Meet the American Brewers Fueling Britain’s Beer Revolution

July 3, 2014 Will Hawkes

For others, tradition can be more of an annoyance. It only takes a short walk around Henley-on-Thames, where Jeff Rosenmeier’s Lovibonds brewery is based, to understand where his vehemence stems from. This extremely well-to-do Oxfordshire town reeks of money: it hosts the Royal Rowing Regatta every year, and every second vehicle, it seems, is a Range Rover or a Jaguar. The result of all this wealth is a conservatism that has stymied Rosenmeier seemingly at every turn.

For a start, he can’t sell his beer in any of the town’s pubs since they are operated—officially or not—by other brewers. Greene King, which bought Oxfordshire’s Morland Brewery in 2000, owns many of them with most of the rest run by Brakspear, once a famous Henley brewery but now a pub chain. The beer is brewed by Wychwood in Witney, on the other side of the county.

And then there’s CAMRA’s classification of his beer, which is served from kegs. “A guy I knew in CAMRA said, ‘You have to see this, it came from head office,’” he relates, a wry smile playing across his lips. “He wikileaked me the document! It said: ‘We’re unable to determine if Lovibonds beer is real or not’. Nobody called me, nobody asked me about the process; it’s because we push the beer with co2. The beer’s real, not filtered!

“I’ll probably never move from here [Henley] but there are a lot of people stuck in their ways. I’m doing the best I can, if you don’t like it … tough shit. You come in here tonight [Lovibonds’ bar in the center of town], only about 20 percent of the customers will be Brits. It’s a very international town; there’ll be Americans, Italians, Brazilians, because they hate the British beer. Now there’s someone making a beer they can drink.”

Rosenmeier’s face lights up when discussion turns to the brewing scene in the United States. He relates his experience at 2012’s Beer World Cup in San Diego, where his Sour Grapes (the result of a fermentation that went wrong with his flagship product, Henley Gold, a wheat beer) was victorious in the World-Aged and Sour Beer category. It was a moment, he says, that joined the dots between his origins as a homebrewer in Wisconsin and his life now.

“I wasn’t holding out any hope,” he says of the dinner where the awards were handed out. “I knew Sour Grapes was alright. The bronze went to The Bruery, the silver was given to Snake River, and I was like, ‘ah, another year.’ I put my head down and I was eating my dinner. And then … ‘And gold to … Lovibonds Sour Grapes!’ It blew me away. I jumped up and the guys from Ska, who were on my table, were like, “I thought you were a blogger, man!’

“Charlie Papazian handed me the award, which was kind of my life going full circle. That’s how I got started, buying his books and my first kit. I idolized this guy for years.”

Rosenmeier’s homebrewing background mirrors that of so many of his contemporaries. Lera O’Sullivan, 30, is a more recent convert; having moved to the United Kingdom to do a Master’s Degree in Slavonic Studies, her (and her British husband’s) frustration with the job market led them to decide to take a punt on brewing.

They have chosen the perfect moment: London, where O’Sullivan brews, has recently fallen back in love with beer. The city seems to acquire a new brewery, like O’Sullivan’s Shamblemoose, every week and more than a handful have American influence: the Texan brewer at Moncada, Angelo Scarnera, for example, or New Yorker Jonah Schulz, who works at The Kernel in Bermondsey.

“It’s excellent, it’s wonderful,” O’Sullivan says. “Not only are the punters looking for [a greater variety of] different beers, but the brewing community is so special, it’s very supportive. I’m optimistic.”

That support has, in O’Sullivan’s case, led to her brewing at Late Knights’ facility in Penge, South London. If she wants to grow bigger, though, she acknowledges that they’ll have to find somewhere else to brew soon.

Not everyone is so confident about the future of London’s small brewers. Travis Mooney founded Hoppy Collie in a Hammersmith cellar last year, but plans to expand have been abandoned as breweries have opened across the city. The demise of Brupond in August last year—which was run by Colorado native David Brassfield—serves as a useful reminder that enthusiasm is not enough.

“I had plans to expand, but realistically I think the brewing scene in London is really crowded now,” he says. “You’ve got 50-something breweries, and I don’t think that that kind of a level is sustainable. There’s too many micros now, we’re seeing a similar kind of explosion that we saw in America in the nineties, where everybody and their brother is establishing a micro.”

No such worries for Witter-Merithew, 32, whose reputation preceded his arrival in the United Kingdom. A long-time collaborator with Mikkeller’s Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, he worked at Fanø Bryghus in Denmark until recently and, extraordinarily, he was the sole focus of a beer festival, ‘Witterfest’, held in an East London pub in August 2012. Cue breathless blog posts, but the North Carolinian’s beers more than back up the hype—in terms of variety as well as quality.

This is a man to whom creativity comes easy. “I had a list of 12 beers I wanted to brew in the next few months, but I had to pull back on some of those,” he says, stretching out in the office of Siren’s industrial-estate brewery. “Some of them probably won’t get brewed … well, they’ll find their way out somehow.”

Witter-Merithew, whose brewery boasts an extensive and varied barrel-aging program, reels off the beers he’s been working on lately. “We just kegged and bottled an 8.3 percent double IPA made with corn and honey. In the course of a week and a half we brewed that, we had the guys from Omnipollo [a Swedish brewery] here to make a Hopfenweisse, we also did a collaboration with seven other brewers in the U.K. based on the seven colors of the rainbow: we randomly assigned everybody a color and they had to use that color to inspire them to make a beer.”

Another beer—a Limoncello IPA—was one of the most talked-about at the London Craft Beer Festival last August. Witter-Merithew’s beers are very much of the moment, which is bad news for English hops. “I’m not interested in them,” he says. “Too earthy for me. In the U.S., at my first brewery, Duck Rabbit [in North Carolina], everything had Fuggles in it. It always smelt like cheese—it was really old when we got it.”

Perhaps he might change his mind should Hawke’s mission to revitalize English hop-growing prove successful. It’s all part of a culture where everything seems possible. “The British beer scene has been completely transformed,” says Hawke. “Look at London now, over 50 breweries, and hundreds if not thousands of great places to drink. It’s probably the best beer scene in the world, and you wouldn’t have said that even 18 months ago.

“If you look at what’s happened in the States, [the new craft-beer culture] really started to get ingrained in the 90s. It’s still growing now. I’m hoping the same thing will happen in the UK.” If it does, Hawke and his countrymen and women will deserve plenty of the credit.

Will Hawkes is the author of Craft Beer London and the current British beer writer of the year. He contributes to a number of publications around the world, including The Independent, The Washington Post and the Financial Times.