I arrived in Burton-on-Trent just shy of noontime and was met at the station by the affable and ageless Steve Wellington, head brewer of the White Shield Brewery, owned by MolsonCoors but producing one of the finest bottle-conditioned beers in Christendom, Worthington White Shield.

Burton is, of course, famously the home of Bass, but that horse left the stables long ago when InBev, now Anheuser-Busch InBev, bought Bass and was forced by the British competitions authorities to divest themselves of some of the latter company’s assets, including the Burton brewery, which they sold to Coors, now MolsonCoors. Coors continued to produce Bass under contract in Burton for some time following the sale, but that, too, is now but a memory and the brewery signs about town today promote not the well-known ale, but such lagers as Coors Light, Carling and Carling C2, a “mid-strength” brew of a mere 2%.

(When last I was in Burton, the Bass signs were being replaced all over by Coors signs, and local residents I spoke with were less than thrilled at the development. Those signs have, of course, been since replaced by MolsonCoors signs and ultimately accepted by the good citizens of Burton, but the effect can still be somewhat jarring to the brewing history savvy visitor.)

Lagers aside, however, and appreciating the growing market for cask- and bottle-conditioned ale in Britain and beyond, MolsonCoors has allowed Steve and his co-brewer, Jo White, to resuscitate the White Shield brand and even expand the family with a cask-conditioned Red Shield and possibly other eventual brand-mates. This pivotal development was what had brought me again to the once globally famous brewing center.

After a quick check on my accommodations for the night, Steve drove me to his shambles of a brewing office and offered me a beer I had scarcely seen since my long-ago underage drinking days, Worthington E. It’s what my high school friends and I drank at the pub when we could afford it, and prior to its rather steep decline, it was a lovely pint of ale, which I’m delighted to report it is once again. I’m told that its revival is in the cards, although under what name remains in question, since the marketers are worried about the anti-alcohol zealots drawing a connection between the historic name of the beer and the modern abbreviation of the drug ecstasy. Absurd, I know, but such are the days in which we live.

I was about three-quarters of the way through my beer when we were joined by accomplished author and British Beer Writer of the Year Pete Brown, who I had earlier beseeched via e-mail to join me in Burton from his London home. (It didn’t take much convincing, really; Pete will accept almost any excuse to revisit Burton.) After a lunch accompanied by pints of Red Shield, Pete and I left Steve to get on with his work and repaired to the old Bass Brewing Museum, which became the Coors Visitors Centre before closing completely about two years ago.

At the time of my visit, it was in the midst of a full restoration that saw it re-open May 1 as the National Brewery Centre, and a fine attraction it promises to be, as well. It will be run independently by Planning Solutions, a company specializing in such destination attractions, including London’s Vinopolis, and will be focused more broadly than before on the history of brewing in Burton and England. Although the Museum was very much still in development during my and Pete’s visit, I saw enough to convince me that it will be substantially better than it was before, and with a little time and effort, has the potential to develop into a solid tourism attraction, both domestically — London is just under two hours away by train, via Derby — and internationally.

A highlight of any future visits will be the revitalization of the Brewery Tap, a connected pub that will pour exclusive ales crafted by Steve and Jo, which alone should be enough to bring the beer hoards streaming back to Burton.

After leaving the brewery and before going for a curry with Steve, we dropped in for a couple of pints at one of my favourite pubs in the world, Coopers Tavern. Once the brewery tap for Bass, Coopers is the kind of pub for which the term “old school” is a disservice; it makes the Old School look like something out of a Flash Gordon wet dream! All casks, as many as eight at a time, are dispensed via gravity from an open area that serves as the “bar,” with as many as four ciders served the same way.

Seating in the room adjoining the bar remains fiercely hierarchical, much as it was decades if not centuries ago, with certain rows of seating on permanent reservation for specific regulars, much as the stammtisch operates in many a Bavarian beer hall. And so we stood and supped, allowing grey-haired patrons greeted uniformly by name to squeeze by in the increasingly cramped barroom — there is also a large and comfortable seating area across the hall, but no one seemed much interested in it — and it occurred to me that while the Museum will be a no doubt fascinating tour of accepted brewing history, here I was experiencing rituals unaltered for more than a century, with only the players and the ales changing as time progressed. Not brewing history, perhaps, but most certainly beer history.