Brewery due to close
Original site: Units G-H2 Penhall Lane SE7 8RX (Greenwich)
Current site: 1 Lawrence Trading Estate, Blackwall Lane SE10 0AR
meantimebrewing.com
First sold beer: April 2000
Expected to close: by end 2024
Old Brewery Greenwich
Brewpub no longer brewing
Pepys Building, Old Royal Naval College SE10 9LW
First sold beer: February 2010
Brewing ceased: January 2016
Meantime is currently the second oldest and second largest brewery in London. Founded by one of British brewing’s most influential figures, Greenwich-born Alastair Hook, it was a trailblazer of contemporary brewing both in the capital and in the rest of the UK. It later became the first of the 21st century London brewers bought by a multinational, leading eventually but somewhat inevitably to its demise.
Alastair trained at Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh, but regularly spent summers as a brewing assistant in California and completed his postgraduate studies at Weihenstephan brewing school near Munich, learning to brew quality lager, then a type of beer largely unknown at home. In 1991, he brewed at a pioneering brewpub, the Packhorse, in Ashford, Kent, specialising in German-style beers.
Four years later he helped create Freedom in Parsons Green, London, the first successful and long-lived UK craft lager brewery: it’s still in operation today, although in Staffordshire under different ownership. In 1998 he was involved in setting up two of Britain’s earliest US-style upmarket brewpub-restaurants: Mash and Air in Manchester (closed in 2000) and Mash in Great Portland Street, London (closed in 2007).
Two years later, Alastair opened his own brewery in Charlton, named Meantime for its location near Greenwich and its commitment to properly matured beers. At a time when the ambition of most microbreweries stretched not much further than the local free trade and CAMRA festivals, Meantime pursued the unusual course of concentrating on keg and bottled craft lagers and wheat beer, targeting restaurants and bars more than traditional pubs, making beers for the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain as part of its premium Taste the Difference range, and contract-brewing for Mash and Freedom among others. A range of beers under its own name didn’t appear until 2005.
In September 2010, Alastair achieved his long-held ambition to move the main brewery to Greenwich, with an expansion to the present location near the Blackwall Tunnel portal, equipped with a new German-built Rolec 100 hl brewhouse. The first modern UK-brewed unpasteurised and unfiltered beer for dispense from 1,000 l tanks, inspired by the Czech model, launched from here in 2013. A new tasting room opened at the front of the site in 2015, next to a 10 hl pilot kit visible from the road and a shop with the first walk-in beer fridge in London, with a cluster of nine outdoor 100 hl tanks further back.
There’s also a third brewhouse, a 20 l homebrew kit used internally for tests and experiments. A seminar room next to the main brewhouse, used for tutored tastings and brewery tours, displays bottles and glasses from the collection of legendary beer writer Michael Jackson. In 2019 Meantime finally occupied two units formerly used as an archive by the National Maritime Museum which had previously separated the tasting room from the main brewery, bringing annual output to around 102,000 hl.
Besides the tasting room at the brewery, Meantime long operated a pub, the Greenwich Union, opened in 2001 just outside the town centre (56 Royal Hill SE10 8RT). This remained closed following the 2020-21 Covid-19 lockdowns and in April 2021 was sold to Young’s, who used it as an extension of their existing pub the Richard I (Tolly’s) next door. The Old Brewery pub at the Old Royal Naval College in the heart of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site was founded as a brewpub by Meantime in 2010 but was sold to Young’s in 2016: it no longer brews, though the kit is still in place and there has been occasional talk of reviving its use.
Meantime was bought by SABMiller in May 2015, a deal negotiated by then-Chief Executive Nick Miller, who formerly worked for the US-South African group. SABMiller was bought out in turn in October 2016 by the world’s biggest brewing group, Anheuser-Busch InBev. To comply with monopoly regulation, ABI sold on the Greenwich business along with Grolsch and Peroni to Asahi, marking the first direct involvement of one of the big Japanese-based groups in the UK industry. Meantime retained its own identity and management for some time, but in 2019 Asahi bought a second London brewery, Fuller’s, and subsequently began integrating the management of both facilities. Alastair went into semi-retirement and eventually relinquished his involvement.
Through Fuller’s, Asahi also acquired the Dark Star brewery in Partridge Green, West Sussex, which had long links back to the emergence of London microbrewing in the 1980s (see Pitfield’s). Asahi closed Dark Star in December 2022, shifting production to Meantime. As the Sussex brewery produced numerous cask beers, this required adding cask facilities at Greenwich for the first time (the cask version of Meantime London Pale Ale available around 2009-10 and subsequently withdrawn was contract brewed by Adnams in Southwold, Suffolk). The exception was flagship brand Dark Star Hophead, which had already been transferred to Fuller’s and remained there.
Then in March 2024, Asahi announced it was closing Meantime completely, and consolidating all its UK brands at the Fuller’s site in Chiswick. No final closure date has yet been set, and there’s a chance that small-scale brewing might continue in a small way in Greenwich through what Asahi describes as a ‘new standalone consumer retail experience’ which will maintain its presence in the area. Based on previous experience of brewpubs managed by giant brewing concerns, I’m not optimistic about the long-term prospects of this.
Aside from the cask Dark Star brands, beers are in tank, keg, bottle and can: the bottles are filled on site but canning is done at Grolsch in the Netherlands. Some London Lager was also brewed at Groslch in Enschede in 2016 but this ended with the expansion of capacity at Greenwich.
A previous version of this post stated that brewing at the Old Brewery Greenwich was erratic, sparking a discussion in the comments section. This revision makes no observations about the frequency of brewing at the site.
Updated 8 March 2024.
Two small quibbles –
The TOB microbrewery was not automated.
Brewing at TOB, whilst the premises belonged to Meantime was not erratic.
Thanks Rod — I’ll correct accordingly, though on the ‘erratic’ point, there were some long periods of time when the brewhouse at the Old Brewery wasn’t in use. Speaking to Alastair when I last updated my book in 2015, he told me that it hadn’t been used for some time but they were planning to start brewing on it again. Not long after that the premises were announced as for sale. Very rarely did I see beer from it on the bar. Perhaps I was just unlucky. It’s not a criticism — I’ve seen this happen to many a brewpub-type setup like this as with all the other pressures of running a large pub, brewing often slips, particularly when there’s a top class parent brewery just up the road.
With all due respect to Alastair’s comment, the TOB brewery was brewing every week day from 2010 until mid 2013 and there was always TOB brewed beer on the bar (usually two actually). I was the brewer, employed full time to brew at TOB. I moved to a different role in mid 2013, and a new brewer, John Driebergen took over. At some point in 2014 (from memory) he left to go to Fourpure. Up until this point there was always at least one TOB beer on the bar, drawn from serving tanks in the cellar, Czech Tankova style.
After this, brewing became less frequent, but the statement “there were several pauses in brewing at the Old Brewery” is untrue. I and other brewers from Meantime’s main brewery brewed there, although less regularly. Brewing only ceased when Young’s took over the premises.
Another point -“contract-brewing for Mash and Freedom”. Alastair had worked for, and moved on from, both these companies before Meantime was founded. There was some contract brewing at Penhall road however, but not for these brands.