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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. 

The malt man

Hops get an awful lot of attention. These little green cones are the undisputed stars of the craft-beer world: any self-respecting drinker can tell his Citra from his Nelson Sauvin, his Simcoe from his East Kent Golding. Brewers have helped to fuel this hop mania - Brewdog used to advertise Hardcore IPA as having more hops in it than “any other beer brewed in the UK”, for example. Hops are hip.

Malt is not quite so fashionable. Despite being the real engine room of any beer (like Charlie Watts to hops’ prancing, pouting, gyrating Mick Jagger), malt doesn’t appear to excite drinkers like hops can.  It’s a shame, especially since Britain can boast any number of beers which give malt the co-billing it deserves (balance, I think they call it).

One of the best examples of this type of beer is brewed here in London – and that’s official. Sambrooks’ Wandle was recently named the best World’s Best Bitter at the World Beer Awards, where judges hailed its “nice fruity nose [while the flavour boasts] fresh tobacco with biscuity malt and floral hops.”

Part of what makes Wandle so good is the malt: Sambrooks use Maris Otter, a type of barley revered for the nutty, biscuity richness it contributes. “We decided right from the off to go for Maris Otter,” says Duncan Sambrook, founder and owner of the brewery. “It’s widely – and rightly – regarded as the Rolls-Royce of malts.”

Anyone who steps inside his brewery – wedged between Clapham Junction station and the grey-brown Thames – will take in great lungfuls of toasted Maris Otter aroma. It’s a traditional scent that denotes a largely traditional brewery, although not one that is stuck in the past: Sambrook’s now have a keg ale on the market, a pale ale that undergoes a period of krausening.

“We’ve produced something that is a cross between a lager and an English pale ale,” says Sambrook, 34. “It was just [about] trying to do something innovative and see how the market responds to it.”

It’s an interesting move from a brewery which has always sought to offer Londoners a taste of traditional British cask ale. Sambrook, who comes from Salisbury and still speaks with a soft West-Country twang, was surprised when he came to the capital at the paucity of breweries. At that stage he was working in the city but when in 2008 he decided to become a full-time brewer, his motivation was clear.

“I always thought that London was an untapped market for craft beer,” he says. “Where I grew up, we had fantastic microbreweries like Hopback, Ringwood, and more traditional ones like Hall and Woodhouse. I was very lucky. I was surprised when I  came to London and there was only Young’s and Fuller’s – and then Young’s left.

“Cask ale is an inherently local product. That’s true everywhere in the country –  look at the furore over Tetley’s shutting down [in Leeds], for instance. I met the guys from Leeds Brewery last week, and I love their advertising, with the hints from the Tetley advertising – ‘the last brewery left in Leeds’. There’s all these pubs up there now which they couldn’t ever supply – overnight, they’re saying, ‘we want your beer in’.”

For all of his passion for tradition, Sambrook is delighted by the proliferation of breweries across London. More good beer available means more interest in good beer. Sambrook’s has certainly grown over the four years of its existence: they now produce some 5,500 barrels a year, which equates to well over a million pints.

The tide may be turning in Sambrooks’ favour. There seems to be a move back towards session-strength beers, like The Kernel’s much-admired Table Beer, which weighs in at just 3 per cent. It’s a trend that Sambrook (whose brewery regularly produces Wandle, at 3.8 per cent, Junction, at 4.5 per cent, Powerhouse Porter, at 4.9 per cent, and Pumphouse Pale Ale, at 4.2 per cent) is understandably happy to welcome.

“I hope it’s the next thing for craft beer,” he says. “We’ve often debated where the market is going. I’ve not fully embraced the American hop thing – I love those beers but our culture in the UK isn’t about that. My expectation is that over the next two or three years you’ll see brewers asking: what are we good at? We’re good at producing low-abv beers packed with taste, at using British ingredients – more malty drinks, porters, stouts.”

Which brings us neatly back to Maris Otter, and Wandle. Sambrook admits he was surprised at the World Beer Awards triumph. “I was absolutely delighted,” he says. “I’ve always been cynical about beer competitions. I’m delighted that this was picked by a panel of independent judges on a blind tasting. Some of the other competitions you’re a bit sceptical about why things get chosen.

“I’ve always thought that Wandle wasn’t a beer that had the flavour profile to stand out – the best thing about Wandle is that it is a lovely, delicate beer. It doesn’t necessarily stand up against something that is packed full of hops, that has a high abv, and therefore if you’re judging it in a competition you’re likely to go for the other one - but if you’re drinking it on a  day-to-day basis you’ll probably have Wandle, because it’s delicious.”

'This is the best time to be a brewer'

John Keeling has seen the ebb and flow of London’s brewing tradition. First came the ebb: when Keeling joined Fuller’s in 1981, Courage was about to become the latest great name to abandon the capital. Some 25 years later, Young’s made their belated, much-lamented departure and left the Chiswick brewer as the sole survivor of London’s brewing heyday.

Then came the flow. Of the 30 or so breweries in the city today, only Fuller’s, Meantime and a handful of brewpubs have been around longer than a few years. It’s a remarkable state of affairs. “I can’t keep track of them,” Keeling admits with a laugh.  “I don’t know how some of them, like Brodie’s, can keep track of all the beers they produce, either.”

That’s not meant as a criticism: Keeling, 56, is evidently delighted with what’s happening around him. He’s as interested in flavour as any craft-beer upstart, as those who’s enjoyed one of Fuller’s recent series of Past Masters beers will know. “The rise of the new breweries means you have to produce more interesting beers,” he says. “You can’t rest on your laurels. You want to try and do more.

“My job is more interesting now – this is the best time to be a brewer. Now, rather than looking at the haze of the beer, the question is: what does it taste like? For brewers like myself who are interested in flavours, that’s a great thing.”

Keeling is popular with many of the new brewers: more than one has told me how useful they've found talking to him at meetings of the London Brewers’ Alliance. The admiration appears to be mutual.

“I like drinking in the company of brewers,” he says. “Even with the new wave of brewers, there’s no ‘our beer is good and your beer is crap’ attitude. It’s more ‘that’s an interesting beer, how do you do that?’ it’s always like that with brewers – you only get a more competitive edge when marketing gets involved.”

Keeling has plenty of knowledge to impart. He has been part of the brewing world since he joined Wilson’s Brewery in his native Manchester in 1974. After three years’ there, he moved onto to Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh before accepting a job at Fuller’s in 1981. In 1999, he became head brewer.

It’s a role he relishes, even if the Fuller’s head brewer no longer gets a town-house at the heart of the complex as part of the job. Walking around Fuller’s part-historic, part ultra-modern site, he enthuses about the brewery’s tradition. “Microbrewers can make beers from the past, but a brewery that existed in the past can make it better,” he says. 

“We have a certain amount of brewing books, we don’t have to use anyone else’s. It’s made right next to the plant it was made in originally. We try very hard to make it the same way – we’ve looked at how we made it, we realised in 1893, we didn’t sparge. Everything here is designed to sparge, but we couldn’t do it because they didn’t. We had to change the way we brew.”

You don’t have to go back to 1893 for a different way of doing things: much has changed since 1981, Keeling says. Back then, they had two basic recipes. “One mild, one bitter,” Keeling says. “From the bitter recipe we produced Golden Pride, ESB, London Pride and Chiswick Bitter. From the mild recipe we produced two other beers.

“In the 1990s we started creating new recipes: Mr Harry, 1845, we revived London Porter. Now we’re actively looking at a huge variety of beers. Our autumn seasonal has been around for 10 years but there’s no demand to get rid of it – people want something extra as well.  

“When the Hock Cellar [Fullers’ brewery tap, where tours of the complex end] was originally designed, there was only three hand pumps. We've got six, and we probably want ten.”

 It’s not just about cask ale. Fuller’s have produced a variety of superb bottled beers in recent years, from the Vintage range to the Past Masters beers. Then there’s the Brewer’s Reserve range of barrel-aged beers.

Next, it seems, is a serious stab at high-quality keg beer. “Keg beer is the next big thing,” he says. “If you think about it, cask beer is seven per cent of the beer drunk in Britain. The best beer in Britain is cask beer but the worst beer in Britain is cask beer too. there’s many places who cannot serve it because they’ve no idea how to look after it.”

Some of these places – particularly in central London – serve London Pride. It’s clearly something that frustrates Keeling. “It does worry me. But if we don’t work with them, do something with them, they’re never going to have cask beer. But now we’ve got an opportunity to sell them keg beer that is equally as interesting.

“The thing you have to learn is that keg is a different environment to cask – just as you have to design a beer for cask, you have to design it for keg. I have no truck with people who say keg beer is rubbish, or people who say cask beer is rubbish. If you say cask beer is rubbish you simply haven’t drunk  any good cask beer – the same with keg.”

It’s a move that will bring Fuller’s into line with the likes of Meantime and Camden Town, whose keg fonts are increasingly common across the city.  More and more of London’s new beer fans expect to find good beer on keg as well as cask; Keeling is well aware that any new Fuller’s product must be of the highest quality. “Craft beer is bringing new drinkers in, and they’re coming in with a relatively open mind,” he says. “They’re quite happy to appreciate cask, can, bottles, keg.

“I do think there’s a load of lager drinkers who are searching for an interesting flavour but can’t find it because it doesn't exist in their environment. Now Meantime are trying to fulfil that need, so are Camden.  

"I think Fuller’s can enter that market. But we won’t put cask London Pride in a keg. It won’t be very good, it would be underselling us and them. It would be perfectly possible to develop a London Pride that is very good in keg but there’s nothing wrong with developing entirely new beers that are designed especially for keg.”