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Double Diamond – still working wonders?

I never tried the original Double Diamond. Production ceased some 30 years ago long before I was at legal drinking age, or indeed at the slightly lower bar (at the time) of the North-West’s mean underage drinking age. It is a beer that, until last week, existed for me only in an apocryphal pantheon – that of history’s most despised beers. Double Diamond sat with such delights as Watney’s Red Barrel and Worthington E as beers I am glad never to have been around to drink, such is the vitriol and scorn poured upon them by the people who did. The epitome of the bland, fizzy keg beers that inspired the four founders of CAMRA to stand up and start doing something about the decline in quality, traditional brewing in the UK in the early 1970s.