Ask anyone from the North East about their local and you'll get an opinion, not a shrug. It's a region built on strong pub culture long before craft beer was a phrase anyone used, from Newcastle's riverside and the Bigg Market through Durham's cathedral city streets and down into Teesside, with Northumberland's coast and hills stretching out to the north carrying their own scattering of rural breweries and taprooms. That inherited seriousness about a decent pint has fed pretty naturally into small-scale brewing: converted warehouses along the Tyne, industrial units on the edges of former colliery towns, seafront spots making the most of a view most breweries would kill for. Bottle shops here tend to double as informal community hubs, the kind of place where the person behind the counter genuinely knows what just came in and why it's worth trying. There's a bluntness to the whole scene that suits the place, more about the beer being good than the branding around it. Winters bite here and the weather rolling in off the North Sea is rarely gentle about it, which might explain a soft spot for darker, stronger styles alongside whatever's newest and palest. This page gathers what we monitor across the North East, brewers and stockists together, along with any deals currently showing on their own sites.
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