The food blog: can we put London back on the brewing map?
Lifting a glass of Meantime London Lager at the company’s state-of-the-art Greenwich brewery, it’s hard to believe that they made their first brew in only 2000.
This is the largest purpose-built brewery in London since Guinness’s Park Royal brewery in 1936: Meantime moved here in 2010 from a crumbling former tram shed in Charlton. The company is now London’s second-biggest brewer after Fullers, turning out around 10 million litres a year – but it has stayed faithful to its craft beer roots.
Founder and Master Brewer Alastair Hook has taken his inspiration in part from the US, where he worked early in his career. America has seen a remarkable craft beer movement in the past 25 years: there are now more breweries in the US than at any time since 1890.
The company has been at the forefront of a similar renaissance in British brewing – especially in London. The capital used to be home to some of the world’s largest breweries – Truman, Watney, Whitbread, Courage and Young’s, all now gone. Yet around 30 microbreweries have sprung up in the capital over the past decade, some of more than 1,000 nationally - a movement spurred since 2002 by Gordon Brown’s reduction in excise duty for small brewers.
Meantime has succeeded both through high quality and offering a wide range of beers, from London pale ale to raspberry wheat beer. I tried their London Lager from the tank, after just a few days’ maturation, as well as the finished product. The quality, from Suffolk malt and Kent Goldings hops, is clear: unlike most commercial British beers, this would comply with Germany’s famous Reinheitsgebot law, which traditionally allowed only water, barley and hops (and yeast) in beer.
Meantime’s beers are now widely stocked in London’s pubs, as well as at higher-end bars: the Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street, for instance, offers them as part of a range of British-sourced drinks.
London nearly lost its brewing tradition but now it’s firmly back on the map: that’s worth raising a glass to.
Info: Meantime offers brewery tours on Thursday and Friday evenings and weekends (meantimebrewing.com)
See also: Five of the best microbrewery bars
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