There are a few up in the North East that do great beers. Matfen High House being my favourite great beer, followed by Allendale Brewery. The Hadrian Border Brewery was indeed one of 2 micro breweries that have merged like the ones you mention in this thread morddwyd.

The thing is the North East is famous for brewing. Newcastle Brown Ale is now brewed in Yorkshire !!!! After moving production from it's home site to Gateshead and taking over the Federation Brewery, the Heineken group closed that brewery as well ending large scale production on Tyneside. Although it was probably a bad thing at the time, and loads of people lost their jobs, it has allowed the micro breweries to flourish. Indeed the ones mentioned above make better beer than anything that the Heineken group churn out as an excuse for beer, IE Fosters, John Smiths and the brewed in Yorkshire, Newcastle Brown Ale.

There used to be a small brewery local tome called Gales they made my favourite bitter called HSB (Horndeen special bitter) they were bought out by fullers and the brewery in Horndeen closed and the production moved to near Brighton. Fullers said that the recipe for HSB has not changed but it is not as nice because of the water being used, George Gale first built his brewery where he did because of a natural spring.

As they slowly morph in to yet another Diageo, so another enterprising microbrewery will start up and inject the passion that has been clinically stripped out of the product by the big boys striving for uniformity.

Or so they tell me when I read the marketing spiel.

... the quickest way to get barred from a microbrewery / pub ... is to order several yards-of-ale.