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Beer firm Bloomsbury is a brand used for exclusive beers commissioned for the Bloomsbury Leisure Group, which owns the Euston Tap and its sister pubs. The beers originate at a variety of breweries in the UK and elsewhere, including Five Points. The name was previously used for an unrelated brewery at the Perseverance pub in Bloomsbury. Updated 23 January 2020 24 openings and revivals, 7 closures and suspensions, net change +17. By the end of 2018, there were 125 commercial breweries operating in London, including 32 brewpubs. Seven were parts of multinationals (M). These breweries were:
Closures this year
Suspended this year
Other changes
N = part of a national brewing group. For definitions of a London brewery, see the current London breweries page. ⇦ 2017 | London breweries year by year | 2019 ⇨  Brewery not currently brewing, no visitors please This small home-based brewery was placed on hold in late 2019 while brewer Mark Drayton made a trip to Australia for family reasons. He expected to return and resume brewing in 2020 but these plans were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. He’s since brewed in Australia, though still plans to return to the UK and revive the project. Beers made before brewing was suspended were mainly bottled, with some short runs brewed at home in Kentish Town and bigger batches cuckoo-brewed elsewhere.  Brewpub not currently brewing After many years setting up and operating beer-friendly pubs for other companies, Ash Zobell and brothers Pete and James Brew refurbished and reopened this pub in a Brentford backstreet conservation area in October 2018. The intention was always to operate as a brewpub, and a small brewery with a 1.6 hl kit finally went into production in an shed in the back garden early in 2020. Opened in 1868 and originally known as the Albany Arms, the pub was rebuilt by Brentford’s now-closed Royal Brewery in 1901. Following a recent troubled history, it was closed for over two years before its current award-winning rejuvenation. Pete was previously involved in setting up Big Smoke, since moved outside London.  Brewing was suspended by summer 2023 with no decision yet on its long-term future. The pub meanwhile remains fully open. Beers in keg and cask were exclusively sold in the pub. Updated 4 September 2023.  Brewpub Perhaps not the most obvious place you’d expect to find an in-house brewery, Greenwich institution Up the Creek is a comedy club in a former church hall founded by the late comedian Malcolm Hardee in 1991. But the owner is a keen beer fan, and a neat 4 hl brewhouse, clearly visible from the street, was installed in October 2018. Originally branded Greenwich Brewery, the beers have simply carried the name of the venue since 2020. There have been some lapses in production, when brewers moved on in 2019 and during the Covid-19 lockdowns, but the brewhouse has been active during 2021. Beers are nearly all in cask, with small scale hand-bottling, and sold exclusively in house except for the occasional festival. Note that the bar may only be open to event ticket holders. Updated 4 September 2023.  Brewery Founder Ben Duck had already given up his career as a financial lawyer before deciding to turn the appealing mix of science and creativity he found in his homebrewing hobby into a day job. He spent a year perfecting recipes before moving into an arch below the Overground Gospel Oak to Barking line by Leyton Midland Road station. Ben did most of the conversion and installation work himself, including designing and commissioning a miniature 2 hl brewhouse, soon upgraded to 6 hl, and, unusually for a brewery this size, a reverse osmosis filter to purify mains water. An informal taproom added in the same arch in April 2019 expanded to its own arch across the main road (155 Midland Road E10 6JT) during 2020.  In March 2023, production relocated to a new site in Tottenham, expanding at the same time. The new home is on the same industrial estate as Bohem and Redemption, next door to the unit formerly occupied by OMEBEER. The Leyton taproom has been retained. The original Tilbury Road arch was taken over by Libertalia Brewing Co later in 2023, with plans to resume brewing. Beers are mainly in keg, with occasional hand-bottling. Updated 1 September 2023. Formerly Goose Island Brewpub Shoreditch.  Former brewpub Chicago brewery Goose Island, founded in 1988 and part of AB InBev since 2011, established its first London home, the Vintage Ale House, in Balham in 2016. It closed this less than two years later to focus on its first brewpub in Europe, opened in November 2018 in a former restaurant and cocktail bar on busy Shoreditch High Street. The brewhouse behind glass at the back was a high-spec German-style 5 hl installation supplied by ProBrew in Wisconsin. It even had a water filtration system and a grist mill, rare in a London brewery this size. Following the trend for multinationals to reduce their involvement in UK craft-style brewing, AB InBev sold the site to pub chain Urban Pubs and Bars in September 2022. It’s since been renamed the Queen’s Head. Brewing was suspended and the brewers made redundant. The kit remained in place for a while with the possibility of leasing it to a third party or parties as the cost of removal was high. But the brewhouse and most of the other equipment had been removed by November 2023. In Goose Island days, beers were only sold in the pub in tank, keg and with one barrel-aged line dispensed direct from the wooden barrels using a Rack Aeriale nitrogen-based system developed by Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware, the only one in the UK. Updated 23 Feburary 2024.  Brewery The Goodness emerged out of the amusingly named Wood Green Hopping City, founded in 2016 as one of several community hop collectives in London, groups of locals who grow hops in gardens and allotments and pool the harvest to create an annual special beer. At first the beers were cuckoo-brewed by Damien Legg and Mike Stirling with Zack Ahmed, including at the Prince and Florence brewpubs and in Sheffield, and sold through local markets. Joe Sheasgreen and Oliver Newbery became involved to help build the business. Production ramped up several notches in August 2019 with the commissioning of a substantial installation with a 15 hl Chinese-built brewhouse and 30 hl fermenters, complete with steam heating plant and water filter. It’s located in a large industrial unit in Clarendon Yards opposite Wood Green’s repurposed Chocolate Factory.  The cask-drinking founders are committed to the format, but also produce beer in keg and can. Updated 10 December 2021.  Brewpubs Mercato Metropolitano Elephant Mercato Mayfair Kraft Dalston The first German Kraft opened in December 2017 in the first Mercato Metropolitano, a lively warren of a food market occupying an old paper factory just off the Elephant and Castle junction. The team behind it comprised Felix Bollen, Anton Borkmann, Andrea Ferrario and Michele Tieghi, who drew on previous experience at Steinbach Bräu in Erlangen, Franconia. At first it was just a bar, but a 20 hl Hungarian-built brewhouse was in action a few months later, capable of making lagers in traditional Bavarian style with a three-step mash. The brewery is equipped with a grist mill and a water treatment unit also used to produce bottled water for the market. The kit is shoehorned in behind the main bar within one of the market halls, while fermentation and conditioning tanks are just outside in the verdant semi-tropical garden. The owners of the market site intend to redevelop it for housing, so the brewery here will have to find a new home eventually, although the timescale is not yet confirmed as two planning applications have been rejected.  The second Mercato Metropolitano opened in November 2019 as an indoor street market in the spectacular galleried surrounds of the former St Mark’s Church, a Grade I-listed 1820s Greek Revival building in the upscale heart of Mayfair. A second German Kraft with a 2.5 hl brewhouse and 5 hl fermenters was installed in the crypt the following year. Besides a bar adjacent to the brewhouse, beers are also sold at a further bar at ground floor level on the high altar, constructed from over 1,000 golden glass bricks made by melting down broken glasses collected at Elephant. Currently all dispense here is from keg due to problems with the dispense tanks. A third site followed later the same year, an ultra-modern brewpub-bar-restaurant created as a four-way collaboration with the neighbours at Elephant, craft gin distiller Jim and Tonic; kebab restaurant Le Bab; and ‘aparthotel’ operator Locke, which provides accommodation on the upper floors of this newly built Dalston complex. A 5 hl German-style brewery operates in the basement, feeding six serving tanks behind the upstairs bar. German Kraft added a small non-brewing site in Brixton Village Market in summer 2023 (43 Granville Arcade SW9 8PS). Beers are almost entirely sold on the sites themselves from tank and keg, with some exchange between them. Most core beers are brewed on the biggest kit at Elephant, with the smaller kits in Dalston and Mayfair used for changing specials and seasonals. Brewing on site is fundamental to the concept: according to the brewery, it not only guarantees freshness but cuts carbon emissions by 75% by reducing packaging and transport. The head brewer for the group is now James Mozolewski. Updated 7 August 2023.  Brewery, now brewing outside London This very small brewery began as a cuckoo in 2018 but has also brewed commercially on a 1.5 hl home-based kit. The name means ‘go home’ in Cumbrian dialect and the brewery did exactly that in January 2020, relocating to Kendal, Cumbria. Updated 9 December 2021. |
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