Brewing in the shopping centre

London has a lot of breweries but not many native brewers. There are a few, most notably Alastair Hook at Meantime, but it’s striking just how many of the city’s most well-known brewers come from somewhere else. Jim Wilson, the East Londoner who’s in charge of the shiny brew kit at Tap East in Stratford, is something of a rare beast.

The story of how Wilson, born in Bow and brought up in Dagenham, came to cask ale demonstrates neatly why this is. “I used to be an avid Carlsberg drinker,” he laughs. 

“That was until I went up to Lincolnshire with my partner to visit one of her friends. We went into a country pub, there was lots of ale; I though, let’s try that. That’s what got me into home brewing and  drinking the usual suspects like [London] Pride and Bombardier.

“I used to go out with my mates and it was always ‘ten pints of lager and one pint of that weird brown stuff’. My mates would say:  ‘oh it’s horrible, why do you want to drink that?’ ‘It’s not, it’s got flavour.”

Wilson’s refusal to give in to public humiliation has prepared him well for his role at Tap East, which, he tells me, is the only brewery in a shopping centre in the whole of Europe. Tucked away in the corner of the huge Westfield shopping complex (which sits alongside the Olympic Park), the brewery is on show to the world – or at least those who wander past on their way into the shopping centre. All that stands between Wilson and a constantly changing cast of smokers, amblers and fascinated toddlers is a large window.

Of course, it means that Wilson, 26, can see what’s going on outside, too. That was particularly handy during the Olympics, when all manner of famous sportsmen and women flitted past his brewery. Some of those taking part even partook of his beer, he says. “I remember there was a Puerto Rican doctor – he was really interested, I showed him around the brewery. We had all manner of East European coaches drinking in here, too.”

If things are a little more humdrum these days on the other side of the window, Wilson’s brewing is going from strength to strength. Yesterday he brewed a Blood Orange Pale Ale with noted beer guru Melissa Cole (“I’d never seen a blood orange until earlier this month,” he laughs) and the size and flexibility of his brewing kit means experimentation is easy. “I’d like to try a Pilsner; Not that many small breweries that have that opportunity – to try different stuff, keep the beer world turning. It’s a case of, ‘let’s have a go and see what we can do’.”

Perhaps Wilson’s late conversion to cask ale has created this expansive approach to brewing. For a number of years, he was a refrigeration engineer – then came that Lincolnshire revelation. He began to homebrew, and a day helping out at Brentwood Brewery in Essex turned into a full-time job. He was there for two-and-a-half years before coming to Tap East in April of last year.  “It was a new challenge, I knew the guys at Utobeer,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It’s a nice place to work.”

Certainly, Wilson takes a lot of satisfaction from seeing his beer being enjoyed. “There’s nothing better than coming in on a Monday and seeing all these empty casks – at least someone has had a good weekend!” he says. “It is very rewarding, that’s the best part of the job.”

He is also quite heavily involved with the London Brewers’ Alliance. “Because we meet each other regularly, we know what everyone is doing. It keeps everyone on their toes,” he says. “We want to improve beer in London. It is an exciting time to say the least." Wilson now lives just outside London, in Chelmsford, but he’s still delighted to be part of the city’s burgeoning beer renaissance. “It’s great to be part of the history of brewing in London,” he says. “To work where you’re from – it’s really rewarding.”

As for the future, Wilson is fairly open-minded. “I’d love to have a restaurant with a small brewery, doing American-style food, not over-complicated,” he says. “Or work for a big brewery. Hopefully by the time I’m there, some of the smaller guys will have grown – but I don’t think I’d ever have my own brewery. Too much stress. All you want to do is make the beer but there’s too much other stuff.”

Bermondsey's reluctant brewer

Andy Smith likes his music loud. Approaching Partizan Brewing’s base under an railway arch in Bermondsey, you can hear the brewery before you see it. Specifically, you can hear the music of Gang of Four, a suitable choice since Smith, 31, comes from Leeds.

“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.”

Partizan’s beer can be found in a number of London’s best craft-beer pubs and bars (if not nightclubs), but if you want to get a closer look at the brewery it’s now open on Saturdays. Just follow your ears.

You can now buy the Craft Beer London book here, while the app can be downloaded here.