Within four years, nine out of 10 beers sold in the take-home market will be lagers. A year later than that, ale sales will be nearly three-quarters down on where they were in 1980. For the last eight years, he says, brewers had effectively wasted over £500 million of marketing cash on ales when the category had been in decline and lagers had thrived.

The brewer was Coors Brewers, and the executive was its marketing director Mark Hunter who said that from now on all its marketing efforts would go behind three big lagers: Coors Light, Grolsch, and Carling.

Mark Hunter is now chief executive of the company – these days known as Molson Coors UK– and this week he paid a reported £20 million to buy Sharp’s, one of the UK’s foremost regional ale brewers, whose Doom Bar brand is one of, if not the, fastest growing ale brands in the country.

This completes a considerable strategy U-turn which has seen the company launch a tidy range of speciality beers, put new investment into its Worthington ale micro-brewery at Burton-on-Trent, shift the industry’s emphasis on beer marketing away from blokey stereotypes towards female-friendliness, and give support to various campaigns and authors championing good quality beer – all praiseworthy stuff and more in the cause of moving beer forward than any of its major rivals have done.

Mark Hunter said this week that the Sharps’ acquisition represented “a great marriage of two businesses with similar values”, which may yet turn out to be true, though the bit about values clearly wasn’t seven years ago. And it’s still not clear, to me at any rate, where Molson Coors has “a wealth of experience with this type of venture”.

Given Mark Hunter’s recent commitment to good beer – which has outstripped that of any of his major rivals – it’s possible to view his previously-held views as simply fronting a party line he didn’t agree with at the time. Or maybe he’s just changed his mind, which happens. After all, cask ale was at a low of 12.7% of the beer market in 2004, but grew rapidly to hold 15.2% over the next five years, and still seems to have more to come, so it’s a compelling case.

At the same time, supermarket shelves have seen an expanding array of bottled ales squeezing the space given to the mass-produced lagers that Mark Hunter said would take over back in 2004. Of course, in responding to such market changes, Hunter is doing what he gets paid for, but what’s disappointing is to see national brewers simply following trends rather than leading them.

The cask/bottled ale boom of the last decade has happened through the efforts of progressive regionals and ambitious independents micros, not because of the majors – Molson Coors included. AB-Inbev’s launch of a Stella Artois cider this week, is another example of this – and in all probability Stella has already missed the cider bandwagon.

Questions remain to be answered about Sharp’s. Will it be the first of many acquisitions for Molson? If so, will it follow the Greene King model of centralised production and close breweries, or Marston’s in keeping local sites open? Or will it be run a standalone brewery with an aspirant national ale brand, similar to Heineken’s Caledonian and Deuchar’s IPA? Or will it end up selling it as quickly as it bought it, as Heineken/S&N did with Theakston.

You also have to wonder how many more people would have been enthused about cask ale by now if, instead of turning its back on ale in 2004, Coors had poured the £20 million its now spending on Sharp’s into developing its ale portfolio?

I’ve already had a sneak preview tasste of the beer, which is a fuller-bodied and fruitier take on proper Stella, and is made with a grain mix of malted and raw barley with some maize, and includes coriander and orange peel in the recipe.

It’s not the greatest beer in the world, but it’s a long way off being the worst as well, though that’s presuamably not going to prevent it getting more than its fair share of stick, given the big volume lager stable it comes from.

The beer was condemned by many reviewers before they’d even had a chance to have a sip because the word “black” is a reference not to its colour – actually a slightly deeper gold than “normal” Stella – but a bit of marketing decoration designed to suggest quality, a bit like Smirnoff Black in vodka.

Personally, I can’t help thinking that the brand will live or die on the popularity of its inevitable bar call. It’s got to be known as “a pint of Cilla”, surely?

It’d be fair to say the debate became heated but wrong to suggest that at any point it was in danger of spilling over into an orgy of drink-fuelled mindless violence (© the Daily Mail).

It was a scene that might have graced any night out in a British pub for the past couple of hundred years.

And then do you know what someone said? “Anyway, let’s change the subject. Have you been to see Sex & The City II yet?” In other words, stop talking about things that fundamentally infringe on the right of people to go about their lawful business without reasonable impediment, and tittle-tattle about something utterly trivial and far less interesting.

Maybe it’s harsh, but it’s the sort of complacent attitude that led to the right-on middle classes putting up with the worst excesses of New Labour for over a decade and accepting the ultimately unfounded confidence of the financial world that led us into the worst economic crisis for more than half a century.

Where was I? Oh yes, pubs. If you can’t talk about serious subjects in the pub, where can you? Pubs and the social environment they nurture have been inspiring Britain’s great thinkers for generations.

Francis Crick and James Watson first revealed they’d discovered the structure of DNA in the Eagle in Cambridge. Hanging around in the Canonbury Tavern in north London inspired George Orwell’s notion of the ideal pub, the Moon Under Water. William Hazlitt, Virginia Wolff, Charles Dickens, Byron, William Blake and many others chewed the fat in London hostelries, with their contemporary equivalents of Cheryl Cole’s marriage presumably not high on the agenda.

Thomas Paine wrote some of the Rights of Man in the Angel and the Red Lion in Islington. What would he have thought if someone had said: “Quit your scribbling Thomas and tell us whether Danielle or Sophie should be Dorothy.”

One thing more irritating than pub customers telling you to stop talking about important stuff in pubs, is pub owners that do. I’m never more dismayed in the course of my work, than when I interview publicans who say they don’t allow talk about religion or politics in their bar. And I’ve met a few. Election night must have been rivetting in their hostelries.

If people want to talk about Sex & the Chuffing City that’s up to them – I couldn’t give a monkeys. But there are enough things we’re not allowed to do around pubs and drinking already, so please let me have a conversation about stuff that matters if I and someone I’m with wants to.

It’s what pubs are for.