Brew Dogs

“Warning,” a printed note on the door of Travis Mooney-Evans’s West Hampstead office reads. “Dogs Running Free.”

It’s no joke. As soon as Travis opens the door, two Collie crosses - Viola, 13, and Isabella, one - bound towards me. Of the two, Isabella is by some distance the more persistent, rewarding each faint flicker of interest with leaps and licks and an insistence that we play a fetching game with her ball. Viola gives me a regulation sniff and heads off for a nap.

Travis clearly likes collies. He also loves beer, which explains why he once ran a small brewery called Hoppy Collie, one of dozens to open in London in the years between 2010 and 2015. Hoppy Collie, which existed for just over a year from the end of 2012, wasn’t ever a big name, but it was fairly typical in an era when opening a small brewery without significant financial backing (or easy route to market) seemed like a good idea in London.

In fact, Travis’s story weaves together a lot of what made that moment interesting: the do-it-yourself ethos, the American influence (Travis is from California), the preponderance of men in their thirties, the pervasive enthusiasm/naivety. “So many of my contemporaries, they were all good people, they were all super enthusiastic,” Travis, now 48, says. “But they weren’t hard-headed - the ones who were are the ones who have … well, they’ve mostly sold out by now.”

The Hoppy Collie website, still online, exhibits some of the sort of rhetoric that adorned the rise of London craft beer. Hoppy Collie’s beer was “iconoclastic and daring”, for example, and there is the assertion that “​​some beers are better suited to keg than cask”. It was a time when the only IPAs were West Coast and people (not Travis) described Best Bitter as ‘tasting like twigs’. 

Travis was smart enough to realise things weren’t going to go how he had dreamt fairly early, before he sunk too much cash into the project. Having taken a course at Brewlab in Sunderland, he established a two-hectolitre brewery in a basement under Simposio, an Italian restaurant on the Fulham Palace Road. “I thought that it would be like having my own place, because I could sell the beer at the pizza place,” he says. “But it didn’t work because Simposio didn’t sell any pizza, let alone any beer.”

There were moments of success. The Cock on Mare Street took all the beer he could make - about 180 litres a week, on average, brewed at the weekend - and Des De Moor, indefatigable chronicler of London beer, gave his California Common a good write-up. “I had a good time,” he says. “It was all decent quality, it was good stuff.”

The line-up included American Pale Ale, Bitter, Coffee Stout and Blonde, plus that California Common, and a rotating range of specials. This combination of variety and approachability reflected his Californian background and passion for breweries like Bear Republic, Sierra Nevada and Anchor, whose taps adorn the outside of the beer fridge in his office (when he heard Anchor was closing he bought all the bottles of Steam Beer he could lay his hands on, one of which he very kindly gave me).  

Travis, who works as a satellite telecommunications consultant, is a big man, verging on lumberjack-like, with a tidy mop of curly hair and beard to match. He is assured, confident and talkative, Californian to a fault, so it’s no surprise to discover he was part of the Bernie Sanders campaign to be Democratic candidate for US President in 2016 and 2020, helping run the overseas operation, and delivering huge victories on both occasions. “In 2016, we had more people vote for Bernie than had voted in any previous Democrats Abroad election,” he says. 

(A huge ‘Bernie’ banner, which lights up, sits in his office to commemorate those campaigns, ready to be put on the wall as soon as he gets round to it.)

The conversation glides easily from Sanders to James Watt, who Travis once called when he was wandering around Edinburgh looking for a beer. “I went to the Brewdog website on my phone, and his number was on there,” he says. “I called him and said, ‘Where can we find good beer in Edinburgh?’ He said, we just opened a bar there, where are you? He stayed on the phone until we got to the bar, and then he said, ‘Hand the phone to the bartender’, and the bartender speaks to him and then says - your drinks are on the house.”

The accoutrements of homebrewing sit in the hallway, a sign not only of his passion for brewing but also of a certain frustration with the direction modern beer has taken, particularly in West London where he lives. “There are six pubs within walking distance, and they all have the same beer range,” he says. “Overall, we’ve taken a huge step up in terms of quality [over the past ten years] but it’s very samey.”

It has made him wonder if now might be a good time to get back into brewing, given the lack of variety and the amount of spare brewing capacity in a beer world where demand is contracting. “There’s all sorts of interesting beers you can make,” he says. “My first beer is always an American Pale Ale, but then there’s Gose, or Sahti, or Ethiopian-style beer. There’s lots you could do.” 

Why not? London beer could do with a little of the spirit of 2013. Let the dogs run free.

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Cribb Notes

Kent family brewery Shepherd Neame has spent £800,000 renovating the Tom Cribb, a West End boozer that commemorates England’s greatest bare-knuckle fighter, the Tyson Fury of the early 19th century.

As usual with Sheps, the renovation of this Panton Street pub has been smartly-done, all shiny tiles and padded bench seating, with a ‘gentleman’s club-style’ dining room upstairs. Memorabilia paying tribute to Cribb, who ran the venue when it was called the Union Arms in the 19th century, is on show throughout.

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Booze Views

Artist Lydia Wood is currently engaged on a gargantuan project: to draw all of London’s pubs. Worth supporting, I think you’d agree - and luckily there’s an easy way to do so. You can buy one of Lydia’s recently-released pub calendars, here. 

I recently sent Lydia a few questions to find out more about what she’s doing, and what she’s learnt:   

Why do you draw London pubs?

On the surface my project to draw every pub in London is an artistic documentation of all the pubs that exist in this city during my lifetime. On the other hand, I continue to feel that the drawings are made so much more by the conversations that surround the project. The cultural and historical significance of pubs and the rapid changes that are happening to these places during this time.

I think the foundation that the project was built on is my simple affection for pubs, my attachment to my local, my fondness of old student haunts, the village pub I went to with my parents as a child. I am a pub girl through and through. Finding like-minded pub lovers through sharing this project with strangers online, I find these personal connections to London pubs have opened up the pub project across the globe; and that is what ultimately keeps the momentum of the pub project going.

If you had to describe the archetypal London pub based on the ones you've drawn so far, what would it look like?

A corner pub, slated roof, a couple of chimneys, bricks on the top half, painted bottom half, leaded windows, lantern lights, pub name signage, swinging sign, double doors, hanging flower baskets, a potted plant either side of the entrance, window reflections of the street opposite.

What's your favourite London pub, and why?

I’m very lucky to have a brilliant local, the Blythe Hill Tavern. A few reasons it’s my favourite are (in no particular order):

• It’s close to my house

• Great Guinness

• Live music every week

• Amazing people

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New Flame

One of the great unsung heroes of London beer departed the scene recently. Nick O’Shea founded Ignition Brewery in Sydenham in 2015 and has run it ever since (alongside co-founder Will Evans), all the while assiduously but honestly promoting its purpose: to demonstrate how adults with learning disabilities can contribute in the workplace. 

The new owners are Brighter Horizons, a Lewisham-based charity that provides day services to neurodiverse adults and people with learning disabilities in southeast London. 

“Ignition is such a community asset and occupies a really unique place at the centre of Sydenham,” Brighter Horizons co-director Dave King says. “It’s loved by lots of people and I’m really excited to build on that and see more people get on board with what we’re about and what we’re trying to achieve. We’re planning to bring a modest food offering next year as well as to start bottling more of our beers.”   

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Week as Water

If you’re normal, you may not have noticed that it was Cask Ale Week, an annual ‘event’ run by Cask Marque, recently. This year’s highlight was a feature on GB News, a TV network that has become a byword for incompetence and dimwitted bigotry, and which apparently thinks Tory politicians soft-soaping their colleagues counts as journalism. 

“It is not for Cask Marque as a company to take sides and add comment,” organiser Paul Nunney said in response to widespread criticism. “We are here to promote cask beer to everybody.”

Let’s be honest: Cask Marque, a group whose efficacy I question every time I get a sub-par pint in a pub with one of their plaques on it, couldn’t promote cask beer to ‘everybody’ if their lives depended on it. You might as well ask me to play up front for England. Everything about Cask Marque reeks of a fusty, increasingly outdated approach to beer, in a world where alternative options have never been more numerous or appealing. 

This wouldn’t be a problem, except that the group is fairly representative of so much of the cask-beer world. It’s no wonder sales are through the floor, and pubs that don’t sell it are increasingly common in London (see Two Pubs, One City, below, for a couple of examples). Cask ale in London badly needs fresh blood and fresh ideas, someone who can resuscitate it to the extent that it becomes available in places like Mercato Metropolitano (where gallons of German Kraft beer is sold), in peak condition, and branded in a way that will appeal to a varied, younger crowd. I’m not holding my breath.   

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Becks Off, Whisky Off, Greenalls On 

The Walmer Castle in Notting Hill has had a colourful recent history. It was bought by David Beckham and Guy Ritchie in 2018, but last year they sold it to London nightclub owner and businessman Piers Adam, whose Scottish themed restaurant and whisky bar also failed to take flight.

Enter Jack Greenall, of the Greenall Whitley brewery family, who has bought and is currently in the process of renovating the pub. Greenall, who also owns The Surprise in Chelsea, is reportedly keen to turn it into more of a traditional pub, although presumably along very West London lines. You’ll soon be able to judge for yourselves: The pub opens on 1 November. 

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Keep London Beer City free

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Two Pubs, One City

The Clissold Arms, Muswell Hill; The Cart and Horses, Maryland. 

I don’t know Simon Bird, I’ve never met him, but I really don’t care for him.

Let me explain. I’m at the Clissold Arms in Muswell Hill, which is famous for one thing: its connection to 60s pop sensation The Kinks. The band grew up nearby and Ray and Dave Davies gave their first performance here, in December 1960 (as a CAMRA plaque on the outside attests).

Naturally, the owners of The Clissold Arms are keen to commemorate/profit from this, which is why they have something called The Kinks Room, full of memorabilia and that. It looks good on the Internet - Kinks cushions, dolls, gold discs, that sort of thing - so I’ve come to have a look.

I can’t, though, because on this Friday afternoon Simon Bird had booked it out. Kontroversy! Inwardly cursing him, I take my pint of Meantime Pale Ale (£6; there’s no cask) out into the sizable garden/yard, to sit sullenly amidst an abundance of pot plants and some graeco-roman-ish statues.

It’s not very Kinks-y out here. The original building, which is now The Kinks Room, is little more than an annex, part of an events space masquerading as a pub (there are three bookable rooms), with a vibe more akin to a garden centre than a down-to-earth boozer. 

Today, there’s a lot of customers dressed in black, spilling out of one of those private function rooms onto the patio. Did the Kinks have a big goth following? No, they look too happy. Must be a wake. 

One of them is carrying out a terse conversation on his phone within earshot of my table. “I don’t know what time I’ll be finished here,” he says, finally. Conversation over.

There’s piped music. It’s not The Kinks. It’s Greek. Is it too much to expect them to play The Kinks on rotation? Probably is. I do think they could spread The Kinks love around a bit more, though - instead of letting Simon Bird hog the lot. 

If I had one bit of advice for The Clissold Arms, it’d be to take a trip to the Cart and Horses, 45 minutes’ away by public transport in Maryland (basically Stratford). 

This is Maiden country. The walls are covered with Iron Maiden imagery, the door mat says Iron Maiden, Robinson’s Iron Maiden beers are available, there’s a jukebox that seems to mainly play Iron Maiden - and, should you be left in any doubt, it reads ‘Cart and Horses The Birthplace of Iron Maiden’ above the door. 

Most of the beer on the bar is provided by Heineken, so it’s an appropriately rock-and-roll-adjacent if not very enjoyable Beavertown Bones (£5.80; no cask) for me. This pub is basically one square, reasonably small room - similar, probably, to the Clissold before it got garden centre-d. It’s not at all grungy: in fact, with its bar stools and herringbone floor, it’s quite smart.

And, with perhaps a dozen punters in and the jukebox pumping, it is full of life. Take the three fifty-something women to my left, who  are clearly big Maiden-heads. Two are drinking the Maiden beer (the other’s on J2O) and they’re thrilled when ‘Fear of The Dark’, Maiden at their shrieking/shredding peak, comes on the jukebox. There’s singing along, air guitar, a general sense of ‘let’s fucking rock’. Chat is constant: “Boris Johnson was OK as mayor of London but as prime minister …” one of them offers before trailing off, perhaps bored by her train of thought.

To my right there’s a heavily bearded young man with a guitar case, just sitting there, looking a bit nervous, staring into the middle distance. He’s drinking Heineken 0.0, which is pretty un-rock-and-roll.

This year the cover of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide featured Iron Maiden-style imagery, which has caused a solid if not unanimous undercurrent of grumbling amongst CAMRA diehards. It actually seemed quite a smart decision to me, a nod to the fact that music and pubs go together almost as neatly as beer and boozers. 

This is more true in London than anywhere else, at least when it comes to pop and rock: most of the city’s great names, from the Stones to Kate Bush, polished their acts playing in pubs. There was even a 70s genre - pub rock - defined purely by the fact most of the venues were London pubs.

The Cart and Horses retains that spirit, while also succeeding as a pure pub. My personal taste veers much more towards The Kinks than Maiden, but in terms of pubs, it’s no contest. Run To The Hills? Run to the Cart and Horses, more likely!*

*sorry

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Salt Mines

Yorkshire brewery Salt, which took control of Hop Stuff back in 2021, has put in for planning permission to expand the Woolwich brewery’s former taproom into an adjacent premises. You can see the application here.  

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Bock to Bock

Mother Kelly’s has launched a very tasty sounding new festival for the colder months. Bocktober! will take place across their four bars, plus the Queen’s Head in King’s Cross, taking in a variety of dark and strong beers: milds, porters, stouts, old ales, doppelbocks, eisbocks, weizenbocks, and barleywines. It’s on from Thursday 26th October until Sunday 29th.

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