MIDDLE-CLASS, middle-aged and male. That’s us real ale drinkers, who occasionally have to seek safety in numbers to fend off the monstrous regiment of lager louts.

Yesterday we took our beards and bellies to Olympia in West London, which has the feel of Paddington station with the trains replaced by beer casks, to the opening day of the Great British Beer Festival. By the time it closes on Saturday, the organisers estimate that 45,000 of us will have drunk 200,000 pints. It is certainly the biggest beer festival in the world when measured by the range of beers: 450 from Britain and around the world.

Bar counters the length of aircraft runways dispense their bewildering variety at great speed, the volunteer bartenders pumping away as though trying to empty the Titanic of seawater. Customers hang on to their pint glasses for dear life.

We have plenty to cry into our beer about. The Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) says that 26 British pubs a month close for ever, a markedly faster rate than five years ago. The trouble is that the pub as property is now worth more as housing, and big chains are allegedly not above running down a pub deliberately to win change-of-use approval from planners.

“It is not just a rural problem. Victorian pubs in London, which have large car parks attached, are particularly favoured targets,” Steve Williams, Camra regional director for Greater London, said. Thank goodness there are 61,000 pubs still functioning.

Beer campaigners announced the Community Pubs Foundation yesterday to help localities to retain their traditional pubs, with their mix of all ages, and to counter the trend towards vast lager halls filled only with the young who then cause the police much extra work on Saturday nights.

The organisers say that visitors to Camra beer festivals never trouble the police: “We have a lot of people here who have had a lot to drink, but very few drunks. We have never called the police in ten years.”

That being the case, it seemed appropriate and safe to sample the Champion Beer of Britain 2005, Crouch Vale Brewers’ Gold, within seconds of it being announced. Just for once during the afternoon, there was an unseemly scrum at the bar serving it, but old hands know how to get to the front of the queue. Unfortunately, everyone was an old hand.

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