The Anchor Brewery at Tower Bridge

As Des de Moor points out, beer geeks got very excited last year when news broke that Wells and Young’s were to start brewing Courage Imperial Russian Stout again.

We’re still sulking that the first brew disappeared to the states, except for a few bottles sent to beer writers and industry types.

What we find particularly frustrating, however, is that it’s possible to disembark from a boat on the south bank of the Thames not far from the building which still bears the words ANCHOR BREWHOUSE HORSELYDOWN; to walk past the site of the old Barclay Perkins brewery; and to a Young’s Pub with a view of St Paul’s Cathedral, without finding one drop of IRS.

London is simultaneously spoiled for beer, and oddly neglected — out-of-the-way locations are increasingly stuffed with craft beer bars while more traditional breweries use their flagship locations to sell burgers and Peroni.

If you want to drink a historic interpretation of imperial stout in Southwark, Harvey’s at the Royal Oak is your best bet. Plenty of other British brewers are also selling bottled beers inspired by Courage IRS, including the Old Dairy Brewery whose Tsar Top is based directly on a historic recipe.

Picture: Westfield, Stratford, by Mallsecrets, via Flickr Creative Commons.

It’s a rare departure from our usual two-bloggers-one-voice approach, but Bailey suggested I write this one alone, because I have to declare two interests in commenting on Tap East: my brother works there and it’s “on my manor”. I grew up and have lived in East London for most of my life; I used to work in Stratford and my Dad lives there now. To see it exploding into Olympic-inspired life is rather special for me. I really do remember when all of that was just fields (or wasteland, at any rate).

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of shopping centres but, if you have to have them, Westfield Stratford City isn’t bad. As well as welcome brands like Lego (big kid…) there are some quirky shops and cafes around the Great Eastern Market, which is where you will find Tap East, the first and only brewery in a UK shopping centre.

Inside you will be greeted by knowledgeable staff (I am very impressed by how much my brother has learnt in such a short space of time) who will help a baffled shopping refugee or hold their own with a lonesome beer geek at the bar, if required. When we arrived, they were gathered in a huddle, sniffing beer and discussing its aroma. A good sign.

Eight handpumps dispense local brews and reliably excellent guests (e.g. Oakham, Brentwood). We liked Tap East’s John Edward Edwin bitter in particular. On keg, various joys included Harviestoun’s Old Engine oil, perhaps the next step on from Camden Ink in the Guinness fan’s voyage of discovery? And there are bottles galore, so even the most adventurous beer geek should be able to find something new.

The main difficulty it will have is trying to feel even remotely as cosy as a pub when it is, after all, in a great big breezy shopping centre, without a separating door, and with centrally piped music to boot. Obviously, January and February in the middle of a recession will also make for challenging trading conditions. And there’s also plenty of competition, with Brodies and the Red Lion also offering excellent beer geek destinations nearby.

However, our experiences of being squashed in the Craft Beer Co., Cask and the Southampton Arms on the same weekend would suggest the market is not saturated, and Tap East is a worthy competitor to all of those in terms of the beer offerings, with the added advantage that you might even get a seat, all for the sake of a few minutes on the tube.

A couple of years ago, we were excited just to find a passable pub in Stratford. How times have changed.

Boak

Camden Town Brewery launched a nitro-keg stout late last year. Although cask-conditioned stout is a great thing, this is a clever move in commercial terms as well as striking a much more effective blow against the ubiquity of Guinness in London’s pubs than cask stout could ever realistically hope to achieve.

First, in commercial terms, like many of Camden’s beers, it sits only just over the conceptual line from the usual suspects. It looks pretty much like Guinness; it feels a bit like Guinness in the mouth; and, although considerably more flavourful than recent pints of Guinness we’ve had, isn’t “imperialised”, flavoured with chocolate/espresso/whisky/etc., or full of flowery US hops. Many people who normally drink Guinness (not beer geeks) will order this and go on to drink more than one pint, probably without grumbling. It’ll sell.

And, secondly, there’s why they deserve a medal: this beer might start to wean people off their automatic, go-to brands. It starts to send the message that there are stouts other than Guinness and that it is possible to stray from your usual brand without being struck down by lightning.

If we want to see choice in pubs, we just can’t have gigantic, monolithic brands stealing all the oxygen in a given space, as Guinness currently does, and Camden are doing something about it.

Fuller’s cask-conditioned Black Cab Stout is a marvellous development, too, but, we suspect, a step too far for many Guinness drinkers, lacking the familiar creamy head. And let’s not forget that Sam Smith’s nitro-keg stout has been around for years…

Ten years ago, with the range of beers they offer today, the Red Lion in Leytonstone or the Bull in Highgate would have been among the best pubs in London. Now, while certainly way better than run-of-the-mill, they merely count as friendly neighbourhood craft beer bars.

That’s right: every neighbourhood in London now seems to have a craft beer bar and many (like the Bull) are also brewing. Everywhere you look, there are enamel signs advertising Orval and glowing neon Brooklyn Brewery logos. These days, you’re never more than a bus ride from a pint of Dark Star or a Camden Helles.

These kinds of places seem (thank God) to be replacing the kind of ‘style bars’ or ersatz ‘gastropubs’ which were everywhere until recently and which had snobbery without the saving grace of exciting beer. They were the kinds of places where you would be charged a fiver for a pint of stale Erdinger wheat beer or four quid for a pint of UK-brewed San Miguel; now, for that money, you get beers that are (arguably) worth the asking price.

There’s more detail on each of these pubs to follow in subsequent posts. Suffice to say we liked them all the more for their localness: drinking in them didn’t feel like a trip to Beerworld, Britain’s newest theme park.

Two hours in to a busy shift at one of London’s currently trendy specialist beer bars, we see a barman heading into the gents. He’s wearing rubber gloves and carrying a mop because someone has pissed all over the wall and floor.

Fifteen minutes later, he picks up a broken glass from a shelf near us, only just avoiding cutting his hand. His face reddens. “Fucking pigs,” he says under his breath, and you know he means all of us — every one of the tipsy, slightly loud people crowding the bar that night.

Later, when we’re at the bar, he doesn’t seem to be in the mood to talk to us or anyone else. He is tight-lipped and frowning. In fact, he doesn’t seem to want to be there at all.

Of course it’s never the customer’s problem that the barman is having a bad day but, sometimes, especially in overstuffed London, we do understand where the scowls and aloofness come from.

Some bar staff and managers handle this by Tweeting their fury in real time which can be enlightening and dispiriting in equal measure.

Pic by Paulius Peciura from Flickr Creative Commons.

This weekend, we found ourselves at the Southampton Arms in North London with one of the friends who introduced us to it not long after it opened.

Although it’s more-or-less his local, he actually isn’t remotely interested in beer. In lieu of Becks or Staropramen, he drinks Camden Helles, but under protest.

Nonetheless, he also dutifully tried every hoppy ale that we brought back to the table, screwing up his face in disgust at each one.

His verdict, at the end of the night, was damning. Where we’d detected elderflower, citrus, grape, and so on, he picked up only one thing.

“All these beers… all these weird beers you drink… they just smell of cheap hairspray!”

In a funny way, we know exactly what he means.

Greene King, by all accounts, are puzzled and hurt by the disdain in which they (and especially their IPA) are held by beer geeks.

As usual, we (as Tandleman would say) sit on the fence a bit when it comes to Greene King: we recognise they make some good beers, but worry that their IPA is a Trojan horse — a beer so bland it has more in common with John Smith’s Extra Smooth than any other ‘real ale’.

However, inspired by this post at the Campaign for Really Good Beer, we thought we’d be constructive and suggest five things they can do to improve their image.

1. Instead of inviting critics and commentators one at a time to come and stand on your lovely roof and meet you charming head brewer, why not make a lot more information about how your beer is made available online? At the moment (unless we’re missing something) the website is all about branding and packaging.

2. Get out and try GK IPA as it is drunk in pubs all around the country: however subtle, balanced and well-made it might be at source, by the time it reaches, say, Exeter, it is usually, in our experience, warm, vinegary and flat. Has it got more market share than your quality control mechanisms can cope with?

3. As CAMRGB suggested, stop pretending that your pubs serve beers from a range of breweries and, in particular, nix the disingenuous London Glory. This is just cheeky and takes your customers for mugs.

4. With that huge London estate, surely there’s room somewhere for a pub which serves your full range of beers, from the rarely seen but apparently excellent mild, via Suffolk Strong, all the way up to the currently brewery-exclusive 5X? A flagship pub where you could send cynics to taste your best products as you intend them to be tasted?

5. On the subject of mild, given that anyone drinking GK IPA has already foregone any pretensions of youthfulness or trendiness, probably attracted by the low ABV as much as anything else, maybe there’s a market you’re failing to tap? We groan when we see your IPA on sale in a pub in Cornwall, but we’d be delighted to see your mild.

Some of this would also apply to St Austell and some other big regional brewers. If any of the above are already happening and we’ve missed them, let us know.

When we heard in 2008 that brewing had begun again in the small set up at the back of the William IV pub in Leyton, only a few minutes from our house in Walthamstow, we were very excited. We were only more excited to discover that Brodie’s planned to brew a wide range of beers, from traditional milds through to fruit-flavoured beers, via imperial stout. At that time, London breweries were few and far between, and this was right on our doorstep.

In those early months and years, however, we were painfully aware that these were brewers on a learning curve and others (see the comments on that article) agreed. When James and Lizzie Brodie kindly sent us a box of beers to review, of the ten or twelve provided, only a handful were really impressive. The others hinted at greatness but had too much of the plastic-bucket homebrew about them — too much yeastiness, muddy flavours and, er, variable conditioning. (Beery carpets. Joy.)

Well, it seems safe to suggest that, now, three years on, they have reached the end of that learning curve. We keep reading breathlessly admiring comments on their beers on Twitter from all kinds of discerning people, and the pint of their Citra (3.1%) we had at Cask in Pimlico last week was as good as any pale and hoppy beer we’ve had from any other brewery. Crisp, well-defined, clean flavours; sparkling carbonation; and all at barely any alcoholic strength at all. A real knockout.

If you’ve been wary of Brodie’s having been a disappointed early adopter, it’s time to give them another go, and see what all the fuss is about.

Hopping in Kent, 1875, from the British Library, via Wikipedia.

From East London (1901) by Walter Besant:

They ran through Wapping and along Thames Street, which is empty on Saturday afternoon; they ran across London Bridge, they poured into London Bridge Station. One of the girls knew the name of the station they wanted; it was in Kent. They took tickets, and they went off.

They had gone hopping.

Thousands of Londoners in the season go hopping. I  wish I could dwell upon the delights of the work. Unfortunately, like the summer, it is too soon over. While it lasts the hoppers sleep in barns, they work in the open, they breathe fresh air, they get good pay, they enjoy every evening a singsong and a free-and easy. The beer flows like a rivulet; everybody is thirsty, everybody is cheerful, everybody is friendly.

When it was over Liz returned, browned and refreshed and strengthened, but fearful of the consequences, because she had deserted her work. But she was fortunate. They took her back into the factory and so she went on as before.

When visitors to the UK ask us where to go in London for a pint, our default answer for a while has been “Manchester, York, Leeds, Sheffield…” but things are looking up and we think the time has come for us to put that advice to bed. London is no longer a beer desert.

More Breweries

Back in 2007, around the time this blog started, we were chatting over a pint (as per) and bemoaning the lack of breweries in London. Back then, Young’s having just evacuated the city, there were only two: Fuller’s and Meantime.

As of today, Des de Moor reckons there are 14, with another 11 opening in the next year or so.

More beer geek pubs and bars

When The Pembury Tavern reopened in Hackney in 2006, a short train or bus ride from Walthamstow, we were ecstatic. It had multiple guest ales and a range of bottled beer from Belgium and Germany — what a find!

Now, although we still have a soft spot for the old place, it’s been overtaken, as places like the Rake, Cask, The Craft Beer Company, the Euston Tap, Mason and Taylor and Tap East open at a rate we can’t keep up with on our rare visits from Cornwall to the big city.

Good beer in ordinary local pubs

In 2006, our local in Walthamstow, the Nags Head, had (as far as we can recall) two cask ales which were not always in good condition. Even so, it was the best pub around by far.

On our most recent visit, a couple of weeks ago, the number of pumps had reached six, all in perfect condition, and Chimay had popped up in the fridge. This is an average pub, not a beer geek destination. And, what’s more, within a ten minute walk, there are now several other pubs offering a decent selection of interesting beer — namely the Rose and Crown on Hoe Street and the William IV in Leyton.

Pubs with thoughtful landlords and decent beer are beginning to become almost commonplace. The best ones seem to be thriving, too, despite the economy.

Appreciation of London’s brewing heritage

In 2006, Meantime (with dodgy IPA and porter histories for reference) were ploughing a lonely furrow in honouring London’s brewing tradition with attempts at historical recipes. Yes, Pitfield were doing something similar, but reclusively.

Now, Fuller’s are brewing an excellent IPA; a fantastic porter; and rummaging in their archives for old recipes to bring back to life. The ubiquitous Truman’s brand has been revived (we’ll see how that works out). And, finally, from Bedfordshire comes the news that Courage Imperial Stout is also to reappear on our shelves. UPDATE: and Kernel, of course, whose range of historically inspired brews is wowing the blogoshire.

So, things are looking up for London.

UPDATE: and here’s the Relucant Scooper making more-or-less the same points, better and earlier, in a review of Des de Moor’s book.