In the city where porter emerged as the first beer of the industrial age, London is poised for a bigger surge in craft brewing.
It’s Friday lunchtime at the Dean Swift, a smart but casual corner pub on the south side of the Thames and a few minutes’ stroll from Tower Bridge. Inside the open-space bar, the lunchtime crowd of young professionals and serious barflies scuff the battered oak floorboards as they enter in search of good food and drink. The beer is flowing: The pub has a comprehensive selection of cask, keg and bottles from both home and abroad.
I go for local and order a bottle of Kernel’s Export Stout, brewed a stone’s throw away beneath a railway arch close to Bermondsey subway. Based on an 1850 recipe, this luxurious dark beer manages to blend notes of vanilla, rich chocolate liqueur and freshly ground coffee beans with an end-of-palate acidity that adds a noble and delicious contrast. It’s magnificent.
Fifty years ago, if you’d have asked for a local beer in this pub, you would probably have been offered Best Bitter or Directors, both of them made at the massive Courage brewery sited just around the corner. Courage was just one of the many famous London names that endowed the city with its reputation as brewing capital of the world. London, after all, was where the first beer of the industrial age—porter—emerged, followed by its younger, more vigorous sibling, stout. Furthermore, you could also argue that London was the birthplace of what would become known as India pale ale (though its spiritual home was Burton upon Trent).
So much history and at one stage so many breweries, but in the decades after World War II, most gave up the ghost and either deserted the capital for cheaper sites elsewhere or completely removed themselves from brewing (many being swallowed by larger competitors in the process). Courage’s Anchor Brewhouse (as it was known) closed in 1981 when the brewery went west in the direction of the town of Reading; it is now a block of luxury flats. Whitbread had already left in 1976—its brewery is now a conference centre. Other names that once made Londoners proud of their beery traditions also joined the rush for the exit: Truman, Charrington and Taylor Walker are among the most famous. Walk London’s streets now and their names can be occasionally seen decorating pub facades, lingering on like ghosts.
London Turnaround
By the start of the 21st century, only Fuller’s, Young’s and new guys Meantime, plus a handful of micros, flew the flag for independent brewing in London (though Guinness and Budweiser were produced in massive plants in the western ’burbs). The downward plunge had not yet finished, either. In 2006, Young’s closed and merged with Charles Wells in Bedford, some 50 miles north of the capital (where Courage beers are also now brewed). A year later, it was estimated that London had a mere 10 breweries and brewpubs, small beer if you consider its 5,000 pubs and the millions living and working within the city limits. (It was an ironic fact of geography that London’s brewing deficit mirrored that of a couple of other beer nation capitals—instead of Berlin we think of Munich, while Pilsen always comes before Prague.)
Times change. Fast forward to 2012 and the number of breweries London hosts is now nudging 30. And, given London’s magnificent history and comparative quietness on the recent brewing front, it’s long overdue.
Fuller’s continues to straddle the scene, while Meantime has had a new brewery installed, supposedly the largest new build in London since 1936. As for the newcomers, most are admittedly small outfits: Some, such as Brodie’s, London Brewing and the Florence, are twined with a pub; others, like Redemption, call home an industrial estate. Prize for most unusual location, though, goes to Tap East, which makes its beers behind a bar at the massive Westfield shopping mall in East London.
Whatever the location, though, there’s a sense of innovation, excitement and pure beery bonhomie that’s not been seen in the city for a long time. Some pretty awesome beers are flowing out of the taps as well: elegant pale ales, robust IPAs, slinky lagers, boisterous bitters, ravishing wheat beers and intriguing fusions that any student of the U.S. craft beer boom would recognize (imperial Märzen anyone?).
