SOME people will tell you they don’t like beer. Those people are wrong. Sure, that’s a bit arrogant, but it’s true.

You see, although it’s not always obvious in your typical British local, the beer spectrum is unbelievably wide. So wide, in fact, that you’d have to be really pretty damn unlucky not to like any of it.

When people say they don’t like beer, what they almost certainly mean is that they’ve not yet found a beer they like. Probably because they’ve only ever been offered a lousy lager or a boring bitter, and are ignorant of the delights that lie beyond. And that’s a bit like eating a burger from a takeaway van in town, and saying you wouldn’t like sirloin steak. Or dismissing all fruit, because you once had some cheapo tinned peaches and they were too sugary.

No, whenever people tell me they don’t like beer, I won’t have it. I get all evangelical, extolling the particular virtues of IPAs, milds, stouts and so forth, and vowing in no uncertain terms to prove the heathen wrong.

And every so often it works, and another lost soul admits that they DO like beer after all! Hurrah!

My girlfriend, quite incredulously, has just become the latest convert, finally accepting after months of cajoling that beer is worthy of a place in her world alongside cupcakes and coffee.

It was Belgian fruit beers that eventually did the trick, and as she realised the error of her ways I too realised the error of mine, in that I’ve never written about them until now.

That’s a gross oversight by me, because they’re growing in both popularity and availability in York. Ten years ago – perhaps even five – you’d have struggled to find much of a range at all, but times have changed and for the better.

Bars such as Pivní, KoKo, Brigantes and The House of the Trembling Madness have sprung up, adding a whole new dimension to the city’s drinking scene and a huge range of new beers that most people won’t have heard of but would surely enjoy.

The fruit options, be they on tap or in bottle, will seem pricey compared with others, but they’re well worth dipping your toe into (not literally, please).

Take Florisgaarden Ninkeberry (3.6 per cent, Pivní), for instance. It may have the fizzy golden appearance of a run-of-the-mill lager, but it is flavoured with passion fruit, mango, peach and apricot and tastes more like an alcoholic version of Five Alive or Um Bongo than it does a beer.

Or take Bacchus Framboise (five per cent, Brigantes), a darker beer that has the smell and colour of a good raspberry jam, and an incredible flavour to match. Or take Strawberry Früli (4.1 per cent, KoKo), a wheat beer mixed with fruit juice to create a blast of strawberry smells and flavours that would appeal to any sweet tooth.

Or, if you can’t find any of those, then take one of the countless other fruit options making their way into the pub fridges near you.

And while you’re at it, take along a non-beer-drinker. And buy them a drink. And show them what they have been missing once and for all. Before you know it, they’ll be moving on to other beer styles. And from there, of course, on to an altogether better life!

* Follow Gav at twitter.com/pintsofview for beer news and views throughout the week.