Brewery
Original site: Fox Hill SE19 2XE (Croydon)
Current site: Rookery Barn, 40 Streatham Common South Road SW16 3BX (Lambeth)
theinkspotbrewery.com
First sold beer: 25 February 2012
Ex-Army officer Tom Talbot and restaurateur and art dealer Bradley Ridge began working together on a beer endorsed by charity Help for Heroes cuckoo-brewed at Tunnel in Nuneaton. They subsequently brewed on a pilot kit in Norwood too, selling at a small scale through Bradley’s Streatham restaurant Perfect Blend, while looking for a more expansive home.
A site in Beckenham fell through when they discovered a 1920s covenant blocked alcohol production, but their luck changed when the head gardener at the Rookery on Streatham Common approached them to brew with hops grown by a local collective and alerted them to a vacant building. It’s taken a lot of work since, including 350 m of new power line, but Inkspot now has one of the most idyllic sites of any London brewery, in a barn right next to one of the capital’s most beautiful public gardens.
A 12 hl brewhouse bought new from Willis European has been in action since December 2018, with waste hops used on site as fertiliser and botanicals from the herb garden or honey from the apiary occasionally added to the beers. There’s an ambition to become the second brewery in London with its own well (after Enfield), digging 115 m into the underlying chalk to tap the water source discovered in 1659 that fed the famous Streatham Wells spa until the early 20th century. The name, recalling Tom’s past career, references a military strategy for occupying a hostile region by establishing several separate safe areas that are then enlarged until they overlap.
Beers are in keg and canned using a mobile line. A taproom is open on site at least monthly, and the brewery also owns a chain of specialist bottle shop-bars, Art & Craft (artandcraft.london).
Updated 11 December 2021.
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