August: The Kernel, Borough Bites and Neck Oil goes North
A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs, (mostly) written by journalist Will Hawkes
The Centre
Dockley Road Industrial Estate in Bermondsey has changed since I was last here. Then, pre-Covid, it was a scrappy collection of industrial units occupied by some of London’s best small food producers; now the same space is filled by soaring blocks of black and beige flats, with glass-fronted shop units at ground level housing many of those same producers.
Some elements, though, are unaltered. The Kernel Brewery, which inhabits a sizeable chunk of the pre-Victorian railway arches running along the north side of what is now called ‘Dockley Apartments’, is much as it was before, physically at least. That’s satisfyingly appropriate: there’s a feel of permanence about The Kernel that increases as London’s brewing world becomes ever more precarious.
How precarious? Well, Bermondsey has risen and fallen since The Kernel was established in Druid Street in 2009 (by late 2010, when I pitched up to research a feature for The Independent, it had captured beer-drinking London’s attention). O’Riordain was working with just two colleagues, Chrigl Luthy and Toby Munn, brewing on a 6.5 hectolitre brewhouse that was subsequently bequeathed to Partizan, and bottling by hand, before the move to Dockley Road in 2012.
A lot has changed. Partizan no longer brews in Bermondsey. The other brewery most associated with The Kernel, Brew By Numbers, faces an even more uncertain future. Change is pervasive and relentless - but like the ravens in the Tower of London, we’ll know that modern brewing in the capital is in real trouble if The Kernel ever founders on the rocks.
Its significance is such that it has become something of a heritage brand, widely regarded as a London classic, like Paddington Bear or double-decker buses. Perhaps it’s the largely unchanged pale brown labels, maybe it’s the commitment to historic recipes; but The Kernel has seeped into the fabric of modern London like no other small brewery.
“In Druid Street, Toby had pink hair, I was trying to be cool but really had no idea,” says Evin, not a man given to rash decisions or, indeed, utterances. “We were gung ho! Now, I think, to most people we seem closer to Fuller’s on a scale of age. We’ve gone from being the new school of craft to a more traditional type of brewery.”
Some things have evolved. The brewery’s website once stated, boldly and plainly, that “we make Pale Ales, India Pale Ales and old school London Porters and Stouts towards these ends,” but there’s greater variety now. Lager, a result of extra tank capacity during the Pandemic; a whole variety of barrel-aged beers, of which more later; and cask-conditioned ale, which would have seemed remarkable back in 2010.
The reason they didn’t make cask then, Evin says, was financial - the slightly better margin on bottles was crucial as a small brewery. But cask, which still represents only a small chunk of production, makes obvious sense for a brewery like this, with its bottled-conditioned ales and 19th-century recreations. (Cask pale ale is sold for the same amount per litre as keg, which is more unusual than you might imagine.)
There are many railway arches in London brewing, but few as atmospheric as these, particularly the wonky inner rooms where a collection of barrels (white wine, cognac, Irish whiskey) are stacked, tidily and untidily. Soaring, unmanicured brick walls - shaded every colour from yellow to grimy, sooty Oliver Twist black - provide one of London’s most genuinely 19th-century atmospheres. If you want to imagine the industrial era when London brought brewing into the modern age, this is a good place to do it.
Appropriately, change here is slow, as fruit sourced from Loughton in Essex (even the “tart, crunchy” apricots, much to my surprise) and yeast evolve over weeks and months in barrel, and often in bottle too.
People stick around, too. Five people - including Evin and Chun Lee, who designed the brewery’s software system, called ‘Cheddar’, that handles stock and invoicing - are still working here who started at the old brewery. Until Covid, there was a flat hierarchy - everyone did a bit of everything - but that’s changed. The opening of the taproom introduced new colleagues working solely on that, while a natural human desire for progression meant the situation evolved in the brewhouse, too.
Covid-19 also affected the brewery’s sales. Once it struggled to keep up with demand; now it makes about 8000 hectolitres a year, short of its 9000-hec capacity. It’s not a problem, Evin says, although it is harder to plan for the future. “It seems like before Covid you’d have little ups and downs but things didn’t change that much, and you could imagine what the future might be," he says. “It’s just become so much more difficult to think about what’s going to happen next.”
And then there are the breweries that have fallen along the way recently - “there’s not much sympathy out there; economic realities are harsh” - and the pervasive cynicism now surrounding craft beer. “10 years’ ago, [craft brewers] were getting people excited based on a set of values, not just beer,” he says. “And everyone’s reward for getting involved and excited about those things was a pat on the back from someone who then took those values and sold them to somebody else for lots of money.”
The only major change in the immediate future is the relocation of the taproom around the corner into one of those new shop units, a pre-agreed shift that will allow the archway to be used for food production, as all the others are.
I remember coming to buy beer here in the high days perhaps a decade ago, and Evin’s son would be playing in a sandpit at the front of the brewery. Today, a decade older, he is upstairs at the taproom researching a school project on a brewery computer. Change is inevitable but, crucially, the values remain the same.
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Desi Pub of the Month: The Gladstone, Borough
In his latest column, David Jesudason, author of Desi Pubs, finds Britain’s first truly modern Desi pub in Borough
I have written a lot of articles about the Gladstone in Borough but I always have something new to say about it. Last night I was there and an uncle at the bar was trying to ply with coffee tequila, while plates of pies (paneer, keema or chicken tikka) were whisked past me and publican Megha Khanna told me about the media intrusion she’s had to suffer since I made the Glad the star entry of my book. Apparently a documentary maker filmed her all day despite promising to be out of her hair by the time the pub opened.
Sorry, Meg. But she’s become a media darling for a very good reason. Meg (and her brother Gaurav) run Britain’s first truly modern desi pub - it mixes great food with an ever-changing roster of impeccably poured craft beer. So many people follow in my footsteps and use this pub, like I did, as their entry to the world of desi pubs. It’s not a utopia, though, and some might feel this British-Indian pub leans too heavily on the first part of that hyphen especially because it normally has a white majority crowd. But that’s a superficial reading as everyone here is welcomed with open arms and introduced to diverse regulars - even filmmakers trying to get a desi pub series from Netflix on the back of my book.
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Des Sez
Last week’s GBBF saw the launch of Cask Beer: The real story of Britain's unique beer culture, a new book by Deptford author Des De Moor about cask ale. It’s such a good idea you wonder why no-one has ever done it before. As a topic, cask ale is hard to beat: it’s knee-deep in mythology, culture, tradition and loads of other interesting stuff.
And Des is the perfect person to tackle the subject. He’s a clear and engaging writer, scrupulously fair, with a commitment to accuracy and detail that puts many others to shame. He’s been working on the idea for a decade, he says, having initially been partly inspired by Evan Rail’s Why Beer Matters. I chatted to him this week to find out a little bit more about what readers have to look forward to. Here’s what I learnt:
There’s a lot of ignorance about cask beer
“Cask is so central to people’s understanding of beer in this country, but there’s an awful lot of myths and misunderstandings. I think that’s because when it first came into focus - during the 1960s and 1970s - there was very little public understanding of beer and brewing, even in parts of the industry. A good example is The Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood, founded in 1963, who thought the problem was the change from wood to steel casks. You can see why they thought that, but it was wrong.”
Cask beer is not as old as you think
“One of the things I quickly discovered was that cask beer isn’t actually that old. Cask is a modern product for the industrial age, which is not how it’s presented - one family brewery website talks about its mediaeval origins, but that’s not true. It emerged around the middle of the 19th century; there was a really profound change at that time from the long-matured porters and pale ales that dominated before to the running, ‘mild’ beers that followed. If you transported an 18th-century brewer into the modern day, they’d be much more at home in Belgium than with the cask-ale tradition.”
London is the crucible of modern beer
“Industrial brewing began with Porter, and that began in London. Porter was so specific to London, this huge place, with an unprecedented level of population, all within easy reach of the city’s breweries. You needed something that was cheap, so they used brown malt - pale malt was much more expensive - but the beer made with brown malt is revolting when first fermented because it’s so heavily roasted. So you stick it in a cask for six months, and the flavours round off - not just the malt but the hops too. Without London you wouldn’t have had that, and without that the whole subsequent history of beer would have been different.”
Cask is now a niche product - and it’s time we all accepted that
“Cask as a product only accounts for 4.3 percent of beer production in this country. There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance with people who go around thinking it’s still the working man’s drink - but it absolutely clearly isn’t, and we need to acknowledge that, and to treasure it for what it is. If it’s going to survive, we need to treat it as something very special - and that brings in the issues of quality and price. We need to emphasise the things that make it different and special and make sure they’re always expressed in the right way.”
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Numbers Up
GBBF was an interesting event. Tuesday’s trade day was thronged - as busy as I’ve ever seen it - but numbers fell off very sharply around 8pm, by which time it was open to members of the public, who pay for their tickets. How did it go over the full week? CAMRA wouldn’t tell me the overall attendance (the organisation hasn’t always been so cagey), but did say it was up on last year. That’s good news, but I suspect there’s been a decline since pre-Covid in line with the rest of hospitality.
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Porter in a Storm
Fact of the day: London Black, Anspach & Hobday’s smash-hit nitro porter, now represents around 70 percent of production for the South London brewery.
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New and Improved
There’s been a handful of new openings. In Brixton, Friendship Adventure, a brewery founded in 2017, has opened a second taproom in Market Row in the heart of Brixton Village Market. In Barnes, The Waterman’s Arms is to reopen in September under the aegis of Joe Grossman, who founded burger chain Patty & Bun. Expect that one to be food-focused.
Meanwhile, the Grape and Grain, a Crystal Palace cask-beer destination until it closed in 2017, has been up for sale by owners JD Wetherspoon.
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Two Pubs, Two Cities
Corona Bar & Koelschip Yard, Glasgow
A pair of stocky pals are occupying adjacent tables at the Corona Bar in Shawlands Cross, Glasgow. Having returned from a brief but apparently enjoyable cigarette break, they slide back into their seats, drinks where they left them. The first has rum and coke. The second - a traditionalist - has half a Tennents and a glass of whisky. Huge windows and a beautiful pitched stained-glass ceiling bathe them in light. God is in her heaven and, it appears, she’s Scottish.
But what’s this? A middle-aged couple, the feel of outdoors pursuits about them, approach the bar. They have a short chat with the genial bearded barman, ponder, and then make their choice: two pints of Beavertown Neck Oil, please.
All very irregular, much like this regular feature taking a trip to Glasgow. There is method in my madness, though (and it’s not just because I ran out of time to do it in London ahead of a summer holiday trip to see grandparents in Scotland, and had to quickly think up a reason why a Glasgow edition would be legit). London beer does not - and has never - stop at the edge of Zone 6; it finds new worlds to conquer, as Whitbread and Courage and the rest did in generations gone by. (Will this do?)
To be specific, Beavertown has decided to conquer Glasgow, amongst other cities. If you wander around Scotland’s largest city, you’ll see numerous adverts for North London’s premier hopslingers, from the huge screen above the platforms at Glasgow Central to bus stops all over the city. When my sister-in-law offered me a beer from a motley collection left in the fridge by her 18-year-old son and his pals, it was there, alongside Peroni and the rest. And it’s on bartops all over - particularly, it appears, the fashionable bits of the city’s Southside.
At The Corona Bar, it shares space on the handsome wooden bar with Budvar, Staropramen, Tennents, Guinness, Belhaven Best and another Londoner, Camden Hells, amongst others. Brew By Numbers cans are amongst options in the fridge. There’s no cask ale. A pint of Neck Oil is £6, pricey for Glasgow but about £1.50 cheaper than London.
I take mine to a corner perch. This single-story Edwardian corner pub is bohemian, very bourgeois. There’s a couple with a spaniel, some people with dyed pink hair, three well-to-do gents, plus the pals at the adjacent tables. Tasteful hip hop - such as Roots Manuva - plays in the background. There’s football on the telly, but the sound is turned down. There are lots of plants and old Tram destination boards plus, for some reason, wooden tennis rackets on the wall. It’s spacious and light and not like a classic Glasgow pub at all. You can see in from outside!
Having finished my Neck Oil - decent, although less enjoyable the further down I went - I wander northwards towards the Clyde. There’s a lot of pubs in this part of Glasgow. On the outside of the Regent Bar, Neck Oil is listed alongside the other staples: Tennents, Strongbow, Madri, and so on. Further evidence, I guess, that it's becoming the default national craft option, Madri for hopheads, which makes sense - although you think that, particularly in Scotland, Brewdog would have something to say about that.
Not everywhere sells Neck Oil, though. Koelschip Yard, for example, a bar the best part of kilometre north on Pollockshaws Road. This is a modern beer bar in an old-fashioned Glasgow pub: high windows means you don’t know what you’re getting until you’ve opened the door. There could be anything behind there, I suppose, but I’m pretty confident that a craft-beer place with the sign ‘Card Payments Only’ on the door is not going to be too daunting.
And so it proves. There are five people at the bar, including the barman, and four have beards. Two of them are chatting about Brian Wilson. Service is quick and friendly. The Kelly family crest is in pride of place on the wall behind the bar (this pub used to be called Kelly’s). The 14 beers on the list (including one cask beer) include Anspach & Hobday’s London Black, but I want something from Glasgow so I opt for Overtone’s Czech Yourself (£5.50), a Czech pale lager.
It’s opaque and there’s a touch of strawberry in the flavour, but I enjoy it, served in a squat handled Budvar glass with a nice collar of foam. There’s a lot to savour about this pub. It's very calm. Besides the gents at the bar, there are a couple of other groups chatting quietly about this and that: beer in Alsace, Tom Waits, a funny thing their daughter said the day before.
The beer takes a delightful half-hour to see off. As I get up to leave, one of the bearded gents is explaining why he dislikes a particular boss so much. “Treats his staff like shite, so I’ve heard but … to be honest, I’ve just never liked him.” Hard to argue with that.
What does this have to do with Neck Oil? Not a great deal, I suppose - except to say that, in common with bosses you don't really like, Neck Oil is everywhere and it's only going to get more so. Given the quality of some of the beers that have dominated British bars down the years, I can't get too upset about that.
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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.