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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.

‘WE ARE MOVING!’

For Andy Smith, the founder of Partizan Brewing, it came down to two things that are really one thing: the departure of Aussie brewer Harrison Long, who’d had enough of the cost of London, and the expense of renting space in Bermondsey. In March, Smith moved his brewery to Market Harborough, where they’ll be sharing space with “long-term friends” Langton Brewery.

Bread Winners

Good Company does not feel like a brewery taproom. It looks more like an art gallery café, with its angles and exposed pipes and bold, blocky colours on the wall. At 11am in the morning, gentle elevator jazz is playing - tinkling piano and the strum of acoustic guitar - and the whole place smells like coffee.

Wild Horses

The carpet at the Greek Street end of the Coach and Horses is scarlet, overlaid with the sort of pattern you’ve seen a thousand times but would be hard pressed to describe. Three main repeating shapes are particularly baffling. Are they flowers? Not like any I’ve seen. One looks more like a Space Invaders alien.

The Generation Game

It’s the morning after his birthday celebrations and Jack Duignan is back in the pub. “It got a bit out of hand,” he says, a touch ruefully, as he drops the dog leads for his Boston Terriers, Ludo and Manny, and they hurry away, tussling and scrapping, across the scarlet-carpeted floor of The Sutton Arms in Clerkenwell. 

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? 

Call me Ahab

Moby Dick, as you will no doubt recall, is the story of one man’s obsessive hunt for an elusive white whale. For the past half-decade or so, I have pursued my own white whale - admittedly in slightly less dramatic circumstances - in the shape of a brewhouse that may or may not have been purchased 10 years ago, that may or may not have been used, and that may or may not be about to finally enter into production.

A few years ago I went to West Flanders, or the Westhoek as it’s known in Belgium. It was a trip organised by Paul Walsh, publisher of the late, lamented Belgian Beer & Food magazine; we visited breweries and bars, and stared wistfully at cemeteries and battlefields preserved for the benefit of the many tourists who visit each year. It was 90 percent fun, ten percent solemnity, about the same ratio as Paul himself.

Beer Instagram can be thin gruel. It’s got reams and reams of the same stuff - pictures of cans, pictures of beer glasses, pictures of people with cans and overflowing beer glasses; images of dingy orange beer, put through a filter to make it more orange; adverts for beer; pub exteriors, pub interiors - and not much else. (I’m as guilty as anyone else).

I had an enjoyable chat with Matt Burns, creative director of Thirst, a drinks branding and packaging design company in Glasgow, a few years’ back. Thirst are at the top of their game at the moment, having done work for everyone from Fuller’s to Northern Monk; they’re undeniably amongst the best in the business (Matt is also a very nice person, fwiw, despite being Australian).

Business was slow when I stumbled, thirsty and bramble-punctured, into The Bull in Wrotham, Kent, shortly before lunchtime last Thursday. I was the only customer. Good for me, less good for the pub - but by the looks of things, it wasn’t a typical state of affairs. The Bull is smartly (if a touch blandly) decorated, and the village is full of nice cars & other signifiers of wealth. Plenty of cash around for pub meals, you’d think.

In the end, it wasn’t so bad. Despite predictions, the re-opening of pubs on July 4 didn’t prove to be the prelude to a national carnival of drunken buffoonery. There have been a handful of incidents, it’s true; a ‘furious beer garden brawl’ in Glasgow, an electric fence around the bar in Cornwall, a few arrests in Nottinghamshire. The fact, though, that an image of a busy Old Compton Street on that first Saturday night drew much of the social media ire suggests things in general were calmer than expected.

I had an unpleasant encounter with the bathroom scales yesterday: my first weigh-in for months revealed four-and-a-half pounds that didn’t exist in March. Annoying, but not really a shock. My lockdown has been a story of more consumption and less exercise, and you don’t need to be a doctor to know where that leads.

Bermondsey is the heart of modern London beer. This central neighbourhood of lock-ups, housing estates and flimsy-looking new-build flats - yours for just £1.25m - is home to the city’s greatest concentration of breweries and, on Saturdays, excitable beer drinkers. Or at least, it was. Like anywhere else in the UK and around much of the beer-drinking world, the fun stopped in March.

At The Park Brewery in Kingston, south-west London, uncertainty reigns. Having ceased brewing between late February and late April due to the Covid-19 lockdown, the wife-and-husband team behind the brewery - Frankie and Josh Kearns - recently decided to start re-brewing beer for cask, in the expectation that pubs might open on July 4, as widely predicted.

Euroboozer’s base, a warehouse just off the M25 north of Watford, is normally a hive of activity. Six or seven vans leave every day to deliver beer into London: palettes are packed to be sent off around the rest of the UK; beer arrives from around the country and, via ports like Harwich, from overseas. This importation and distribution company employs 14 permanent staff and four regular contract workers, handling significant brands that run the gamut from iconic Danish craft brewer Mikkeller to historic Austrian lager-makers Stiegl.

The big losers from Britain’s extended lockdown have been the nation’s pubs; those shops who’ve been able to deliver to people’s homes, by contrast, are the winners. Supermarkets, delicatessens, wine merchants and off-licenses/bottle shops - these companies, so popular understanding has it, have done well.

Unless you’ve been in really deep lockdown, you’ll know that Britain’s pubs are struggling. “Britain’s pubs face worrying future”, says The Sun; “15,000 pubs to stay shut forever unless lockdown lifted,” according to the Daily Mirror; “Will Britain’s pubs survive the coronavirus?” asks the New York Times. There are many more along similar lines.