London’s history is dripping with beer. Alehouses have been present in the capital since Roman times and the impure state of London water always guaranteed that beer was in constant demand.

You can trace this history by visiting buildings like the Old Truman Brewery, or examining the codestone lions on Westminster Bridge, which originally graced the entrance of the Old Red Lion Brewery on the South Bank.

Although there are few survivors of London’s original brewing industry, a new generation of artisan brewers has taken up the mantle and there has never been a better time to visit London pubs to taste the best of what the capital produces.

CAMRA’s London: City of Beer is a new website aiming to enhance your experience of beer in London. At the launch, we learned that the city now has 24 breweries that are creating a phenomenal range of exciting brews. Many of them do guided tours and tastings: try Sambrooks in Battersea or the Fuller’s Griffin Brewery in Chiswick.

Fortunately for those who can’t make it down to the breweries themselves, many London pubs offer a wide selection of real ales and other London beers. From smooth malty Porters made at Meantime in Greenwich to intensely hoppy pale ales from Bermondsey’s The Kernel, there is something to suit everyone’s taste.

London also has a fantastic range of beer-related events and you can search for upcoming festivals, tastings and walks on the City of Beer site www.londoncityofbeer.org.uk. A particular highlight will be the Great British Beer Festival, which runs from 7 to 11 August at Olympia and offers over 800 different beers.

This morning I headed down to a sneak preview of Greenwich’s newest visitor attraction. Discover Greenwich is a fantastic mix of museum, exhibition, education centre, tourist information centre, café, and brewery.

Its different titbits of information, entertainment, interaction and refreshments reflect the diversity of Greenwich itself perfectly.

As a destination, Greenwich is also a potentially confusing mix of Tudor palace, old hospital, art gallery, observatory, architectural treasure and naval college. What the new exhibition-and-more at Discover Greenwich does so well is bring all the different bits of this amazing heritage site together into one manageable room.

I really liked the way traditional ways of displaying attraction information were mixed with interactive objects to twist, build, play with, doodle, watch, listen to, take away, and try on! Discover Greenwich is certainly a classy opener to one of the world’s heritage sites, and a great way to introduce all the different aspects of Greenwich in one space.

Once you’ve tasted a particularly tempting piece of Greenwich’s diverse platter of historical, architectural and cultural offerings, you can head out into Maritime Greenwich and explore your selected morsel further.

Or, if you’re particularly interested in Greenwich’s gastronomical past, there’s the fantastic Old Brewery, run by the Meantime Brewing Company, promising an “astonishing range of beers”. The experimental micro-brewery is going to create historical and modern beers, including recreations of recipes drunk at the time of Henry VIII, and avant-garde beers, such as Mojito Pilsners and Juniper Pale Ales. Like the sound of those!

Discover Greenwich opens to visitors on 23 March. Check out more images from Discover Greenwich on flickr. Give us your feedback in the comments below!