22-05-2025
Six of the best pale ales — tried and tasted by our expert
Long ago, when I started drinking beer, pale ale was a small, dusty bottle on the shelf behind the bar. A prim aunt might drink it on her annual pub visit, or your grandad might mix it with half a mild.
It wasn't always like this. When glass became affordable in the 1840s, this bright, sparkling elixir — paler and clearer than porter — became the most fashionable drink of its time. Bass Pale Ale's red triangle was the first British trademark (awarded in 1876), and Bass arguably the first global brand.
A century later Bass was still going strong, but if you talked about 'pale ale' in the late 1960s and early 1970s you were more likely to mean keg beers such as Double Diamond, which spent so much on ads there was no money left to brew decent beer. It was to counter brands like this that the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) began.
Pale ale quietly started doing well in Camra competitions, then in the late 1980s a new beer emerged. Golden ale replaced pale as the brew that might win over lager drinkers: the same colour and brightness, with the flavour and fullness of a pale ale.
Meanwhile, the American craft-beer movement seized on pale ale as the perfect vehicle to showcase the fruity, resiny hops coming out of the Pacific Northwest. Compared with the turbocharged IPAs emerging around this time, pale ale was their gentler, more sessionable cousin.
And now we've come full circle. Because Double Diamond is back! The Seventies legend has been reanimated — its owner, Allsopp's, has worked wonders — while its erstwhile rival, Bass, has been stifled by lack of investment from owners who demonstrably have no interest in ale.
So here's a mix of new, traditional and classic pale ales. Try them on draft in the pub if you can. If not, these are all perfect early-summer fridge-fillers.
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Hop Back Summer Lightning (5%) 12x500ml, £35 A pioneer of 'golden ale'. If we lean into its name, Summer Lightning is the first taste of sunshine rather than drowsy mid-August, all clean and bright.
Kelham Pale Rider (5.2%) 500ml, £2.70 Rescued by Thornbridge after the near-demise of Kelham Island Brewery, this former Camra champion is a perfect balance of fruity hops and biscuity malt.
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (5%) Morrisons, 355ml, £2.50 The centre of gravity for American craft beer and a great introduction to ale. Piney resin from cascade hops is held in check by the chewy caramel backbone.
Timothy Taylor's Landlord (4.1%) Sainsbury's, 500ml, £2.40 The bottle is good; on cask, Landlord is superlative, bucking the trend of long-term decline in cask ale. It was the first 'craft beer' and still is, in the truest sense.
Double Diamond (3.8%) Tesco, 4x440ml, £5 Forget what DD tasted like first time round. This is a modern, zippy pale that is clean, refreshing and moreish. An exceptional blend of old and new-world styles.
Track Sonoma (3.8%) 4x440ml, £14 Sonoma is a hazy pale for folk who don't love hazy pales, and folk who do. Fruity with a soft bitterness, it's a Manchester must-drink now, a sequel to dear, departed Boddingtons.
