Suspended brewery, no visitors please
Original site: 12 Platts Eyot, Hampton TW12 2HF (Richmond upon Thames)
Second site: 6 Triumph Trading Estate, Tariff Road N17 0EB (Haringey)
Last site: Friern Barnet N11 (Barnet)
First sold beer: March 2017
Suspended: by early 2023
Taking his brand name from expressions such as ‘oddly delicious’, Brian Watson began cuckoo-brewing in 2015 at Clouded Minds in Oxfordshire, itself a former cuckoo at London’s Gipsy Hill. From 2017, he had his own brewery with a 10 hl kit on Platts Eyot, a privately-owned island in the Thames at Hampton which is still home to Tiny Vessel.
Though in many ways an idyllic place to work, the location posed numerous practical challenges. Its only fixed link to the mainland is a suspension footbridge, so deliveries and dispatches had to be accomplished either laboriously in stages using a handcart, or by boat – the brewhouse arrived by the latter mode.
A move in February 2019 to a unit in Tottenham adjacent to Watling Street (since closed) didn’t work out, with Oddly vacating the site by the end of the year. Brian subsequently found a new way of working, creating bespoke experimental beers for specific clients, events and bottle clubs, either on his own small kit or as a cuckoo elsewhere.
Beers, possibly cuckoo brewed, were briefly available on a small commercial scale again in 2022 but activity appeared to have ceased by early 2023 and an application to strike off the company is pending.
Beers varied widely according to demand.
Updated 3 May 2024.
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