and stout from a developing taste among beer drinkers for the “safe” but insipid steel-keg productions of a new race of brewers. He joined in the defence of traditional British brewing, at the same time as exposing himself to the widest possible interpretation of beer through journeys abroad that took him from northern Finland via the United States to Patagonia. His first book The English Pub (1976) was followed by the World Guide to Beer (1977).

Michael Jackson was born in Yorkshire in 1942. His grandfather, Chaim Jakowitz, was a Jewish refugee immigrant to Leeds from Kaunas in Lithuania. His father, who married a Yorkshire gentile, anglicised the family name to Jackson; in christening his son Michael, he could have no idea of the opportunities for humorous mis-identification that this would give him later in life.

Jackson left King James Grammar School, Almondbury, Huddersfield, at 16 and trained as a reporter on the Huddersfield Examiner. He subsequently moved to London, worked on the Daily Herald, and served on World’s Press News, which he helped to transform into the magazine Campaign, which he was to edit for a period.

When Camra was launched he became a proselytiser for English traditional beers in the columns of a number of newspapers. With wine writing in the press encouraging a more thoughtful, more organic approach to gastronomic culture in its entirety, he promoted the notion of beer, too, as a civilised accompaniment to the pleasures of the table. In his travels abroad he kept notes not just of the beers he encountered but of the food that was eaten with them locally. He appropriated the expansive vocabulary of wine writers and applied it to his beloved beers too.

He was particularly interested in the micro-breweries of the US, and he followed this up with accounts in newspapers and magazines of the pub-based brewing operations of the British countryside – and of parts of London.

His homage to the country that had given him his first serious experience of beer, The Great Beers of Belgium, was published in 1991. It went into five editions. Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion appeared in the same year. Meanwhile, his fondness for Scotland had given rise to the bestselling Malt Whisky Companion (1989). It was followed by Scotland and its Whiskies (2001) and Whisky (2005).

Altogether sales of Jackson’s books exceeded three million in 18 languages from Japanese to Estonian. The six-programme series, The Beer Hunter, first shown in this country on Channel 4, has since been seen in 15 countries. He appeared on many other television programmes besides, extolling the virtues of his favourite beers and whiskies.

He was, in particular, a foe to the carelessly expressed notion, “I fancy a beer.” He constantly argued his favourite thesis that, as no one would simply say to a waiter in a restaurant, brasserie, trattoria or kneipe: “I fancy some food,” without stipulating what they wanted, so it was a nonsense to be so uncurious about the rich variety of beguiling fluids that the endlessly inventive beer cultures of the world were striving with every nerve to produce for human enjoyment.

Jackson’s awards included three Gold Tankards in the British Guild of Beer Writers Annual Awards and five Glenfiddich Awards, and in the United States he was the first winner of the Achievement Award of the Institute of Brewing Studies. In 1997 he was made a member of the Belgian Confédération des Brasseries de Belgique, the first nonbrewer to receive this honour. He was also the holder of the medal of the German Academy of Gastronomy.

Jackson had for ten years suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

His wife, Maggie O’Connor, died in 1980 after 13 years of marriage. He is survived by his partner of 26 years, Paddy Gunningham, and a stepdaughter.

Michael Jackson, writer, was born on March 27, 1942. He died of a heart attack on August 30, 2007, aged 65