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The Shock of the New

There’s a motley selection of breweries at Brew LDN. This beer festival, heir to Craft Beer Rising, offers a blend of multinational-owned brands pretending they’re not (Camden Town, Drygate), ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’ family breweries (Timothy Taylor, Outland by Badger Brewing/Hall & Woodhouse), ageing micro stalwarts (Blue Monkey), international icons (Sierra Nevada, Budvar) and perhaps half a dozen mid-range craft breweries offering murky tributes to the Yakima Valley.

Amongst them this year was Great Beyond Brewing Company, which doesn’t fit into any of these categories. It’s a much rarer beast: a new brewery in London, established at the tail-end of last year in railway arches under the Overground at Hoxton. A new brewery, in this economy? It might seem unlikely, but even now, with the ink on London brewing’s obituary not yet dry, there are young and not-quite-so young men hoping to make it big in beer in the Capital.

Not that they’re wet behind the ears. Manning Great Beyond’s stall was John Driebergen, who is steeped in modern London brewing: the 35-year-old was head brewer at Fourpure until recently and, before that, brewer at Meantime. Along with Ollie Parker and Nick Walsh (both also formerly of Fourpure), Driebergen accumulated around £500,000 from friends and family to get things rolling last year.

Great Beyond is a few steps ahead of Snowmoon Brewing Co, an East London partnership tiptoeing tentatively down the same path. Founded by ace homebrewers Joon Chung and Oli Edmonds, their first beer, Moonrise, a Cold IPA brewed in collaboration with Elusive after Chung’s victory in a West Coast IPA competition (one of many by the pair over the past few years), is out now. 

So what’s going on? Are they mad, or is there still space in London for new breweries? 

Well, maybe. Great Beyond, the lavishly-bearded Driebergen explains, was planned explicitly as a taproom-focused company, a model that seems to have a greater chance of success in a city where hoppy beer in pubs means Beavertown in the same way that stout means Guinness. 

Taproom events, from sold-out quiz nights to Sofar Sounds, are legion. Driebergen hopes to sell as much as half of the brewery’s beer at the taproom, but there’s also plenty of interest from local pubs, including two permanent lines at Howl at the Moon. 

The site is good: it’s a bit awkward to find from Hoxton Station, but they have this still fashionable neighbourhood largely to themselves, brewery-wise. Even better, it’s a TfL arch, rented on a 9-year lease inherited from boxed fruit and veg specialists Abel & Cole, rather than with ArchCo. On the flipside, there’s not much money: the 10-hectolitre brewery came second-hand from Romania, and a few unanticipated difficulties when they opened absorbed much-needed capital. 

The five members of staff, including the founders, are doing everything themselves - which has turned brewer Driebergen into an unlikely and, it appears, slightly reluctant salesman. That’s not to say that he doesn’t believe in the product, which is explicitly different from what he made at Fourpure, with a focus on hoppy and sour beers. “We’re very deliberately not using any of the same ingredients,” he says, definitely, in his American East Coast tones. “It’s a complete blank slate.”

The same is true of Moonrise, who have similarly clear ideas of what they aim to brew. The pair, who met as members of Beer Boars, are planning to combine 33-year-old Edmonds’ passion for lager-brewing with the hoppier beers favoured by Chung, 37. Their pedigree is excellent. Both are regular winners of homebrewing competitions: Edmonds, for example, won the Lager Than Life competition run by Pillars in 2022 with a German Pils that subsequently also won the LAB Open Competition.    

Edmonds, from Buckinghamshire, works in finance for an affordable home provider; Chung, from South Korea, makes his living in urban planning. The latter was a lager drinker when he came to the UK in 2012 but his wife convinced him to try IPA, and from there he moved onto sour beers and the wider world of flavoursome beer. Together, they’ve decided to focus on Cold IPA. “From the very first batch that we did, there was something interesting,” says Edmonds. “When you combine lager yeast with hops, it creates something a little bit different.”

There are long-term plans for a brewery, formulated during the Pandemic, but the immediate future is a rolling campaign of cuckoo brewing. Chung’s recent success has given them a platform for takeoff, which begins tomorrow at All Good Beer in Hackney Downs.

For Driebergen, the next step is crowdfunding to make the taproom snazzier and the brewing process more effective. Investors will be offered taproom-based benefits in return for helping Great Beyond to defy the economic headwinds. “We don’t have cash reserves, we don’t have a lot of money,” Driebergen says. “It’s about survival at this stage, but sales are good and the taproom is growing. It’s building momentum.”

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Camden Down

Grace Land, which owns six pubs in East and North London, recently decided to review its lager options. For many years, their boozers - which include The King’s Arms in Bethnal Green and The Axe in Stoke Newington - have been serving Camden Hells, a hangover from when co-owner Andreas Akerlund was a significant investor in the pre-AB InBev company. At that time Alex Troncoso (below), now co-owner of Lost & Grounded in Bristol, was head brewer at Camden.

Deliciously, Camden and Lost & Grounded faced off as two of the final three options … and Lost & Grounded came out on top. I think it’s fair to say that Troncoso’s time at Camden didn’t end with hugs all round, so I’m sure he enjoyed it. There’s plenty to enjoy for Bristol’s Antipodean lagermeisters at the moment, with their Keller Pils being named best in show at America’s top event.

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Very Strong Stout 

40ft, the Dalston brewers, have collaborated with East London Liquor Company to produce a Whiskey based on the malt bill for its Stout. Golden Promise, Chocolate, Amber, Black, Brown and DRC Malt were used, creating, so I’m told, “a  deep, roasted base note with a fudgy fruit finish.” The whiskey was fermented, distilled and aged at East London Liquor Company in a Sonoma Bourbon cask.

From next week, 40FT will drop one bottle of the whiskey at a different cocktail bar in London each fortnight,  where 40ft x ELLC boilermakers will be served until the bottle runs dry. The list of bars will be kept secret and announced via @40ftbrewery and @eastlondonliquorcompany before each drop.

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A Date with Desi-ny

No Desi Pub of the Month, I’m afraid, but a reminder here that David Jesudason’s book about Desi Pubs - which covers the entirety of the UK - is published next week. Order your copy here.

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You Won’t Believe This List of Important London Beers

Modern London beer began in 2009, when The Kernel opened, and reached full steam in 2013, when Five Points, Fourpure and The London Craft Beer Festival began, at a time when 15 to 20 breweries of varying sizes were opening in the City every 12 months. Heady and, as it turned out, short-lived times. Last year, according to Des De Moor, the number of breweries reduced (from 132 to 122) for the first time since 2006. Last week, Brew By Numbers and Brick breweries, both based in south-east London, signalled their intent to appoint administrators, although in both cases it now looks less terminal than feared.  

Nonetheless, it feels like an era has come to a belated end, which is more than enough excuse for the list below. This is a personal selection of the most important beers to have come out of London during the past decade or so, based on their success, how they illustrate the ebb and flow of London brewing fashion, and, crucially, how much I like them. Does that make sense? Hope so. Let’s list:

2010: Camden Hells

Jasper Cuppaidge, founder of Camden Town Brewery, was a hard man to interview. It’s not that he was difficult in person - not with me, anyway - but he’d jump from one idea to the next without fleshing things out sufficiently, which made him hard to quote. He produced 30-second riffs rather than fully-formed songs.

It was this relentless energy, I think, that made Camden the most fashionable brewery in London for the two or three years before he sold it to AB InBev, in 2015. By then the brewery was focused on Hells, just the sort of higher-quality, snazzily-packaged lager London was calling out for, but it hadn’t always been that way. 

Camden’s website claims Hells is “the reason we started our brewery”, but that’s not strictly true. Cuppaidge was looking around for a flagship when he started, from pale ale to stout, but it was Hells that stuck. A lot of that was down to Alex Troncoso - of whom, more above - who fine-tuned the recipe to perfection.      

2012: The Kernel Table Beer

Some things in London beer haven’t changed much over the past 14 years. The Kernel still has much the same labels, much the same philosophy, and lots of people still spell it The Kernal. The beer, though, has evolved.

When The Kernel started in 2009 it was about hop-focused pale beers, and stouts and porters that drew on London’s brewing history. They were very good, and hugely popular, capturing the imagination of London’s beer drinkers in a way that must have set imaginations aflame in Kentish Town and De Beauvoir.

These two streams - hops and local tradition - came together in Table Beer, a low-ABV hoppy pale ale that relies on the soft texture and lower carbonation common in cask ales. I remember buying it in 500ml bottles in the late, lamented Mr Lawrence bottle shop in Brockley, and marvelling at the depth of flavour despite the lack of booze. No wonder it’s become the brewery flagship, even in an era when they make a much wider range of beers.

2012: Brew By Numbers 01/01 Citra Saison

The first time I met the two founders of Brew By Numbers (Dave Seymour and Tom Hutchings) was in a basement flat on Southwark Bridge Road, which served as Hutching’s home and their first brewery. They were earnest young chaps, evangelistic about Belgian beers, and Saison - a sort of non-style style, based on an idea of funky rural Belgian ale, of which the most famous is Saison Dupont - was just about to enjoy its moment in the sun.

Hence their Citra Saison, which combined the rustic, tangy flavour of Saison with punchy, limey hop character. It was really delicious. What makes it interesting now is how it represents a moment in London brewing which is gone: the idea that you could build a business on new beers, that brands were passé, that a brave new world was emerging. Brew By Numbers took this to the extreme with their somewhat confusing naming convention (the first number is the style, the second the iteration of that style, I think), a convention the brewery, now run solely by Hutchings, has ditched.    

2013: Beavertown Neck Oil

There are two events from the early years of modern London beer that stand out. One is Camden Town’s lavish IPL launch at a venue in Camden in 2014; the other Beavertown’s opening night at Duke’s Brew & Que in 2012. A beer called Neck Oil was available that evening, but it was a cask pale ale based, if my memory is correct, on the Black Country classic Bathams Bitter. (I briefly spoke to founder Logan Plant’s father at the event; he lamented the lack of a Mild in the Beavertown line-up).

It didn’t last long. The modern Neck Oil, Britain’s most popular ‘craft’ keg ale, came into being in 2013. Its success has relied on three factors: the initial input of brewer Jenn Merrick, a master at crafting high-quality sessionable, hoppy beers; Nick Dwyer’s illustrations, which captured drinkers’ imaginations in a remarkable way; and Logan’s stardust.

Gamma Ray, its older sibling, was the top seller for a long time, but it’s all about Neck Oil now. It must be in a plurality of central London pubs, selling for upwards of £7 (and sometimes £8!!?!) a pint. That’s a very strong brand, which is presumably why Heineken completed the takeover of Beavertown last year.    

2017: Wimbledon XXXK

Most people haven’t tried this beer, nor will they. That’s a shame because it might be the best beer made in London this past decade, so smooth and rich, complex yet harmonious. It’s a masterpiece, really, and it’s wowed everyone I’ve shared it with, from wine writers to beer-phobic relatives.

Conceived and created by Derek Prentice, whose brewing career began at Truman’s in the late 1960s, it was served as a party at Wimbledon Brewery to celebrate his 50 years in brewing. It’s a link to London’s brewing past - like The Kernel’s dark beers, but more so, since Derek began his career in brewing when that semi-Victorian world still existed.

2018: Lucky Saint

If, in 2013, you’d asked me what I’d be drinking in 2023, non-alcoholic lager would have been somewhere down the list, between ‘beer made of human wee’ and ‘mead’. But here we are. Non-alcoholic beer is a big thing, and some of it is actually quite nice.

Lucky Saint, of course, is made in Bavaria at an undisclosed brewery (although I have my suspicions about which brewery it is), but the company is based in London - they opened a pub here earlier this year, after all - so they make the list. What makes Lucky Saint so good is the way it's made - a blend, I’m guessing, of 0.0 lager and a little bit of full-strength unfiltered stuff, that adds back so much of the flavour lost in vacuum distillation.

2019: Five Points Best 

2019 was a big year for London brewing. Fuller’s, the last of the city’s independent Victorian breweries, sold out to Asahi in January; in April, Five Points released Best, their version of Best Bitter. The two events are linked in my mind, the latter a seeming reaction to the former. 

It’s a lovely beer, distinguished by potent hop character - provided by Hukin’s - and the perfect dry finish, an essential in any serious Best Bitter (and a characteristic shared with Fuller’s London Pride). Since it came out, we’ve seen a glut of new cask beers and a renewed interest in Mild amongst the city’s smaller brewers. Boring Brown Bitter - as some used to call it - is now getting the respect it deserves.

2021: Anspach & Hobday London Black

Paul Anspach and Jack Hobday make a good combination: their personalities dovetail, one more laidback, the other a stickler for detail, both essentially practical. They’ve navigated a fairly difficult beer scene expertly over the years, tacking first this way then that, trying different things, but nothing has made such a splash at London Black, their nitro porter.

In essence, it’s a punchier Guinness; all the flavours you’d expect but turned up a few notches, in the same creamy, good-looking package. The fact that a nitro-poured beer is one of independent London brewing’s big success stories tells you how things have changed over the years. The fundamentalism has gone - which is lucky for A&H, as their next trick is a smoothflow bitter … 

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Brewing Up That Hill

For any true head, Des De Moor’s London’s Best Beer is an absolute must-have, not least because the tireless De Moor publishes regular updates. The latest is full of interesting tidbits, including news that the Canopy site and equipment in Herne Hill has been acquired by Bird House London, a group that runs a gaggle of bars around London. The name is yet to be confirmed, but they hope to start brewing this month, for the taproom and their bars.

In further De Moor news, his no-doubt authoritative tome about England’s greatest glory, cask ale, is getting closer and closer to publication. Not to be missed.    

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London Shrinks

This year’s Brew///LDN beer festival (see above) took place for the last time at Printworks, a massive nightclub in Surrey Quays. Printworks is currently under threat of closure, and 2023’s event had a similar fin-de-siecle feel: the biggest of the three rooms was unused, which made for a livelier atmosphere but didn’t say much for the health of Britain’s brewing industry. London, though, was well-represented, with Camden Town, Fourpure, Hackney Church, Jiddler’s Tipple, Toast, Signature and Great Beyond (again, more above) taking stands at the two-day event.

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Late Pints

Sometimes a hero emerges out of nowhere - a hero like James McIntosh, who has put together an ever-evolving map of places to get a late drink in London, a city where licensing laws sometimes seem designed to stop people having fun. A quick look at the map suggests to me that the latest you can get cask ale in London is at 4am, at the Horse and Groom in Shoreditch. Can anyone do better than that?   

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Two Pubs, One City

Sir Colin Campbell, Kilburn & The Crown Hotel, Cricklewood

Why is London so intriguing and enticing? It’s not the weather, or the welcome, or the quality of the shop signage. I think it’s because this city (a giant unplanned mess, essentially, carelessly carved by private and public enterprise out of the surrounding countryside) is almost impossible to fully know. You can live here all your life and still have visited only half of it. London is frequently sullen and overpriced, but there’s always something new just around the corner.   

Which brings me to Kilburn, in both senses. Until recently, I had never been to this north-western inner suburb, but it’s a place that has lived in my head for a while, thanks to membership of Facebook pub groups and the (fascinating and enlightening) book “An Unconsidered People: The Irish in London”, which features a series of interviews with people who came here in the 1940s and 1950s to escape Eamon De Valera’s economically illiterate government.

Between 1931 and 1961, around half a million women and men crossed the Irish Sea, many ending up at Euston. From there, the cliché has it, they walked as far as was possible with a suitcase in each hand - which took them to Kilburn (and lots of other places, in truth, but we’re not concerning ourselves with that right now). Their arrival transformed Kilburn and changed London forever.

Transformation, though, is not a one-time thing, as anyone who’s been to Kilburn recently will know. It looks like a lot of places in London: slightly chaotic, extremely diverse, noisy, defined by relentless traffic. It’s hard to pick out anything that’s distinctly Irish. So is there anything left that links this place with Ireland? 

The pubs, perhaps. There are lots of pubs here. I know because, on a warm Wednesday afternoon earlier this month, I counted them. After a quick detour to see the rebuilt Carlton Tavern (even nicer in the flesh, I think), I trudged northwards up the Kilburn High Road. There’s the Queen’s Arms, The Old Bell, The Juniper, The Earl of Derby, The Coopers Arms, all in quick succession; and there are some interesting relics, like the former Red Lion, which closed in 2012, The Victoria Tavern/Biddy Mulligans, gone by 2007, and The Kingdom Bar.    

One of the most famous of Kilburn’s Irish pubs is the Sir Colin Campbell, which has just reopened under new management. That’s obvious as soon as you walk in: Iit smells of paint, and there’s a man up a ladder connecting the electrics for a big screen TV. It’s not quite operating at full speed, too: I hadn’t meant to order Guinness (£5.50), but the six hand pumps are not yet in action, and I don’t fancy any of the other usual suspects (Kronenbourg, Amstel, Neck Oil).

This is a small pub, composed of two slim rooms divided by a central bar. On the right there’s wallpaper and high tables, on the left painted walls, bar stools, a cast-iron fireplace and beautiful long wooden benching. Happily, I’m on the left. There are two other customers, both men, both also in the left-hand section: one drinks Guinness and reads a book, basking cat-like in the sunshine spilling through the front window, another sips 1664 with a copy of the Metro.  

It’s so blissfully calm. The outside world is at arm's length; the sound of traffic and the bleep bleep bleep of a crossing enters through open doors, but not in an oppressive way. The only serious incursion is a white plastic bag, blown in on a gentle breeze, that lodges itself on the foot of the book reader. 

Is it Irish? Well, there’s a small selection of Irish Whiskey, and there are regular folk sessions - but there are also those handpumps, plus stickers on the front window announcing the pub’s place in the Good Beer Guide, 2020 and 2021. It just feels like a nice London pub, clean and simple and welcoming. 

It’s about a 20-minute walk from the Sir Colin Campbell to the Crown in Cricklewood, under the railway bridge at Kilburn tube station and up Shoot-Up Hill. Everything gradually becomes calmer. The main landmark is a plaque to mark Learie Constantine’s former home in an elegant pre-war block of flats, Kendal Court.

At the top is The Crown, recently reopened, a late Victorian wedding cake of a building: deep-red and built in what I (an architectural ignoramus) would guess is Jacobethan style. It’s rich in detail, exemplified by the ornamental bases of the street lamps outside, which feature fierce-looking canine countenances.

For many years in the post-War period, Irish labourers would wait outside The Crown every morning to pick up a day’s casual work. It was the centre of things, an iconic place in the London Irish experience. (Dexy’s Midnight Runners ‘Celtic Soul Brothers’ video was filmed in and around The Crown in 1983, a tribute, perhaps, to McAlpine’s Fusiliers).

Well, it’s not what it was. Even worse, it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be: hotel bar or pub? There’s a long bar with a handful of beers available - most notably Madri, supported by a cornucopia of POS items, including an isolated font right in the centre of the bar, the only one visible as you enter. “Is that your best seller?” I ask the friendly young woman behind the bar. “Oh yes, we were quite surprised,” she says. Presumably not everyone was surprised.

It’s Guinness again (£5), and it’s not very good: a bit tart, the glass not clean. There’s bland jazz playing, and a huge TV screen dominates one end of the bar, the end where - I think - Dexys play in that video. On the plus side, my chair - a high-sided armchair - is very comfortable, and there’s a beautiful, original plaster ceiling. Overall, though, I’m underwhelmed. This is someone’s idea of elegance, but not mine.

As a symbol of how Kilburn has moved on from the post-war era, though, it’s hard to beat. Not impossible, though. A few minutes’ walk north of The Crown there’s a large brownfield site, hidden from public view by wooden hoardings. This is where the Galtymore, perhaps London’s most famous Irish ballroom, stood from 1952 until a few years’ back, although it closed in 2008. That’s another thing about London: you turn your back and it’s gone.

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. You can unsubscribe here. Thanks for reading.