Also includes information for the 1980s Battersea and Brixton breweries.
Brewpub no longer brewing
78 Norman Road SW19 1BT
hopback.co.uk
First sold beer: March 2015
Ceased brewing: November 2015
In a South Wimbledon back street, the well-loved Sultan has been the only London pub owned by Wiltshire’s Hopback brewery since 1995. A small brewhouse was installed in a shed in the garden early in 2015, producing cask beers for sale in the pub. But the brewer left in November 2015 and was never replaced, and the equipment was subsequently removed, leaving this as one of the most short-lived London brewpubs of recent times.
The owning brewery has historical London connections as its founder John Gilbert was one of the first generation microbrewers in the capital in the 1980s. His first brewery, begun in 1983, was the Battersea Brewery (unrelated to two subsequent breweries to take that name: for the current one see Battersea Brewery) in the Prince of Wales pub in Battersea (186 Battersea Bridge Road SW11 3AE, Wandsworth). A year later, he installed a brewery at Brixton’s Warrior (242 Coldharbour Lane SW9 8RR, Lambeth), operating as Brixton Brewery (again unrelated to the current name holder). In 1986, John moved to his own pub outside London, the Wyndham Arms in Salisbury, where he began brewing under the name Hopback in 1988. Moving to a standalone site in 1991, Hopback became one of the most successful UK microbreweries, noted for Summer Lightning, the beer that popularised a new style of cask golden ale and laid some of the groundwork for the hoppy pale ales of today.
Hopback is still around today, though John himself retired in 2018. Both the Prince of Wales and the Warrior continued brewing after he left, ceasing in 1989. Sadly both have since closed, converted into flats and a supermarket respectively.
Last updated 7 January 2020
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