ack towards the end of July I was relaxing outside in the sun, enjoying the views out over the sea, supping a pint of real ale and trying to avoid getting sunburn. Nothing unusual about that you might think, except that it was ten o’clock at night! From that clue you can tell we weren’t at Skeggy, but then you can’t actually see the sea there and as for sunburn!

Amazingly I was enjoying a pint of real ale in Anchorage, Alaska where the weather gets pleasantly warm in the summer and there is almost 22 hours of daylight. We were on a coach tour of Alaska and the Yukon, covering 2,600 miles of this vast and beautiful area. But what I wasn’t expecting when we booked the holiday was the wide range and diversity of beers available, including several real ales and the pleasing relative shortage of the US mainstream domestic brews on the bars.

It was a good omen when we checked into our hotel on the outskirts of Anchorage to find a brew pub almost next door. Needless to say, despite the 15 hours of flights, I was in there checking out the beers as soon as I had chucked the cases in the room. The moose’s Tooth Pub and Pizzeria is really just a pizza restaurant, but it has its own brewery and there is a small drinking area around the bar. I ordered a “Prince William’s Porter”, described as dark, rich, full bodied and lightly dry-hopped and was handed a free one “if I wanted it”. When I queried why it was free the bartender said because he had poured it by mistake a few minutes earlier and it was now a bit warm – but it tasted superb to me and if anything still a little too cold. The pub had about a dozen beers on draught, varying from stouts and porters to a hefeweizen, raspberry wheat and an amber ale. There was a handpump on the bar but it had no pumpclip, so I queried when they sold a cask beer, as many US brewpubs put them on once a week, and was delighted to be told that it was available now! So my second beer in Alaska was a real ale, a very tasty IPA.

The next day we took a boat trip on Prince William Sound to the glaciers and the amazing scenery, but before we got onboard I called in a small café in Wittier and found bottled Copper Creek Amber Ale on sale from Silver Gulch Brewery in Fairbanks. Onboard the boat I discovered they sold bottles of Alaskan Summer Ale described as a kolsch style ale. Already the trend for the holiday was being set, with interesting brews popping up in the most unexpected places and not once was I faced with having either an American “domestic” brew or going without (I would have gone without!)

Downtown Anchorage provided some interesting drinking and eating, that night. We started off in the Glacier brewhouse where I had the best beer of the whole trip, and the best meal. They always have one cask ale on sale and on this occasion it was an I.P.A at 6.35% (yes they were that specific) and it was served at 52degrees F. Not only that but they had full tasting notes on all of their beers to ensure that the servers knew the full details of each one including ingredients etc. I was well impressed with this and the high quality of the beer. It wasn’t expensive by US standards either at $4.95 an American (16oz) pint – I paid $7 in New York back in February. They brew other beers such as a stout, raspberry wheat and a curiously named Zoo Blonde, but with a cask ale this good why bother? If you get to Anchorage this place is a must.

Our next port of call was the Snow Goose Restaurant and Sleeping Lady Brewery, with its open decks overlooking the bay. The walls were decorated with English bar towels and I was surprised how many of them were from closed breweries such as  Wards, Morrels, Hartleys, xe Vale, Higsons, Oldham and Tolly We ate here on another night and the food was good, although like the beer, not up to the high standard of the Glacier. They had a selection of their own beers on draught including a porter, Scottish Ale and IPA but apparently they had not had any real ale on sale for at least three weeks, despite the handpump on the bar and nobody knew why. Interestingly they had a good selection of Belgian beers and I finished my meal with a real treat a bottle of Boon Kriek Lambic – absolutely delicious!

Our next night was spend in Beaver Creek, just over the Canadian border which gave me the chance for my first taste of Yukon Brewing’s fine brews. This brewery, based in Whitehorse, was only founded in 1997 but already has more than 10% of the market share in the Yukon territories and on sampling them it is not difficult to see why. Their two best sellers are Yukon Gold a 5% golden ale and Artic Red a 5.5% amber brew. However the best of their beers I found was their 4.5% Grizzly Wheat Hefeweizen made specially for the High Country Inn in Whitehorse, where we stayed for a couple of nights. This is a refreshing, cloudy unfiltered wheat ale, light bodied with a tangy citrus character. Apart from a bottle of Grasshopper wheat beer from Big Rock Brewing in Calgary, Yukon was the only beer I sampled on the Canadian part of the trip, but they were so good that our coach driver used to take cases of it back over the border into Alaska.