'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.” 

'Maybe I need to be more ruthless'

What’s it like to be the nicest man in British brewing? Andy Moffat laughs. He’s heard that one before. “Maybe I need to be a bit more ruthless,” he says, but the smile on his face suggests he doesn’t mean it.

His actions confirm that suspicion. If Moffat was more ruthless he might still be working as a banker in The City, which he did until his gnawing desire to brew became too much. That was in 2010, when he set up the Redemption Brewing Company in Tottenham. In the short time since, the brewery’s cask ales have become regulars on all the best bars in town. And last Friday, Big Chief, a punchy IPA made with New Zealand hops, was voted the South-East's best beer by the Society of Independent Brewers.

Such is the quality of his products that Moffat, 39, has not had to be particularly ruthless in selling his wares. There's that niceness again. “We don’t do any sales,” he says. “I don’t want to hassle people. I just think about how many calls pubs get from people trying to sell them beer. I think most good pubs in London want to have a nice spread of beers  - they know what they’re doing. They’ve got a clear idea of what they want.”

Which, more often than not, includes at least one Redemption beer. The softly-spoken Scotsman has the intelligence and clear-sightedness you’d expect of a banker, even if he has rather more heart than the tabloid stereotype would allow. That clear thinking is obvious when he talks. Listen to him, for instance, on the subject of kegged beer and why Redemption, who for the moment produce only cask ale, will not be joining the rush to put beer into keykegs.

“I think there’s good keg beer around but it’s too much investment for us,” he says. “I think that’s where the future growth is going to be but it would be a lot of work. We have a brewing consultant, a guy called Dave Smith, who comes down three times a year to do quality control here. [That shows how] We want to keep standards up:  if we were going to do the other things we might not do it very well and that would affect our good cask reputation.

“I know keykegs are the big things right now but the cost adds about £20 – I can envisage myself having a conversation with the pub: ‘oh, if you want it in keykeg that will be an extra £20’. They’d be ‘we’ll have it on cask!’”

Don’t get the idea, though, that Moffat dislikes change. The recent updating of Redemption’s branding illustrates how keen he and his five-strong team at the brewery (which includes his other half Sam in the office) are to reach a new audience. “If the beer’s good, the beer guys don’t care [about the branding],” he says. “But if you want to get other people interested, who might not otherwise try it in a pub, that helps.”

Moffat is clearly happy with where the company is. He says – and it’s easy to believe him – that he’s still pleased he made the jump from city-boy to brewer. The blossoming London craft-beer pub scene is opening up new avenues for those like him who produce good beer.

“The great thing about London is that lots of the breweries are doing different things ,” he says. “You’ve got The Kernel who are a bit more niche, Sambrook's who make good solid session beer, Brodie's doing all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff, Stuart [Lascelles] at East London is making good beer, it’s a real family business. We’re somewhere in the middle.

“One of the things we like about being in Tottenham is that there’s still an edgy, urban quality to it. You’ve got a contradiction in that there’s a brewery in a place where very little cask ale is sold. But it’s a quirky place, there’s an element that’s like Shoreditch 15 years ago – I’m not sure Tottenham will ever change like that but it’s an interesting place.”

It’s a long way from Moffat’s previous life working for Deutsche Bank, too. Moffat, though, insists bankers are not all bad. “I got on really well with the guys I worked with,” he says. “ We helped each other out.

“But there’s a minority, a large minority, I don’t know what the best word is to use [to describe them]! They don’t care about anything. You don’t just want to care about yourself, we’d be selling bonds to insurance companies and pension funds and you’d want them to be happy. There were some of us who were interested in more than just ourselves.”

Moffat admits it was a bit of a midlife crisis that led him to brewing (‘Some people gets a sports car,” he says, “I opened a brewery”) but he doesn’t regret it: “When I got out of banking, it was starting to go a little pear-shaped. It was going in that direction.

“[At the time] I thought, ‘There are lots of breweries up and down the country but very few in London’ – I tried to analyse my way out of it: ‘Oh, it’s a bad idea, if it was a good idea someone would be doing it already.’ The more I thought about it the more I thought it could work.”

It was the perfect time to make the leap: Redemption opened perhaps a year-and-a-half before London filled up with little breweries. The last year has been good. Moffat is now selling around 140 casks a week, as compared to 80 12 months ago. There are no plans for rapid expansion: home will be a Tottenham housing estate for the foreseeable future.

Moffat is cautiously optimistic. “There are many more people opening in London now but we’ve not felt [the impact of that] yet,” he says. “There’s still a big potential for expansion.

“I’m fearful that there’s an element of faddishness with cask ale at the moment. I dare say that in a couple of years things might move on – to gin distilleries, perhaps, that might be the next thing.

“There’s always room for good beer. It has to be of the right quality, though.” 

Images by James Lambie for 'Craft Beer London' (Vespertine Press 2012)

Welcome to Craft Beer London - the blog

The Craft Beer London app has been out for over a month now and the response from the capital's beer lovers has been tremendous. That's why we thought it was time to offer something else, in the form of a blog. Now that might not sound particularly original - the beer world has its fair share of excellent blogs - so we're going to aim to offer something slightly different, something along the lines of what I used to produce in my days at The Independent.

The aim is to give you a taste of beer culture, both in this city and further afield. The British beer scene has never been so complex: each brewer has his or her own philosophy and if you understand that then, perhaps, you can enjoy the beer even more. It's a living, vibrant culture and I'm hoping I'll be able to reflect that on this blog.

And even if I can't, at the very least it might introduce you to some interesting beers that you won't have tried before.