Closed brewery
17A Eley Road N18 3BB (Enfield)
enefeld.com
First sold beer: June 2015
Ceased brewing: February 2022
This Lea Valley outfit was the only contemporary London brewery to source water from its own well. It was founded by Rahul Mulchandani on a site adjacent to his family’s cash and carry warehouse just off the North Circular Road in Edmonton as an ambitious operation with a high-spec 32 hl brewhouse from DME in Canada, a parade of cylindro-conical fermenters and a sophisticated bottling line inside a large warehouse with plenty of spare floorspace.
A 55 m water borehole tapped the same aquifer as the Coca-Cola bottling plant next door. The water was lightly filtered to remove larger chalk particles and treated with ultra-violet light as a precaution against bugs. Its mineral content is tweaked for certain styles, but as you’d expect from chalky London water, it turned out to be perfect for making porter without any further treatment.
The first head brewer was Stuart Robson, founder of Shongweni, one of South Africa’s first craft breweries. When he left early in 2018, Rahul recruited brewing legend Don Burgess, who founded the Freeminer brewery in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, in 1993. This was one of the most important small breweries of its time and among the first to break into supermarkets, surviving into 2016.
In response to the challenges of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns, Enfield switched largely to contract brewing on behalf of others, though it continued to produce small quantities of its own brands. Originally it planned to relaunch these in 2022, but by February brewing had ceased and the equipment was up for sale.
The brewery’s beers were branded Enefeld, using the spelling of the town name as it appeared in the Domesday survey of 1086. Beers were initially bottled but later supplied in cask and ecokeg too. Following Don’s recruitment, the output included revivals of some of the Freeminer brands.
Updated 25 March 2022.
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