“I’ll just
turn that down,” he says with a smile. Behind him is the brewing kit, a gift
from Evin O’Riordain at The Kernel when they moved from their own Bermondsey
railway arch to a bigger one, and a huge pile of boxes filled with bottles.
Smith, sporting
a thick woolly jumper and an even thicker beard to combat London’s winter
chill, is somewhat wearily attaching Partizan’s stylish, witty labels to the
bottles: not everything about brewing is as glamorous as some appear to think.
But Smith
wasn’t attracted to the world of beer by glamour, but by money. Back at the
tail end of 2009, he was working as a chef at a restaurant in Chelsea which was
struggling to pay its staff.
In order to deal
with his bills, he got a job at The White Horse in Parson’s Green, where he
ended up working in the cellar. That’s how he met Andy Moffat, head brewer at Redemption in Tottenham. “Andy was dropping off some casks,” he says. “I’d been
homebrewing and asked him if he wanted some help.” He did.
More than
two years on, and having enjoyed the full Andy Moffat experience (“He’s almost
too nice at times,” laughs Smith. “It gets to five o’clock and you want to
finish your job but Andy’s pushing you out of the door!”) he has his own
brewery.
If it seems a
natural next step, it didn’t appear that way to Smith. “It wasn’t something I
intended to do,” he says. “When I was a
chef, it was always ‘are you going to open your own restaurant?’ ‘No, I’m not
interested!’
“I had a
chat with Andy in January. We talked about my future, I felt I wasn’t getting
anywhere anymore. It felt like I was doing a 9-5 job. He’s a really open guy to
talk to about that. He said I could try and get a job at a big brewery like
Thornbridge, or start on my own – which I wasn’t too keen on.
“I talked to
a few people, including Evin (The Kernel), and he offered the brew kit for
nothing. That was decisive – it was almost impossible to decline.”
If Smith sounds at all half-hearted, a taste
of his beer should be enough to dispel any misgivings about his commitment. The
Foreign Extra Stout, in particular, is excellent: it comes from an old Courage
recipe, he says, and it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as some of
London’s other recent revived recipes.
“The beers I
make are the beers that I want to make. They won’t all be very strong [like the
FES, which is 8.6 per cent]. I’m making a Saison which should be four or five
per cent. They have to taste good. With strong beers, it’s like reducing a
stock: the more you reduce, the more flavour you get. That’s what I want.”
Smith’s
background in cooking makes him an interesting brewer. Plenty of people have
compared brewing and cooking, but Smith isn’t so sure. “Organisation is the big
thing you learn in cooking – have everything laid out,” he says.
“That’s
helpful in brewing, too - but when you’re cooking, you can taste as you go
along. If you make a dish and didn’t taste it until the end, that would just be
the worst thing to do. There’s nothing you can do about it when you’re brewing
– you have to wait until the end, fingers crossed.”
His career
as a cook began in Leeds, and it’s there that he first got a taste for great
beer, too, at one of the country’s foremost craft-beer haunts. “We used to go
to North Bar; it was a big chef hangout on Friday and Saturday night – you’d have
a bottle of [Schneider Weiss’s wheat dopplebock] Aventinus after you’ve
finished service on a Saturday night. It’s about eight per cent but it goes
down incredibly easily!”
Smith believes
that London has something to learn from Leeds when it comes to beer
appreciation. “The drinking culture there is different,” he says. “You can go
to a nightclub and drink cask ale, which is unheard of down here.”
