To find out why, we went to meet the family behind the award-winning Jarrow Brewery.

Anyone who was alive in the 1960s will know there was no such thing as a lager lout.

That is because the fizzy beverage, blamed for all manner of social ills ever since, simply didn’t exist. Not in this country anyway.

That meant come a night out, your choice of tipple was stark. Real ale, spirits or nowt.

Fast forward to 2010 and the pub trade is a very different beast.

Lager and kegged beer are kings, but what with tax increases and the smoking ban, sales are way down.

Pubs are no longer on every street either. In 2009 more than 2,700 closed their doors for the last time.

Yet amongst all this doom and gloom, there is a chink of light; real ale is making a comeback with a one per cent growth last year.

It might not sound much, but one man who’s taking advantage of this renaissance is Jess McConnell, 57, owner of South Tyneside’s only real ale production company, the Jarrow Brewery.

Having been licensees for 20 years, Jess and his wife Alison went on a brewing course and set up their brewery at The Robin Hood, in Jarrow, which they still run to this day.

Due to demand for their ales, they had to purchase a larger plant and transfer all brewing to The Maltings, Claypath Lane, South Shields.
Their lives have never been the same since.

While their evocatively named ales are lauded all over the region, their magnus opus, Rivet Catcher, has gone on to achieve national notoriety.

Already the current Champion Beer of the North East, it has also won silver and bronze at the annual Great British Beer Festival held in London.

Not bad going for a brewery which hasn’t even celebrated its eighth birthday yet.

Jess puts the secret of their success down to a few magic ingredients: “Quality control, attention to detail, and, above all, consistency.