I agree the style of beers made "locally" is weird, but the justification for local beer, on keg at least, is that it does seem hard to transport them successfully. In the UK beers do taste best on tap when you're within about 50 miles of the brewery. I'm sure they could be transported further safely, but in practice them almost never are.
The UK beer market is quite different, especially when considering cask ale.
This beer is unpasteurised and still fermenting in the cask when it leaves the brewery! The carbonation of the beer comes from creation of CO2 during fermentation, rather than injection of CO2 post-fermentation.
This makes for a pretty unstable beer, that doesn’t travel particularly well and should be consumed reasonably quickly!
British cask ale is the most underrated beer. Amazing you can’t find it outside the UK. I have a feeling someone will make some form of it in the USA to differentiate.
Nothing like getting a proper pint of whatever is local.
I'm with GP on reliability though - I'd rather have a can of a known bitter than a local 'IPA' on tap that I don't know (and the other side of the bar doesn't care, or share a common language to decide) if is a 'proper' IPA, or one of these very pale, extremely fizzy things that seem to be in vogue and call themselves IPAs, when to me they're closer to a lager and almost any (non IPA-style) bitter would've been closer to what I expected. Sometimes I can tell from the label it will (or I fear it will, so don't try and can't say for sure) be like that, but certainly not always, and that's not always practical.
