December: Pre-flight Pints, Posh People in Pubs & the Desi Delights of NW8
A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs
Smoke Signals
If you made a list of London’s five most important breweries, who’d be on it? Fuller’s, certainly. The Kernel, equally certainly. Camden and Beavertown, very likely. Meantime? Possibly. Five Points, Signature, Wild Card, Sambrook’s: you could make a case for all of them, and about a dozen others too.
One name you might not consider is Big Smoke, and with good reason. It’d be odd, surely, to include a brewery based outside the capital, without a major presence east of Hammersmith. Wouldn’t it?
Well, maybe not. Look at it this way: when you arrive at or leave Heathrow, London’s main airport, you’re very likely to pass one of their pubs, in Terminals Two, Three and Five. The former (Big Smoke Taphouse & Kitchen) can be found after security, the latter two (The Oceanic, the Globe) before.
The brewery also has a pub at Luton Airport. A lot of people from across the world have drunk, and will drink, Big Smoke’s beer when visiting London. Along with Fuller’s, this is the brewery that provides the first and last impressions many visitors get of our city. That makes them important.
I went to the Taphouse this summer, en route to Washington DC - and, in a fit of journalistic rigour, I jumped on the Elizabeth Line to Heathrow late last month to recce the other two. The Oceanic, it’s fair to say, is a bit tucked away, in Heathrow’s least appealing terminal - but The Globe is definitely not. It couldn’t really be more prominent, dominating the airy departures hall at Terminal Five, gaudily advertising the possibility of a cold drink before the soul-sapping chore of putting your liquids in little plastic bags and removing all metal from your person.
I was there in time for a Friday lunchtime pint (Big Smoke Electric Eye, £6.90). The pub was perhaps a third full, but felt busier thanks to the decor - angular tiling on floor and walls - plus TV screens showing football, huge posters for ‘Flight Mode’ (a pilsner only available at the airport), and staff hurrying here and there with food and drinks. There was big-name beer as well as Big Smoke, and a hail fellow, ‘would you like some crisps with that’ sort of welcome. It’s a shiny and confident place, the sort of pub-cum-diner that proliferates at major airports.
So who are Big Smoke, and how did they become so significant? The story begins in Surbiton, at a handsome Victorian pub called The Antelope, not far from the River Thames. Big Smoke Brew Co was established here in 2014 by James Morgan and Richard Craig, with Nick Blake - a genial Kiwi (is there any other kind?) - in charge of the beer. In 2018, they moved to the current site in Esher, Surrey, just beyond Greater London’s boundary, in search of more space.
Brewing, though, is only the second most important thing about Big Smoke. This business is built on boozers. Morgan - whose dad Dick has run pubs around London for decades - met Craig when he hired him to work at Shillibeers, on the Caledonian Road, in 2001. They went on to take charge of The North Pole in Islington, one of the city’s first craft-beer focused pubs. They are steeped in pubs, with contacts most brewery owners would kill for.
That’s how they’ve accumulated a pub estate numbering 13 (not including airport pubs, or their taproom). The first five are leased from Greene King, the latter eight from Punch. These pubs tend to be in London’s leafier suburbs - Harpenden, Berkhamsted - with a few outliers, including The Prince of Wales in Hammersmith.
How have they afforded it? 46-year-old Craig insists this hasn’t been achieved through venture capital cash; he and Morgan still own 65 percent of the business, with the rest held by a silent partner. A couple more pubs will be added early next year, he says.
270 people in all are now employed by the company. Just five of those are on the brewing staff, based on an industrial estate in Esher, an affluent corner of an affluent county. This is where the focus is beginning to shift. In January they hired Jenn Merrick as managing director, to oversee the brewing business. She is tasked with tidying up how the company goes about making and distributing its beer, in particular by creating clear financial controls, a job tackled in tandem with ex-Beavertown colleague Sarah Elkins.
It’s a very smart hiring. Regular visitors to Beavertown during Merrick’s time there (as I was) will know how much of the brewing side she controlled; since then she’s been in huge demand as a consultant all over the place, even as her own project - Earth Station - has been stymied by bureaucratic flip-flopping. She’s a natural problem solver.
Big Smoke, she says, is on the cusp of a period of brewing growth, taking it from 10,500 hectolitres this year (around 20 percent of it cask, and excellent too: seek out Dark Wave Porter) to a potential annual output of 50,000, similar to Beavertown’s production on their old Tottenham site when she was there.
There’s a lot that needs to be done before that can happen, of course, and the current economic situation means no company can be totally sure of its future, but the signs are promising. Big Smoke could be landing in pubs all over London, and perhaps in your top five, soon.
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Dodo battles against extinction event
The Dodo in Hanwell is one of London’s best micropubs, so when owner Lucy Do talks about the problems hospitality is facing, it’s worth listening.
Do joined the Hospo Demo protest at Parliament in November (above, with Andy Parker, owner of Elusive Brewing in Wokingham), an attempt by the world of hospitality to get the government to engage properly with the huge issues they’re facing. Already businesses are beginning to close; even at The Dodo, a company run in a “very risk averse” way, with no debt, times are tough. Visitor numbers are not back to pre-Pandemic levels, and there’s no longer any rhyme or reason as to when the pub is busy or not - which makes staffing decisions tough. On top of that, the huge rise in energy costs is leaving many operators facing disaster, Do says.
The Dodo is not at immediate risk, but it may need to increase prices. Do feels that hospitality must be more honest with customers when talking about the problem they’re facing. “We’re really good at putting on a brave face, but it’s bleak out there,” she adds.
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Desi Pub of the Month: Three Falcons, St Johns Wood
David Jesudason, author of the soon-to-be-published Desi Pubs, has kindly agreed to contribute a ‘Desi Pub of the Month’ to London Beer City. Here’s the first:
‘What’s a Desi Pub?’ I get asked this question a lot and I usually say it’s a British-Indian pub where the landlord has stamped their cultural imprint on it whether that be food, drink or events, such as bhangra or even kabaddi. It’s a definition that means a Wetherspoons doesn’t suddenly become a Desi Pub if they hire a manager of Indian origin. In truth if you really want to know what a Desi Pub is then I recommend visiting one and there’s plenty in London and some you might have walked past on numerous occasions.
The Three Falcons (nearest Tube Edgware Road) in St John’s Wood is the perfect example. It’s run by the impossibly young Zora Singh, who is 20 years old, and has a team of chefs turning out some of the best Indian food in the country. Maybe even the world – Singh’s father runs a restaurant in Delhi called Wok in the Clouds which is very famous for its Murgh Makhani (Butter Chicken), but because of the quality of the ingredients in the UK even Indians claim it’s better at the Falcons. The pub used to be the Richmond Arms, which was falling into disrepair, and this is one of the best characteristics of a Desi Pub: taking over an ailing business and totally rejuvenating it.
David’s book, Desi Pubs, comes out in May. Pre-order it here.
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Christmas, Time of Good Beer
If you’re struggling to get in the Christmas spirit, struggle no more. The London Christmas Beer Festival is back, and this time it’s bigger. The 2022 event takes place at Tobacco Dock, with 50 breweries, plus spirits, cocktails, cider, snacks and more, next Friday and Saturday.
In terms of what to drink, you can’t really go wrong. I’d recommend London classics like The Kernel and Partizan, plus lagers from Braybrooke and Hofbrau’s Winterzwickl, which will be available in the Roadhouse Vault.
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Two Pubs, One City
A regular series about pubs and modern London
The Star Tavern, Belgravia, and the Buckingham Arms, Westminster
Six Englishmen come barrelling into The Star Tavern. With my back to the door, I can hear them before I see them, barking merrily away, demob happy, work finished at 3pm on a Friday afternoon. They gather behind me at the small U-shaped bar, where a solitary barman (“Be with you in a minute…”) is just about staying on top of things.
“What are we on?” the first to the bar asks the others. Two London Pride, Two Asahi, Two Neck Oil.
If that’s a satisfyingly symmetrical selection, a summation of London beer at the moment, then The Star aspires to be a little more timeless. The drinks menu, sat on each table, has a slightly over-cooked preamble reflecting on the pub’s popularity with London’s 1960s criminal underworld (The Great Train Robbers? Find me the London pub they didn’t drink in), Punch cartoons cover the walls, an open fire entices and reassures.
But the most English thing of all - and we’re talking upper-crust English - is the shabbiness. Posh people dislike things that are too fancy, that try too hard. The Star doesn’t try too hard. Floorboards creek, the carpets are a couple of stages beyond careworn, chairs and tables don’t fit in the space they’ve been allotted.
London Pride (£5.20) thrives in this ambiance. (My pint is in good condition, lively enough, and bitter). It’s a key part of The Star’s heritage offering (“It’s so good, we never run out,” promises the drinks menu) and the reason I’m here, on the last Friday in November: this is one of only two London pubs that have appeared in every edition of the Good Beer Guide, which published its 50th iteration in October.
There’s something both natural and surprising about how English The Star is. Belgravia, land of embassies, is at least as international in flavour as any other central London neighbourhood, but most of the people in here are English. There’s one American woman (I can tell because she hasn’t eaten all her chips), but pretty much every other customer is English, and lots of them are drinking cask ale.
There’s a good mix of generations, too. When I step out of the front of this handsome pub (set in a mews, the yellow brick facade is darkened by age; at the top, the name is spelt out in solid Victorian type, crested by a beautiful pale blue autumn London sky) a group of younger customers are saying a drawn-out goodbye: “I’m going to head,” one tells the others, plummily and finally.
Me too. South-east down Belgrave Mews is the back of the Austrian Embassy, austere in brown concrete, the first of many as I wander eastward. Spain, Norway and Italy follow. Then, suddenly, embassy London gives way to tourist London, Victoria, a land of unappealing but invariably full pubs. A Routemaster containing middle-aged women eating afternoon tea rolls past on Buckingham Palace Road.
The Buckingham Arms is on Petty France, tucked away from the tourist hordes, opposite the back of Wellington Barracks. This is the other London pub to have been in every Good Beer Guide, 15 minutes’ walk from The Star. It’s attractive but, to my eyes, odd. From the front it looks like half has been chopped off, and the main room inside is all nooks and unlikely angles. The ceiling is all over the place height-wise.
The beer, though, is very good. I ignore Beavertown - it really has become the Bass of modern London, a must-have for any major operator - and Camden Hells in favour of Young’s Bitter (£5.30), or Ordinary as it was still called when I first drank it more than 20 years’ ago. It is close to perfect, zippy and with a pronounced hop bitterness.
There’s a classic pub scene playing out as I sit down towards the back of the main room. A young woman in an Ecuador football shirt is struggling to get one of the many TVs to work. Her struggles attract the barman. He jerks the controller towards the screen as he presses a button, in the hope that the TV will understand he means business and stop mucking about. It doesn’t. Another young man, in chef’s whites, has a go, but with less conviction. Same result. The young woman sits, disconsolate, with her chin resting on her hands. (Ecuador drew 1-1 with the Netherlands).
This is more like modern London. The Portuguese group on the table next to mine have just finished lunch, a very late lunch, and there’s a thick fug of fried food in the air. Two of them have drunk Estrella, two Coke. At the end, one goes to the bar to pay; his phone, left on the table, keeps ringing, ‘Born to be Wild’.
As I leave I poke my head in the next room. Actually, it’s more a corridor than a room, with space for customers along one side. That’s not what’s remarkable, though. There’s a large, wall-sized painting of a smiling John Young (who ran Young's Brewery for 40 years, dying the same week the brewery closed in 2006) featuring a 1980s (I think - see image) pump clip. There’s also a fairly involved explanation of the brewing process, as it was at Young’s.
It feels like stepping back in time. Pleasing as it is to be reminded of John Young, an indomitable champion of cask ale, I wonder how many customers will know who he is. Who is this display aimed at? Maybe Young’s is happy for customers to believe it still makes beer. It doesn’t, but then Fuller’s - the pub company that owns The Star - doesn’t either. Perhaps that’s one reason why both are looking backwards, in their own way.
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It’s Shirking Time
Speaking of the Good Beer Guide, I met up with a remarkable man called Martin Taylor recently, at the marvellous Shirker’s Rest in New Cross. Martin has been to every pub in the 2022 Guide - all 4500 of them - which is why I was interviewing him for this article in the Daily Telegraph. After you’ve read that, visit the Shirker’s; great cask ale and huge Slab crisps, which have to be seen to be believed.
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Cologne for Christmas
Xmas Ales are not such a staple in the UK as they are in Belgium, which is a shame/not a shame depending on how you feel about Xmas spices, which tend to feature heavily. Orbit, the Walworth Road’s No 1 brewery, are aiming to turn things around with a festive version of Nico, their delightful Kolsch, called Jolly Saint Nico, made with nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice.
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Dark Clouds, Happy Fans
Asahi decided to close Sussex’s Dark Star Brewery in November - a decision which has put some good people out of work, including head brewer Henry Kirk. A kick in the guts, especially as just a week earlier he was celebrating Dark Star’s revival of Gale’s Prize Old Ale, a project he has guided, and which, it appears, has been very successful. Online sales have been good, while the London launch saw the capital’s beer cognoscenti celebrate the continued existence of one of England’s genuinely unique beers.
Among them was John Keeling, Kirk’s former boss at Fuller’s and the man who kept the last Gale’s batch of Prize Old Ale squirrelled away in Chiswick, thereby making this latest revival possible. As ever, Keeling was not short on opinions - specifically, about why CAMRA & SIBA should be campaigning for a cask-ale tax break - but he was initially speechless when a beer-loving Australian journalist enthusiastically asked him to join him in a selfie. Ever the professional, though, he quickly composed himself.
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Bearing Up
The Elizabeth Line is already reshaping London in interesting and unexpected ways: craft beer, for so long hard to find the other side of Pimlico, is making a concerted push westwards. After Forest Road’s Quiet Night Inn launched in Westbourne Park in November, the Craft Beer Co has opened The Bear a stone’s throw from Paddington Station. It mixes the best of the other Craft venues - a huge range of beer, breweriana on the walls - with a more modern feel. My first impressions are they’ve got this one right, but time shall tell.
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Justice, at Last
Finally, here’s some excellent news. The Old Justice, a Grade-II listed ‘Brewer’s Tudor’ pub in Bermondsey, has been restored to its original 1930s-style state after Southwark Council forced the owners to repair damage they made in 2017, when they removed the bar and timber panelling. The pub, which featured briefly in the video for Paul McCartney’s 1984 smash ‘No More Lonely Nights’ (and the terrible film that came from, ‘Give My Regards to Broad Street’), is currently being marketed for public house use.
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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. If you’ve got a story or an observation, contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Thanks for reading.