It's always good to see an old friend who has looked the Grim Reaper in the face and lived to tell the tale. Worthington's White Shield is a classic Burton India Pale Ale that was once a mainstay of the Bass empire but fell from grace.
Back in the 1960s it accounted for 25,000 barrels a year. That's an astonishing amount of beer when you consider it is available only in bottle and is bottle-fermented with live yeast as well, which some in both the on and off-trades find too pernickety to handle.
Bass lost interest in the brand in the 1990s. It was moved from its home in Burton to Bass subsidiaries in Sheffield and Birmingham. Those breweries closed and the beer ended up at King & Barnes in Horsham, West Sussex. When K&B also trundled off to the great mash tun in the sky it seemed we would lose this historic beer for good.
Then, to everyone's surprise but no little joy, White Shield returned to Burton and has been brewed there for several years. It has been given a new design that stresses the importance of the heritage of India Pale Ale and the overall package is appealing, especially to those who come across the beer for the first time.
What is remarkable about its renaissance is that White Shield is part of the Coors' portfolio. When the American giant took over the former Bass plants in Burton it is a safe bet that most of its directors had never come across a bottle-fermented pale ale in their lives. Its cause was helped when a woman executive from Coors visited Burton and declared that White Shield was one of the best beers she had ever drunk.
Steve Wellington brews the beer today in the small micro plant that forms the Museum Brewery within the Coors complex. The site includes the magnificent Museum of Brewing that traces the history of beer making from the dawn of civilisation.
Last week, in a small ceremony in Burton, Steve and his colleagues celebrated the production of the one-millionth bottle of White Shield since it returned to Burton.
Generously, they presented me with a gold-painted bottle of the beer, which now enjoys pride of place among my various tankards and celebration bottles.
White Shield traces its history back to 1829 when Burton took over from London as the major producer of beers for the India trade.
Burton had once brewed vast amounts of sweet brown ales for export to the Baltic and Russia but that market was lost to the breweries during the Napoleonic wars, when the French blockaded the ports that were vital to Britain's export trade.
Desperate for new business, the likes of Allsopp, Bass and Worthington in Burton responded to a call from the East India Company to supply it with a refreshing ale for troops and civil servants stationed in the sub-continent. The brewers were able to make use of the hard, salty waters of the Trent Valley to fashion beers that were paler than porters, stouts and brown ales and which were heavily hopped to withstand a three-month sea journey to Bombay and Calcutta.
When IPAs were released on the British market they rapidly became cult beers. As they were heavy with alcohol, weaker versions known simply as pale ale were produced for the domestic trade and they became the forerunners of the style dubbed bitter early in the 20th century.
While there are some draught beers called pale ale, the style is today thought of as primarily a bottled beer. For years, beer lovers considered White Shield, with its rich, fruity and hoppy character, to be the finest of the breed.
Today Steve Wellington, with the enthusiastic backing of Coors, aims to build volumes of White Shield to 1,500 to 2,000 barrels a year. Sales have increased by 70% since Coors brought the beer back to Burton and most encouraging it is increasingly popular with young people.
The high point of my visit to Coors was a glass of draught White Shield, which is exclusive to the bar in the Museum of Brewing.
This is an experience not to be missed, a true taste of old Burton.