Why would anyone drink bottled beer in a pub? Pulling off a stubby cap can hardly match the sheer theatre of a well-poured glass of beer. Only the most desperate alcoholic would neck a bottle of wine – at least not in public – so why do we drink beer this way?

For a growing band of beer aficionados in Australia, the answer is out of sheer frustration at the poor quality of tap beer. Many pubs, they complain, serve indifferent commercial lagers in dirty glasses and don’t clean their beer lines regularly. Bored, untrained bar staff frequently “pour” beer with the same care and dexterity they reserve for Coke. Contrast that with the artistry demonstrated at your local Belgian beer café, where draught Hoegaarden or Leffe is expertly poured into a sparklingly clean glass – each designed specifically for that brew.

Australian microbreweries are also bucking the trend of serving frozen lager in foggy glasses. Canberra’s famous Wig & Pen – one of the few pubs still using hand-pumps -- serves its artisan beers in tall, well-made glasses. Each glass is poured slowly and allowed to settle before being handed across the bar.

I suspect that the advent of “tasting paddles” at microbreweries across this wide, brown land is also changing public perceptions of what real beer should taste like and how it should be served.

But the battle is far from won. Kirrily Waldhorn, the editor of Beer and Brewer magazine, tells me that she usually orders bottled beer in the pub because the range and quality of bottled beer is often better than the tap beer. Her tip: ask for a wine glass so that you can pour the beer correctly.

“You do get some funny looks,” she says. “But no-one should ever drink beer directly from the bottle. For a start you’re not going to experience the full flavour spectrum – and all that gas is going straight into your stomach instead of being released in the glass.”

With the consumption of premium bottled beer surging and sales of high-volume lagers, such as VB, languishing, many publicans are no doubt thinking about how they might respond to this trend. Having tried pokies, trivia nights, happy hours and wall-to-wall plasma sports screens, is it time to reinstate beer as the signature experience in the Aussie pub? Now, that’s radical.

With a few notable exceptions (the Baden Powell in Melbourne and the Riverview in Sydney spring to mind), pubs desperately need to lift their game. And re-learning how to serve draught beer is critical. Once that happens, ordering a stubby in the pub will become obsolete – and Kirrily can abandon her wine glass forever.

Where do you stand on the bottle versus tap debate?