Please welcome Andy MacWilliams back to the site. You may have seen him at a beer share or two.
I land in London after a two week work trip in Switzerland and Germany. I’m spending two nights in Battersea and on the first sunny day, I take an e-bike through Battersea Park to hit Clapton Craft in St Johns Hill. Clapton has a handful of locations throughout London and this one has a few tables outside, four seats at a small ball and a well curated section of coolers focused on English craft. While I browse, I have a half pint of Time & Tide Spratwaffler session IPA. It’s crisp and has good malt character at 3% ABV. This is a welcome relief to my palate after my previous week stuck with the Karlsberg offerings in Kaiserslautern. I select a bunch of cider and saison to go and the manager checking me out mentions how nice it is to see someone buying mixed fermentation stuff. Like so many beer markets, London is dominated by hazies. The friendly staff point me in the direction of a bar called Ghost Whale, but I may have to sideline that for a future trip. Beer people always know where to go.
My next spot is a hunger-forced pitstop at the Victoria Arms in Clapham. I have an unspectacular lunch with a pint of Brixton Coldharbour. It’s cold and fizzy and went well enough with grilled chicken. They advertise craft beer and real ale and something tells me pre-COVID this may have been true. It’s not true today though and I fail to finish my Heineken imposter. The next stop is the US Embassy Pub with incredible views of the Thames and two craft options from neighborhood producer Mondo on tap. Don’t go to the embassy looking for a quick pint though; it’s for diplomatic staff and their honored guests (like me). From there we move across the river and have a pre-dinner pint at the Sutton Arms in Farringdon. They have a hazy IPA on cask, which admittedly wasn’t a great treatment. Sweet sugary notes are all that’s left when the carbonation doesn’t push the fruity and tropical aromas to the top. The Sutton Arms is real old school, a maze of nooks and crannies and the Friday after work crowd is boisterous.
My friends have kindly booked a table for us at St John restaurant at Smithfield market. I start with an English pale ale from 40ft Brewing. It’s bright yellow and fruity. There is an underlying biscuit note, which I guess makes it English. My friend has a Cote Breton Cider from a French producer called Kerisac. This is very well made, the apples are far more earthy than bright or funky. Think about a bite into the bruised part of the apple. Light tannins and acid that feels on the lower end of the spectrum for the style allow it to pair well with everything. A bottle of wine is poured with dinner and then I skip dessert and go for a power move. Having trouble deciding between a glass of port and a half pint of perry, I choose both. The Peardrop Explodes from Oliver’s is so soft. The pear is a nice backdrop for notes of lemon and elderflower. St. John has maintained a Michelin star since 2009 and there’s no wonder why. The food is impeccable (the bone marrow and salad on toast and the venison loin being the stars of my meal). And it’s great to see high-end dining also embrace a well-curated draft menu. The farm-to-table ethos doesn’t need to end at the plate. Quite a few DC restaurants should take note.
After dinner it’s off to Mother Kelly’s in Nine Elms. This is a beer bar for all, with college students occupying long tables and older couples finishing off a double date at the bar. The star here is the Left Handed Giant West Coast IPA which feels like a throwback. Aggressive bitterness, pine and fermented totally dry, it’s a beer you can have many of. Too many of. And then… another cider! Mother Kelly’s has 4 ciders out of their 24 taps and the Dunkerton Black Fox pops. Slightly higher carbonation than some of the ciders I’ve had recently; it’s grippy in the mouth and just off dry. It takes me an extra minute to finish this pint, but I don’t mind. We close out the night with a pint at my friend’s local. A properly poured Guinness as a nightcap sends me home full and sleepy.
My family arrives the following day and after a night’s rest, we head down to Bermondsey on a sunny Sunday. Bermondsey is home to “The Beer Mile,” a stretch of London that has a number of breweries, taprooms and eateries. Prior to COVID I hit the Beer Mile solo and had a blast. My experience on this day is a little different since I’ve got 2 families plus my embassy friend in tow. London Beer Factory is the far west edge of the mile and it’s a good place to start. The menu is broad and has something for everyone. The other dad in the group enjoys the non-alcoholic pale ale. My wife drinks the 4% dry stout. I get spontaneously fermented saison brewed exclusively with Kohatu hops. It’s appropriately sour and dry with pleasant herbal notes.
We move from the Beer Factory to Cloudwater, which if you’re a beer nerd and reading this then a brewery you will have heard of. It’s London’s version of Other Half [ed: and they’ll be at Snallygaster this year!]. It’s a haze factory and it’s my main event. They have a lager and a dry porter on, but if you come to Cloudwater then you come for hops. They don’t disappoint. I’m happy to see more 4% and 5% options than the last time I was here. They also have an extensive cooler for take away. They also have a non-alcoholic option on draft, which is appreciated by my party. It’s an NA NEIPA brewed with Citra and Nelson Sauvin. It’s almost too good to be non-alcoholic. The last stop for our party along the beer mile is Anspach & Hobday. Like the others, this is built into an industrial space under the tube tracks and they have crammed equipment or seating into every crevice. This is another beer menu that has one of everything, ranging more toward old school British pub styles (to include an NA option) over continental complexity. The big commercial push is behind London Black. It’s a 4.4% porter that’s often served on nitro. It’s pitched as a local alternative to Guinness; Anspach & Hobbs’ Arch House brewery is much closer to home for British drinkers than the St. James Gate product. It’s thick and creamy with plenty of malt character and some smokey notes. If you drink Guinness at your regular pub and desire to drink something locally made then you won’t regret switching to London Black.
It’s worth pausing the trip report for a moment to commend the Brits on their commitment to non-alcoholic options. Nearly every pub, brewery and restaurant I stop into over my week in the UK has some sort of non-alcoholic beer on draft or in bottles. It makes perfect sense, when you think about it, for a society with such a strong and committed pub culture. The English socialize differently than Americans. The pub is their third place and has been for centuries. It’s a place you can eat and drink of course, but it’s more than that. It’s a place where communities congregate. Where you begin and end adventures with your friends. Where you catch up with your neighbors and have tea with your gran. Within that context, non-alcoholic options are essential. There is far less stigma around NA beers in the US than ever before, as Berg and Stein wrote about.. In showing a commitment to serving quality, NA options, English pubs continue to make themselves a place where the whole community can meet.
The fam and I head out of London for a few nights while our friends go back to school. We take a breezy train down to Brighton to get out of their hair and check out the sea. You are met with craft beer the moment you step off the train at the end of the platform where Seven Cellars awaits. It’s just the outpost of a larger shop a few blocks away, and yet there are still four full coolers of quality craft, focused more on Dorset, Hampshire and Sussex than the London bottle shops. Off-season Brighton is a college town. It’s a popular LGBTIQA+ vacation spot and, as one business owner told us, it’s a place for everyone. We certainly find that to be true at Hand in Hand, the pub outpost of Hand Brewing in Worthing, just a few miles down the coast. We walk in with a picnic lunch, common since many pubs only serve “English style tapas” (aka peanuts and crisps). We find a few pensioners having their afternoon pint, a group of friends celebrating one’s cancer free diagnosis, and a staff that’s quite happy to chat while we nibble. The cask ales are the highlight, with two very well made dark beers. They have a trio of “New England IPAs” on draft and I try two. Both are good beers and very drinkable… but they lack the body and hop aroma to be thought of in the same vein as our Northern haze factories. Maybe they meant New English IPAs? The publican directs us toward The Independent, a bright corner pub in the center of Brighton with an excellent draft menu and The Smiths on the PA. My wife starts with an English rauchbier while I have a pint of cider from yet another producer (Ascension). She’s made the right call. The cider is fine, lightly sweet and works for me as an aperitif. The smoked lager from Baybrooke is unexpected but welcome. It looks like an English pale ale, with a clear caramel body but the aromas of smoked almonds and toasted grains fool the brain. It’s lightly sweet, very earthy and wonderfully nutty. It disappears from my wife’s glass quickly before she asks, “what else do they have like that?” Nothing sadly, but I love seeing a small English brewery do their version of a relatively unpopular Bavarian style.
We hit a few other spots in Brighton over the next two days. North Laine’s beer and atmosphere leave us wanting. Both cater to a crowd closer to my son’s age than mine. They have six of their own beers on tap and nearly half are flavored with something. This is the only place all week my family and I don’t feel totally welcome. Bison Beer down on the beach is tucked into a bunch of converted Conex containers. There’s a coffee shop in one. A pizza joint in another. The beer is fine, easy drinking but a bit passive. It feels made for a beach crowd without exotic tastes. The Drop located in Brighton’s Open Market is well worth a mention. The open market is a handful of food stalls and second hand shops in what looks to be a converted train warehouse. The market offers everything you need, which thanks to The Drop, includes several coolers of well curated craft beer. Worth highlighting too is the entire cooler dedicated to NA options. It represents nearly 12% of the shop’s inventory.
The last stop on the beer portion of our tour happens back in London. Halfway between the Tate Modern and the London Eye is an awesome “bar” called The Hop Locker. I visited many years back when they were pouring in a particle board shed under Golden Jubilee Bridge on the south bank of the Thames. They can now be found pouring outdoors at the Southbank Centre Food Market. The market itself is worth checking out on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. We popped in for a late lunch after The Eye and the family split an eclectic mix of polish sausage, Mauritian curry and Nigerian suya. I start with a pint of, you guessed it, cider with the Pilton Murmuration while my better half has the Whippet porter from Double-Barrelled. The Pilton is well blended, essentially two different batches of cider mixed into a single offering. There is complexity while still being approachable. Per usual, my wife makes the better choice. The Whippet is 5%, creamy, malty and crazy drinkable. Macro brewed porter tends to come off as watery and lacking body. The craft porters we’ve had on this trip haven’t lacked for body while avoiding the feeling of being heavy. We chat up the staff and they recommend I take a can of Verdant’s Cheeky IPA to go and I’m glad I did. Verdtant is a well known English haze producer, but this beer is a collaboration with Green Cheek out of Orange County, California. The Hop Locker team tells me a series of collaborations with Green Cheek has elevated Verdant’s haze game. I pop my can later in the evening and I’m blown away. It looks the part and is huge with fresh orange and mango sherbet. It’s clear the malt bill has a healthy portion of oats, as the creamy texture holds up the orange and melon and pineapple. This is one of the best beers I’ve had in 2024.
Looking back on the week, I’m struck by two themes. Pubs are great and shouldn’t be conflated with bars. London has bars. But they have far more pubs. At their best, pubs work their butts off to make everyone feel included. Many appeared to have a solid customer flow from the moment they opened through the moment they closed. Realistically, you could probably live in a good one for a week even now and not miss much. English ciders also thoroughly impressed me throughout the week. One hundred and twenty-five years ago if you ordered a cider in England you likely got a mug full of scrumpy. It would have been wildly inconsistent and unpredictable. Twenty-five years ago if you ordered a cider in England then you likely got Bulmers. It would have been macro produced, sweet and soulless. The English cider revival is fully on now with boutique producers fermenting apples and pears for nearly every type of palate. Craft culture in London is also alive and well, which is what you’d expect for a city roughly the same size as Chicago by area. Like Chicago, it’s hard to feel there’s not something for you. There are places that celebrate old school British beer. There are places that would make you think you were in Brooklyn. Other places would leave you feeling you were in Wallonia… at least the beer would, not the setting.
This review has made me thirsty though, and after 3 weeks away I really need to get myself a becher of Grave Shift.
