Take Bulawayo, for instance. It's Zimbabwe's second largest city, with a population of about 400,000 and yet it has three different breweries producing stout alone. And when you go into a shebeen (for that is what they are called in Africa, weirdly) and call for a pint of plain, they'll ask you which 'style' you want, ranging from the dark and vaguely familiar brew produced in the 'Northern' brewery to the milky, translucent liquid churned out by the 'Town' brewery. Totally different drinks, but all with the same name and all made within a five-mile radius of the city.

And there are examples closer to home. Just look at that swank new Belgian eaterie which opened in Dublin recently. Chips with mayonnaise isn't the big selling point, needless to say - it's the fact that they can offer over 100 different Belgian beers. Everything from the mass-produced (but lovely) Duvel, to casks of real ale fermented in the left slipper of a Tridentine priest.

But in Ireland - for a series of bizarre reasons - our taste buds are in the hands of a few multi-national brewers and some of the slop they serve up is hardly worthy of the name gargle. This is true of hugely popular brands, producing thousands of pints which are genuinely enjoyed by Irish drinkers every night.

These drinkers are victims of the delusion that they are making a choice. They are missing the point, which is that the brewing of beer is a hugely com- plex and variable process and the range and diversity of texture, flavour and strength means that local differences should be apparent and celebrated. Factors such as the water source, the acidity of the fields in which the hops are grown and the particular strain of yeast which is used all go towards determining the final brew and that's why somebody in Dortmund will only drink Union beer.

In this country, which is supposedly home to some of the most discerning and practised drinkers in the known world, beer is invariably mass-produced, cost-effective and utterly bland. Kieran Finnerty travelled the world—and, like so many of us, bemoaned the fact that the brewer's art had been sold out to big business long ago. Unlike the rest of us, however, he did something about it.

"Most beers in Ireland are mass produced and mass marketed, so you get the same seven or eight beers in every pub in the country. It doesn't matter whether the pub has ten beer taps or 50, the same beers are on offer wherever you go," says Kieran. "We wanted to do something different - and we have done." As he talks, his words mingle with the smell of roasting barley and drying hops which permeate the air in the cramped confines of the Dublin Brewing Company, the company he founded just three years ago. Returning from America with a pocketful of cash gleaned from a successful career in the publishing industry, he took up a lease on a small premises in Smithfield (yes, that's just across the river from Uncle Arthur, and we'll get to that presently) and basically went about the business of building his very own brewery.

He had seen it done elsewhere and saw no reason why it shouldn't work here. "In the US, where trends tend to start, micro-breweries have been going since around 1980. In the fifties and sixties, evervbodv wanted to be like their neighbour, everybody wanted to drink what their neighbors were drinking, and so mass brewing was the thing.

In the eighties and nineties however, the pattern has reversed and people want to establish their individuality - having your own particular drink is part of that. Some people identify with the Sierra Nevada brewing company, others with Anchor Steam in San Francisco - and so on," he says. "And we all know what the situation is in Europe.

Over there your local beer is part of your identity, just like your local football team. You drink it just as you would support your local team. It doesn't matter that it's taste might equate with Manchester City, while the beer of the next brewer along tastes like Manchester United - you drink the Manchester City one because it's your local brew."

Like so many entrepreneurs who have made good abroad and have now come back for a slice of the action, Kieran was also convinced that Dublin was ripe for a new approach to selling booze. "I was walking along in New York, trying to think of a business opportunity in Ireland when I noticed a sign on an empty building which said: 'Coming soon - HMV Records, as seen in London, Tokyo and Dublin'. It dawned on me that Dublin had suddenly become a major player almost overnight. A year earlier, that sign would have listed Sydney, Amsterdam or Paris rather than Dublin. Dublin had become a great brand name, and nobody was using it. That's another thing we wanted to change."

Of course, the micro-brewery is hardly a new idea. There was a famous experiment in the deep south a number of years ago which failed, because the lads involved just didn't really know what they were doing. As anybody who has ever tried to mix up a batch of home brew in a bucket will tell you, it's a complicated business.

"Well, it has been done before. One micro-brewery tried it in 1982 and failed for technical reasons. This put other entrepreneurs off, because they thought 'It's been tried before and failed, so why should it work for us,' even though it failed for technical reasons rather than a lack of demand." To take care of this, Kieran enlisted the services of Liam McKenna - a spookily intense Canadian who knows more about the making of beer than is probably healthy. He's the man responsible for the soggy end of the business and his determination to produce 'real' booze, as opposed to the mass-produced suds he so reviles, ensures the Dublin Brewing Company lives up to all of the ideals which are so precious to fans of the micro-brewery genre.

As we sit in the small bar which forms the centre piece of the DBC premises at North King Street, Liam draws a pint of D'Arcy's Stout - the first stout launched by the firm - and looks at it adoringly. He should - it's all his own work. "It's the kind of stout our fathers would have drunk," he says in between measured mouthfuls.

Then, having softened me up with a couple of 'samples' Liam takes your humble narrator on a tour of the plant. Having been on similar tours at the Guinness and Beamish plants, there was something very reassuring about actually seeing geezers throw a few handfuls of malt into the small vats if something didn't smell just right. To see men and women actually intrinsically involved in the making of the gargle reminds you that brewing is a very human art, not to be left to machines.

"We're a craft-based production. We brew 12,000 pints for every two million that Guinness brew," says Liam proudly. "Our brewers don't sit by a machine making sure the process is going according to a computer programme. They are measuring the gravity, the clarity, the Ph. They are deciding whether to slow down or speed up the process. It gives you a beer with more flavour and character."

He is also scathing of the modem practice of using preservatives, chemicals and other artificial agents in mass-produced beers to make them cheaper to produce and easier to store in the barrel. It seems the famous myth about hangover-free German beer (Teutonic tipplers are protected by ancient and strictly enforced chemicalfree laws) is based in fact after all.

"We don't use any stabilisers or preservatives, industrial enzymes, chemicals or food colouring and sweetening agents. We brew from the grains themselves - water, yeast and hops. Nobody can say what it is about beer that causes hangovers, but the chemicals most big breweries use certainly can't help. And we never get any complaints about our stuff. The focus is not on volume and efficiency, but instead on quality."

Once the five minute tour is over - they only have a couple of vats to look at - Kieran and Liam take me back to the pub and give me a quick run-down of their beers.

Beckett's Gold was the first DBC product and it caused quite a stir when the first batches started dripping out of the vats. And it's lovely. Without wishing to lapse into the descriptive non-speak so beloved of amateur wine-buffs, Beckett's is smooth, full of flavour and distinctly continental.

1798 Revolution is a red ale and is tasty too, but don't take my word for it. Kieran can call on no less an authority than Huey of the Fun Lovin' Criminals to laud its qualities. "That was quite a boost for us alright," explains Kieran. "The band were playing a gig here and a friend of mine brought them down to us for a couple of pints. They liked it so much, they asked for a couple of crates, which of course we were delighted to give them.

That night, they were playing a gig, which - as usual - was sponsored by one of the big breweries. I was at the gig, and the next thing I saw was Huey standing at the front of the stage with a bottle of our ale in his hand screaming: 'I'm just a Dublin Brewing Company man and this Revolution is hot shit!' I was pretty shocked, but the beer company rep was going bananas - his bosses had spent all this cash promoting the gig and there was the star singing the praises of some micro-brewery from nowhere. It was priceless."

The recently launched Maeve's Crystal Wheat is a light ale, particularly suited to food (or, as in my case, throwing down your gullet and asking for more) and is gaining in popularity.

But the real challenge - in terms of business for Kieran and brewing for Liam - was D'Arcy's Stout. You won't be surprised to learn that Guinness were less than thrilled at the prospect of a young upstart like the Dublin Brewing Company setting up shop on their doorstep. But it was the launch of D'Arcy's Stout which really got on their goat. So upset were they, that they speedily launched a 'micro-brewery' of their own called St James Gate to a fanfare of corporate publicity. A couple of years and £35 million later, the place closed without so much as a whimper.You taste the pleasure Kieran Finnerty takes from that tale, and it's clear that a lot of animosity exists between the tiny DBC and their infinitely larger neighbours. It's probable that both Kieran and Liam are overtly paranoid about 'Big Uncle' next door, but their back- ground in the micro-brewery business makes them very protective of what they consider to be the real thing.

"Guinness is sold all over the world and the company has very successfully got into this Irish pub thing, but the drinks sold in them are not brewed in Ireland," says Kieran. "The world is awash with fake Irish beers. We want to push the fact that our beers are brewed in Ireland using Irish water and Irish products, and try to restore the Dublin brewing tradition," adds Liam Finnerty.

"As a Canadian and a brewer, the opportunity to brew stout in Sir Arthur Guinness' backyard was something I couldn't pass up. I want to remind Irish people what real beer is about." Kieran adds: "Guinness has 80 per cent of the total beer market, with Murphy's and Beamish mopping up the rest. But we see an opportunity for regional diversity, whereby you have a brewer in, say, Galway who makes a beer peculiar to that area and perhaps another guy in Cork.Ireland is fragmenting or diversifying culturally. People are travelling more, society is becoming more liberated and open to new influences and one manifestation of this is that people are demanding a greater variety of beers, both from Ireland and abroad."

The Dublin Brewing Company's four beers are available in off-licences through- out the country (on the day I called, they had just signed a distribution deal with Tesco) and they are selling extremely well. Their products are also shifting well in foreign markets, particularly North America, Britain and northern Europe, where drinkers actively seek out new brews.

And the beers are also available in more than 60 Dublin pubs at this stage, including the incomparable Stag's Head, Eamonn Doran's, the Palace Bar and the brewery's local - the Cobblestone in North King Street. So, if you are down the local and you can't decide between Bud, Heineken and Carlsberg, try a Revolution, a Beckett's or a D'Arcy's Stout. I've been a committed cider drinker since my youth, I wouldn't touch any larger out of the taps in Ireland. And I thought the stuff was gorgeous.