SALT London (Ossett Brewery)

Includes information for Hop Stuff Brewery

Brewery moved outside London, planned brewpub
Unit 9, 35 White Hart Avenue SE28 0GU (Greenwich)
First sold beer: August 2018 (as Hop Stuff)
October 2018 (SALT Beer Factory at Shipley, West Yorkshire)
Brewing suspended: April 2019
Brewing restarted: December 2019
Brewing suspended: March 2020
Brewing restarted: December 2021 (as SALT London)
Ceased brewing in London: May 2023

Hop Stuff Brewery
Original site: 7 Gunnery Terrace SE18 6SW (Greenwich)
First sold beer: November 2013 (at original site)

London regained one of its larger craft brewers in December 2021 when West Yorkshire brewer SALT Beer Factory bought the former Hop Stuff brewery in Thamesmead and its associated bars in Woolwich and Deptford from multinational Molson Coors. By early December the bars had already been rebranded and test brews and flavour matching had commenced, with commercial brewing restarted by March 2022.

SALT is a contemporary craft-slanted offshoot of Ossett Brewery. This began behind a pub in Ossett, West Yorkshire, in 1998 before expanding to a much more substantial facility in a nearby industrial unit in June 2005. The original SALT Beer Factory opened in 2018 as a ‘craft’-focused brewpub in one of the historic buildings on the World Heritage Site at Saltaire near Bradford, and quickly established a good reputation. It was looking to expand its business in London and the south of England, so the Hop Stuff deal seemed a good fit.

SALT continued to brew on its original site but planned to transfer production of its biggest-selling core brands, notably Jute Session IPA and Huckabuck NEIPA, to London. The five-vessel 70 hl brewhouse was designed to be steam-heated: the steam plant was never commissioned under Hop Stuff or Coors, with a temporary generator used instead, but was finally commissioned under SALT’s ownership.

The revival proved short-lived, as following a failure to agree a new lease on the property, brewing ceased in May 2023, with production once again concentrated in Yorkshire. SALT continues to operate the former Hop Stuff bars and there are long-term plans to revive London brewing on a small scale by converting one of them into a brewpub.

Hop Stuff Brewery

Hop Stuff was created by ex-City worker James Yeomans, who learned to brew at Grainstore in Rutland, with his wife Emma. It grew largely through crowdfunding, with 71 investors securing the first facility, a 16 hl kit from Oban Ales, in a listed former warehouse on what was then the newly redeveloped Woolwich Arsenal complex.

An ad-hoc taproom at the brewery was succeeded in late 2015 by a bar on another part of the Arsenal site. Further crowdfunding in 2017 financed an ambitious upgrade to a much bigger site on former arsenal land near Belmarsh prison in West Thamesmead, increasing capacity to a potential 15,000 hl a year. Two more bars were added, in Deptford in December 2017 and outside London in Ashford, Kent in May 2018, with still more crowdfunding.

The business began to unravel in 2019, with production abruptly halted in April when staff were locked out by the landlord following problems with duty and rent payments. In July, James announced a pre-pack administration deal selling the business to US-Canadian group Molson Coors, owner of Carling and Sharp’s, which became the last of the major multinationals active in the UK to buy into a new London brewery – unfortunately with the loss of over £1.5 million to around 1,000 crowdfunding investors. James oversaw the transition but left before production restarted in December.

In the event, Coors managed 25 brews before the Covid-19 lockdowns struck in March 2020 and the brewery was mothballed. It was put on the market in August 2021 and subsequently bought by SALT as explained above. Coors retained the Hop Stuff brands with the possibility they could be brewed elsewhere, but they seem to have been quietly forgotten.

Updated 18 December 2023.

More London brewers