Coverage of London's craft beer scene tends to focus on pubs in the east and north of the capital, neglecting the area where most visitors end up: central London. So here's our guide to the best boozers in Soho, Euston, Covent Garden and Clerkenwell

The Old Coffee House, Soho

At first glance, this Beak Street boozer is indistinguishable from its Soho competitors. Its 18th-century interior is decorated with tourist-titillating vintage tat. Almost inaudibly, pop and R&B music nag on in the background while, on one wall, a muted TV relays the Sky Sport News headlines. However, it has one crucial thing going in its favour: it is run by Brodie's. The Leyton microbrewery is one of the capital's most innovative breweries and the Coffee House showcases a large range of its fine beers. For Brodie's boldest brews look to the keg fonts where, among coffee and bacon flavoured beers, I opted for the Hoxton Special IPA (half £2.90). It was immense: a great big gob-stopper of pineapple, tropical fruits and assertive bitterness. Brodie's have a second pub in Covent Garden, the Cross Keys.

Incidentally, if you want to eat in Soho but don't want to forgo good ale, then the Beak Street branch of burger joint Byron serves five draught beers (two "Byron exclusives" from Camden Town Brewery), as well as flavour-packed UK/US craft beers from breweries such as Ska and Bear Republic (bottles from £3.75). The house beers at chicken restaurant, Whyte & Brown, meanwhile, are brewed by Macclesfield's terrific Red Willow. The pale ale (half £3) is a typical Red Willow beer, very clean and floral atop a light caramel base. Whyte & Brown's bottled menu also features such breweries as Pressure Drop, Moor and Tiny Rebel (beers from £5.).

• Pint from £3.80. 49 Beak Street W1, 020-7437 2197, @BrodiesBeers

The Queen's Head, King's Cross

The Queens Head pub, London

Located on a quiet residential street near King's Cross, the hops and pump clips that decorate this Victorian boozer serve notice of its commitment to good beer. Three cask pumps will please the Camra purists, while the keg lines offer rather more exotic beers. From a choice that included Kernel's Table Beer, Harviestoun's Schiehallion lager and Siren's Berliner sour, I opted for the Thornbridge/Sierra Nevada collaboration, Twin Peaks (half £2.95), a sweet, sherberty west coast pale, with a pleasant, lingering bitterness. The "ever-expanding bottle list" is similarly weird and wonderful, taking in, as it does, smoked porters, oatmeal stouts, black IPAs and saisons, from the likes of London's Five Points and Brew By Numbers, as well US trend-setters Brooklyn and Redhook.

• Pint from £3.80. 66 Acton Street WC1, 020-7713 5772, queensheadlondon.com

Holborn Whippet, Bloomsbury

The Holborn Whippet pub, London

A bar spreading the good beer gospel in the previously barren lands of Bloomsbury, you will find the Holborn Whippet on the kitsch, Italianate Sicilian Avenue. There is little to the space: it's essentially a series of bare, beige-washed, interconnected rooms, where all the focus is on the (slightly confusing) chalkboard rotunda behind the bar that lists 15 draught beers, with tasting notes. On a busy afternoon, despite the crowds (of largely vertical drinkers), a lone barman was coping ably, dispensing advice and tasters with speed and good humour. A hazy half of Siren's Amarillo Calypso sour (£2.20) was, on a sunny day, the perfect lemony refresher. Kudos to the Whippet for keeping its prices down (seven beers were under £4 a pint), and for showcasing a couple of – these days, underrated – German beers, notably Köstritzer's black lager and a Rothaus wheat beer. The Holborn Whippet also has a sister bar, the Pelt Trader in The City.

• Pint from £3.20. 25-29 Sicilian Avenue WC1, 020-3137 9937, holbornwhippet.com

The Lyric, Soho

Lyric Soho, London

This corner bar off Shaftesbury Avenue in the heart of London's Theatreland, has been given a retro Victorian makeover – it's very artfully distressed; there is a lot of antique market bric-a-brac – but its beer selection is bang up-to-date. On this visit, the 15-strong cask and keg list was a roll-call of big-hitting, new wave breweries from London (Kernel, Redwell, Camden Town) and beyond (Bristol Beer Factory, Otley). A half of citrusy Progressive Pale from Cumbria's Fell Brewery (£2) was at the sedate end of all this. A compact selection of bottles adds further depth, although the import choices are rather obvious (Anchor Steam, Cooper's etc).

On the downside – and this was a common problem in central London pubs – I could have done without the naff background music. I don't want to listen to Imagination or the Rolling Stones with my pint. The service at the bar was also brusque and largely mute, despite me asking a couple of questions. The beer range isn't as impressive (five somewhat conservative cask ales, plus a small, discerning collection of craft bottles from London breweries such as Meantime, Redchurch and the amazing, Partizan), but the welcome was much warmer at the nearby Queen's Head's (pint from £3.80).

• Pint from £3.50. 37 Great Windmill Street W1, 020-7434 0604, lyricsoho.co.uk

Euston Tap, Euston

Photograph: Alamy

When the Euston Tap first opened, in one of two Grade II-listed stone lodges which once guarded the historic Euston station entrance (the other is a specialist cider bar), it seemed like a boon for rail travellers. In fact, the popularity of the Tap – one of London's best beer bars – goes way beyond commuters. It is owned by a northern company and there tends to be a slight, entirely justifiable bias to cutting-edge northern breweries – such as Thornbridge, Magic Rock, Summer Wine andMarble – across its 28 cask/keg lines and 150 bottles. Small London breweries such as Beavertown and Kernel are well-represented, and there is little you can't find here, from obscure Belgian saisons to the unusually good Czech pils, Bernard. The Tap does get packed, but the service is swift and the well-informed staff retain their composure.

Incidentally, while we're at Euston, it is worth mentioning the pub that, long before the Tap opened, offered real ale solace to weary travellers, The Bree Louise (pint from £4). It is ultra-traditional, the walls decorated with pump-clips and many beers gravity-dispensed from barrels stacked around the bar. Craft fanatics are unlikely to be that wowed by the Bree's focus on staid, old school brewers (for instance, Brains, Moorhouses, Wadworth, Wychwood) but it is an institution, and one worth a pint on any local pub crawl.

• Pint from £3.60. 190 Euston Road NW1, 020-3137 8837, eustontap.com

The Harp, Covent Garden

The Harp pub, London Photograph: Facebook

Nearby Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square may be mobbed with tourists, but this former Camra pub of the year remains an oasis of quiet, conversation, good beer and real cider. Its 10 cask ales include two permanent beers from East Sussex's excellent Dark Star and a few from further afield. However, the main focus is on London breweries, both established (Sambrooks, Twickenham Ales) and hip, young upstarts: for instance, Weird Beard or Late Knights, whose spritzy pale Rebel Lion, (half £2), was in decent form. You will drink-in the décor, too. On a sunny day, the pub's gorgeous stained-glass frontage opens out on to the street, while, within, the walls are lined with Victorian portraits and, above the bar, a monumental edifice of pump-clips.

• Pint from £3.50. 47 Chandos Place WC2, 020-7836 0291, harpcoventgarden.com

The Draft House, Fitzrovia

The Drafthouse pub, Goode Street, London

Not one for the pub purist, this loud (the XX, quality reggae), stripped-back corner site feels more like a bar than a traditional boozer. The small Draft House chain takes its beer seriously, however. The staff were keen to chat and offer suggestions. They clearly love their beer. The bar's 12 taps and a vast bottled selection run the gamut. Cool imports from breweries such as Rogue, Odell's, Flying Dog and Mikkeller rub shoulders with Britain's best new breweries. Beavertown's bracingly dry, almost gooseberry sharp Gamma Ray (half £2.65), was the pick at the pumps. Note: although prices are steep (a fiver is pretty much the starting point for anything on keg), the Draft House offers one discount cask beer a day – Alechemy's Starlaw was £2.75 on this visit. This gives chippy northerners the opportunity to a crack a joke I imagine they have heard a hundred times behind the bar: "£2.75? But why is it so expensive?"

• Pint from around £2.75. 43 Goodge Street W1, 020-7323 9361, drafthouse.co.uk

Craft Beer Co, Clerkenwell

The Craft Beer Co, Clerkenwell, London

It is not as central as the Euston Tap – you don't see many tourists on Leather Lane market – but if you are a fully paid-up craft beer enthusiast, then this Clerkenwell bar (a big, open room with an ornate mirrored and wooden-carved ceiling), is a must visit. (And on 9 May they will be opening a bar in Covent Garden.) With 37 beers on draught and 300 bottles in the fridges it is, quite simply, the malt mother lode, the HQ of hops. That Thornbridge's Chiron and Magic Rock's 7.4%% IPA hop-bomb, Cannonball, are two of its regular "house favourites" speaks volumes about the seriousness of this endeavour. It was heartening, on this fly-past, to see so many northern breweries (Black Jack, Marble, Anarchy) represented on cask. If you crave something more exotic then the keg line-up will leave you reeling – possibly literally – with its range of rare beers from, say, Spanish craft outfit, Naparbier; Swedes Omnipollo; or Belgian brewing mavericks, De Struise. And that's before you have even looked at the bottle menu.

Of course, the Craft Beer Co also hosts various irregular beer launches, meet-the-brewer events, tap-takeovers and mini, themed beer festivals. By way of contrast, you may also be interested in the nearby Jerusalem Tavern, a small, atmospheric pub full of historical detail – the building dates to the 18th century – that acts as the brewery tap for Suffolk's St Peter's.

• Pint from £3.45. 82 Leather Lane EC1, 020-7834 9988, thecraftbeerco.com

Old Red Cow, Smithfields

The Old Red Cow pub, London

If you can't enjoy a pint unless it is served amid chic, charcoal grey furnishings and quietly pumping house music, then this City-side craft beer bar – full of suits sloping off work early on my visit – will be just the ticket. As a venue, it felt a little smooth to me, but there is no denying the quality of the beer served across four cask and 10 keg taps, featuring such talented micros as Wild Beer, Kernel and Camden Town. A supplementary bottled list is relatively short but intelligently compiled, its eye-catching items ranging from Sierra Nevada's always revelatory Torpedo Extra IPA, and beers from little known Norwich aces Grain, to Harviestoun's legendary, whisky cask-aged Ola Dubh. Faced with all this choice, I perversely opted for the Old Red Cow's pils, brewed by Portobello. Dry, lemony-sour with a bristling bitterness, it is a lager that reminds that you can never write off any beer style.

• Pint from £4. 71/72 Long Lane EC1, 020-7726 2595, theoldredcow.com

The Exmouth Arms, Clerkenwell

Exmouth Arms pub, London

This airy, open-plan bar retains its green, glazed-brick tiled exterior from its days as a Courage pub. Its beer range, however, is fiercely cutting-edge. Thirteen keg and four cask pumps dispense a stylistically and geographically diverse range from – to give you just a few examples - London Fields Brewery, Liverpool Craft Co, the Italian Brewfist and Danish Mikkeller. The extensive bottled beer menu also includes a notable section of hard-to-find barley wines, like Stone's Old Guardian, and what the menu describes as "bombers". That is, large bottles of strong and often unorthodox beers, such as Thornbridge's Bracia, a 10% honey beer brewed to an Iron Age recipe. All of which makes it galling that on a warm evening so many pints of Estrella Damm were being handed across the bar – when you have such quality behind the bar, that has got to hurt. Nevertheless, the staff were all smiles.

The people who own the Exmouth are also affiliated with Camden Town Brewery, and their company, Barworks, has a variety of venues where good beer is paramount. In central London, its Covent Garden Diner restaurant has a sound bottled list. If you are able or willing to venture out to Islington, Barworks also owns the renowned brewpub, the Earl of Essex on Danbury Street.

• Pint from £3.90. 23 Exmouth Market, 020 3551 4772; exmoutharms.com

• Travel between Manchester and London was provided by Virgin Trains

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