Promoting an international beer culture that recognises and celebrates beers of quality, distinctiveness and local character, brewed with care and passion.
Best beer and travel writing award 2015, 2011 -- British Guild of Beer Writers Awards
Accredited Beer Sommelier
Writer of "Probably the best book about beer in London" - Londonist
"A necessity if you're a beer geek travelling to London town" - Beer Advocate
"A joy to read" - Roger Protz
"Very authoritative" - Tim Webb.
"One of the top beer writers in the UK" - Mark Dredge.
"A beer guru" - Popbitch.
Brixton Brewery brands its new site in August 2018, financed by Heineken.
London’s Best Beer, the book that chronicled the seemingly unstoppable expansion of beer and brewing in the UK’s capital, will soon be back for a third edition. I’m just starting work on completely revising and updating this award-winning guide from CAMRA Books for publication in February 2020, almost five years after the last edition in July 2015.
The
first edition in 2011 appeared at a time when there was much excitement among
London beer lovers but still only 13 breweries – nonetheless a welcome increase
on 2006 when the closure of Young’s had left the city with only nine. I doubt
anyone could then have guessed that when the next edition appeared in 2015, I’d
have to rejig the format to accommodate details of 70 breweries.
The number has continued to grow since, though at a reduced rate. The ever-reliable Jezza of the Beer Guide London website puts the current total at 120, and I expect a modest increase on this figure by the time the book goes to the printers. They include some really good small and independent producers, like Affinity, pictured left. Encouragingly, only a few have closed, most of them either very small or brewpubs who decided it wasn’t worth the bother. More significant have been the many expansions.
With the threat of a no-deal Brexit in a month’s time, there’s always the possibility that economic catastrophe will torpedo further growth – but brewing has already demonstrated its capacity to expand in difficult circumstances, and the preference for the affordable luxury of good local beer now seems embedded in London’s culture.
For proof of this, look no further than the way the multinational brewing groups have voted with their chequebooks over the past few years. When I finished work on the copy for the last edition, every London brewery was independently-owned except for the Stag in Mortlake, which AB InBev was in the process of closing. Then, just as the guide went to press in May 2015, came the news that SAB-Miller had bought Meantime.
Today,
following the dramatic announcement last month that Fuller’s was selling its
brewing interests to Asahi and concentrating on pubs, the five biggest London
breweries are owned or part-owned by multinationals. Asahi also ended up with
Meantime following the breakup of SAB-Miller while fellow Japanese giant Kirin
owns Fourpure through its Lion subsidiary. Beavertown is near-50% owned by
Heineken, enabling a major expansion to what will potentially be London’s
biggest brewery in Ponders End – just up the River Lee Navigation from AB InBev-owned
Camden Town. The Dutch brewer has also financed a major expansion for Brixton brewery
while Carlsberg now owns London Fields in a joint venture with Brooklyn.
So far,
all these new subsidiaries have kept their distinctive identities and
management teams: unlike in the post-war decades when big breweries swallowed smaller
ones primarily for their pub estates, the multinationals are after credible
brands and businesses that can respond more flexibly to the demands of a new
generation of drinkers. But the megabrewers still have the power to restrict access
to market for the independents and, ultimately, are more interested in shareholder
dividends than the quality of their beer.
And there’s
reason to be particularly concerned about Fuller’s, now London’s only remaining
heritage brewery with roots stretching back to the 17th century –
every other one of those 120 is a 21st century creation. Asahi says
it will continue to brew at the historic Griffin brewery on Chiswick Mall, but
as this is squeezed between the river Thames and the A4 right next to one of
London’s prettiest ‘villages’, someone must have worked out quite how much it
would be worth as a prestige redevelopment site.
The
positive side of this for beer drinkers is the normalisation of ‘craft’ beer in
London. We can now expect to see at least a few decent, and usually
locally-brewed, beers at any new bar or informal restaurant, which means I’ll
have the raise the standards for non-brewing outlets higher still to keep the
book within reasonable proportions. Interestingly, the traditional pub sector, once
seen as the natural home of good beer, is increasingly lagging behind thanks to
the dominance of tied houses and chains.
So I’m now looking forward once again to several hard-working but rewarding months visiting as many pubs, bars, shops and breweries as I can: my ‘long list’ rather dauntingly exceeds 700. If you think you can add to that, you’ll find a suggestion form and guidance on the London’s Best Beer page.
My
mission remains to provide the complete and indispensable guide to great beer
in London, and to celebrate the city’s contemporary brewing scene and its brewing
heritage. Previous editions have been described by reviewers as “probably the
best book about beer in London” and a “detailed and accessible treasure chest
of information”. I hope you’ll agree that I’ve kept to those standards when the
book appears a year from now.
Brewery, taproom Original site: 5 Grand Union Centre, West Row W10 5AS (Kensington & Chelsea) Second site: 1 Buspace Studios, Conlan Street W10 5AP (Kensington & Chelsea) Final site: 37 Humber Road NW2 6EN (Brent) moncadabrewery.co.uk First sold beer: 22 October 2011 Ceased brewing: by September 2021
Former chef Julio Moncada, originally from Argentina, was planning to open a specialist delicatessen. Then he realised that, while a deli requires supplies to be shipped from around the world, all the ingredients for brewing are available close to hand in Britain, so decided to create a brewery instead.
Julio first sold his beer at the inaugural London Brewers Alliance festival near Borough Market in October 2011, produced on a 10 hl PBC brewhouse at the brewery’s original site in North Kensington not far from the Grand Union Canal.
Brewhouse at Moncada
Rising demand rapidly led to expansion, and in January 2013 the brewery moved to bigger premises around the corner in Buspace Studios, with increased fermentation and storage capacity. Moncada expanded again during 2017, moving north into the borough of Brent, with a new brewhouse and taproom at Dollis Hill not far from Staples Corner road junction. For most of 2017, operations were split between the sites but by December everything was based at the new site, now one of London’s more substantial independent operations.
The Dollis Hill site boasted a 30 hl brewhouse custom-designed in Israel by AN Technologies and fabricated in China, plus a bottling line, with a mobile line for canning. There was also an on-site taproom.
Sadly, trade never recovered from the 2020-21 Covid-19 lockdowns. By September 2021, all activity had ceased and the brewery was for sale.
Cask, keg, bottled and canned beers were produced in a range of styles, mostly under the brand name Notting Hill. All the beer was unpasteurised, unfiltered, unfined and vegan-friendly.
Julio Moncada at the London Brewers Showcase, October 2011
Closed brewery Original site: Units G-H2 Penhall Lane SE7 8RX (Greenwich) Last site: 1 Lawrence Trading Estate, Blackwall Lane SE10 0AR meantimebrewing.com First sold beer: April 2000 Ceased brewing: 1 May 2024
Old Brewery Greenwich Brewpub no longer brewing Pepys Building, Old Royal Naval College SE10 9LW First sold beer: February 2010 Brewing ceased: January 2016
Founded by one of British brewing’s most influential figures, Greenwich-born Alastair Hook, Meantime was a trailblazer of contemporary brewing both in the capital and in the rest of the UK. For a time the second-oldest brewery in the capital, it became the first of the 21st century London brewers bought by a multinational, leading eventually but somewhat inevitably to its demise.
Alastair trained at Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh, but regularly spent summers as a brewing assistant in California and completed his postgraduate studies at Weihenstephan brewing school near Munich, learning to brew quality lager, then a type of beer largely unknown at home. In 1991, he brewed at a pioneering brewpub, the Packhorse, in Ashford, Kent, specialising in German-style beers.
Four years later he helped create Freedom in Parsons Green, London, the first successful and long-lived UK craft lager brewery: it’s still in operation today, although in Staffordshire under different ownership. In 1998 he was involved in setting up two of Britain’s earliest US-style upmarket brewpub-restaurants: Mash and Air in Manchester (closed in 2000) and Mash in Great Portland Street, London (closed in 2007).
Two years later, Alastair opened his own brewery in Charlton, named Meantime for its location near Greenwich and its commitment to properly matured beers. At a time when the ambition of most microbreweries stretched not much further than the local free trade and CAMRA festivals, Meantime pursued the unusual course of concentrating on keg and bottled craft lagers and wheat beer, targeting restaurants and bars more than traditional pubs, making beers for the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain as part of its premium Taste the Difference range, and contract-brewing for Mash and Freedom among others. A range of beers under its own name didn’t appear until 2005.
Meantime main brewhouse
In September 2010, Alastair achieved his long-held ambition to move the main brewery to Greenwich, with an expansion to a site near the Blackwall Tunnel portal, equipped with a new German-built Rolec 100 hl brewhouse. The first modern UK-brewed unpasteurised and unfiltered beer for dispense from 1,000 l tanks, inspired by the Czech model, launched from here in 2013. A new tasting room opened at the front of the site in 2015, next to a 10 hl pilot kit visible from the road and a shop with the first walk-in beer fridge in London, with a cluster of nine outdoor 100 hl tanks further back.
There was also a third brewhouse, a 20 l homebrew kit used internally for tests and experiments. A seminar room next to the main brewhouse, used for tutored tastings and brewery tours, displayed bottles and glasses from the collection of legendary beer writer Michael Jackson. In 2019 Meantime finally occupied two units formerly used as an archive by the National Maritime Museum which had previously separated the tasting room from the main brewery, bringing annual output to around 102,000 hl.
Besides the tasting room at the brewery, Meantime long operated a pub, the Greenwich Union, opened in 2001 just outside the town centre (56 Royal Hill SE10 8RT). This remained closed following the 2020-21 Covid-19 lockdowns and in April 2021 was sold to Young’s, who used it as an extension of their existing pub the Richard I (Tolly’s) next door. The Old Brewery pub at the Old Royal Naval College in the heart of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site was founded as a brewpub by Meantime in 2010 but was sold to Young’s in 2016: it no longer brews, though the kit is still in place and there has been occasional talk of reviving its use.
Meantime was bought by SABMiller in May 2015, a deal negotiated by then-Chief Executive Nick Miller, who formerly worked for the US-South African group. SABMiller was bought out in turn in October 2016 by the world’s biggest brewing group, Anheuser-Busch InBev. To comply with monopoly regulation, ABI sold on the Greenwich business along with Grolsch and Peroni to Asahi, marking the first direct involvement of one of the big Japanese-based groups in the UK industry. Meantime retained its own identity and management for some time, but in 2019 Asahi bought a second London brewery, Fuller’s, and subsequently began integrating the management of both facilities. Alastair went into semi-retirement and eventually relinquished his involvement.
Through Fuller’s, Asahi also acquired the Dark Star brewery in Partridge Green, West Sussex, which had long links back to the emergence of London microbrewing in the 1980s (see Pitfield’s). Asahi closed Dark Star in December 2022, shifting production to Meantime. As the Sussex brewery produced numerous cask beers, this required adding cask facilities at Greenwich for the first time (the cask version of Meantime London Pale Ale available around 2009-10 and subsequently withdrawn was contract brewed by Adnams in Southwold, Suffolk). The exception was flagship brand Dark Star Hophead, which had already been transferred to Fuller’s and remained there.
Then in March 2024, Asahi announced it was closing Meantime completely, and consolidating all its UK brands at the Fuller’s site in Chiswick. The site was rapidly decomissioned and ceased brewing in early May.
There’s a chance that small-scale brewing might revive in a small way in Greenwich through what Asahi describes as a ‘new standalone consumer retail experience’ which will maintain its presence in the area. Based on previous experience of brewpubs managed by giant brewing concerns, I’m not optimistic about the long-term prospects of this.
Aside from the cask Dark Star brands, beers were in tank, keg, bottle and can: the bottles were filled on site but canning was done at Grolsch in the Netherlands. Some London Lager was also brewed at Groslch in Enschede in 2016 but this ended with the expansion of capacity at Greenwich.
A previous version of this post stated that brewing at the Old Brewery Greenwich was erratic, sparking a discussion in the comments section. This revision makes no observations about the frequency of brewing at the site.
Brewpub Original site: Ealing Park Tavern, 222 South Ealing Road W5 4RL (Ealing) Current site: 20 Worship Street EC2A 2DX (Islington) longarmpub.co.uk First sold beer: March 2015 (at original site)
The brewing arm of the ETM pub group, owned by brothers Ed and Tim Martin, began operations in 2015 with a 10 hl brewhouse from Oban Ales in a former hay store at the Ealing Park Tavern, a location that had seen brewing before but not since the 1850s. Original head brewer Vladimir Schmidt, although from the Czech Republic, was a fan of traditional English styles and the brewery initially focused on cask beers for the pub and others in the group, though some keg and hand-bottling later took place.
In July 2017, the company opened a second more central brewpub in Shoreditch, with a smaller but more sophisticated 5 hl kit and a tightly packed parade of fermentation vessels in a corner of the Montcalm Royal London House hotel.
The original Ealing site was decommissioned by the end of the year and the equipment sold to Affinity: it’s still used by Three Hills. ETM sold the pub lease back to the freeholder in February 2020: the site is currrently closed and awaiting redevelopment.
Cask has been discontinued; beers are sold from tank in the bar and from keg at other outlets in the group. The Long Arm lager is currently outsourced.
Brewpub Original site: The Bull, 13 North Hill N6 4AB (Haringey) Current site: The Bohemia, 762 High Road N12 9QH (Barnet) londonbrewing.com First sold beer: September 2011 (at the Bull)
Dan Fox, former manager of legendary beer pub the White Horse, took over Highgate pub the Bull in 2011, establishing the London Brewing Co with a 4 hl kit in the kitchen. As demand for the beer outside the pub increased, Dan began looking for a second site with more room for a brewery, finding the Bohemia in North Finchley, a big pub that had been an O’Neill’s, a furniture shop, a supermarket and a squat.
The Bohemia reopened in June 2014, though the new 10 hl kit in a convenient lower-level area at the back wasn’t commissioned until early in 2015. London Brewing operated at both sites until July 2016 when the Bull was sold to new owners, who have restarted brewing under the name Gorgeous in new accommodation in the garden.
Dan himself moved on in summer 2017 to take over the Arnos Arms, leaving the Bohemia in the hands of business partner Senan Sexton. Brewers have included Daniel Vane (co-founder of Exale) and US-born Rich White; current head brewer is Rich’s former assistant George Boustred.
Beers are in cask, keg and can, sold through the pub and elsewhere.
Former brewpub, no longer brewing in London The Bull, 13 North Hill N6 4BX gorgeousbrewery.com First sold beer: September 2011 (as London Brewing), August 2016 (as The Bull Brewing Co) Ceased brewing in London: Feburary 2022
Dan Fox, former manager of legendary beer pub the White Horse in Parsons Green, set up on his own in 2011 by reopening the Bull at Highgate as a brewpub with a 4 hl kit. Located in the pub kitchen, this initially produced cask beers mainly for sale in house under the name London Brewing Co. Dan opened a second brewpub, the Bohemia in North Finchley, in 2014, and in July 2016 sold the Bull, complete with brewery, concentrating London Brewing’s operations at the Bohemia.
The Bull’s new owners, Samantha and Rob Laub, were keen to continue with brewing and Reuben Moore, head brewer under the previous ownership, continued in his role. At first the brewing operation was simply known as the Bull Brewing Co, but in March 2017 it was rebranded as Gorgeous Brewery.
Capacity was increased with the objective of increasing sales outside the pub, and early in 2018 the brewery was relocated to a new purpose-built home in the garden, with an increased brew length of 8 hl, more and bigger fermenters and more space.
Early in 2022, the freehold of the pub was sold to Greene King and it was placed under new management, with the brewery forced to suspend operations. Its building has since been converted into additional drinking space.
Originally the kit was placed in storage with the intention of resuming brewing at a new site, with the brands cuckoo brewed in the meantime outside London at Church Farm Brewery, Budbrooke, near Warwick in Warwickshire. But in August 2023, Church Farm announced it had formally acquired Gorgeous and the brands would become a permanent part of its portfolio, ruling out the revival of brewing in London.
Beers in cask, keg and bottle all had names beginning with G and tended towards pale and contemporary in style, though with some more traditional lines.
Brewery no longer in London Brewery: 160 Hamilton Road SE27 9SF (now closed) Barrel vault: The Barrel Project, 80 Druid Street SE1 2HQ thelondonbeerfactory.com First sold beer: August 2014 Ceased brewing in London: August 2022
The London Beer Factory began as an ambitious undertaking just across the yard from Gipsy Hill brewery. It was the brainchild of brothers Sim and Ed Cotton – the latter spent several years in Australian vineyards before moving on to beer. The first head brewer was Archie Village, who went on to found his own brewery, Villages, in Deptford. The facility started with a substantial 32 hl kit, with an additional pilot kit enabling the development of several unusual beers.
Fermentation capacity was extended, and in spring 2016 the brewery became the first in the UK to package in ‘360’ cans with an entirely removable lid. The beer was canned in-house using a micro line supplied by Cask Brewing Systems of Canada.
In summer 2017, London Beer Factory added a barrel vault and bar, the Barrel Project, in Bermondsey, which was refurbished and relaunched in September 2018. During 2019, the brewery added a mobile coolship which was used in collaborations with several other brewers.
Mobile coolship at London Beer Factory.
In the early days an occasional taproom operated at the brewery site but this was closed to make way for expansion of production. In December 2020, an offsite bar opened at the brewery’s warehouse in West Norwood, but this was closed by October 2021.
Brewing in London ceased in 2022, with operations moving to an undisclosed address in Norfolk. The Barrel Project continues as a retail outlet but there are no brewing facilities there, only fermentation.
Beers are sold in can, keg and cask, with Barrel Project specials hand-bottled in 330ml bottles.
Brewery no longer in London
Original site: 1 Sutherland Road Path E17 6BX leftbankbrewery.co.uk First sold beer: September 2014 Ceased brewing in London: by end 2017
On its inception, Left Bank described itself as “probably London’s smallest commercial brewery, ” brewing on a licensed pilot kit working alongside bread and pickle maker the Fermentarium in Walthamstow’s Black Horse workshop. The brewery specialised in working with wild yeast and mixed fermentations.
By 2017, Left Bank was no longer using its original kit but brewing at Ubrew in Berrmondsey. In spring 2018 it relocated out of London, to the much more rural surroundings of Pumsaint in Carmarthenshire, Wales, near the Dolaucothi Roman gold mines and close to the Brecon Beacons National Park.
Also contains information for Late Knights and Shamblemoose
Brewery 21 Southey Street SE20 7JD southeybrewing.co.uk First sold beer: 5 May 2013 (as Late Knights/Shamblemoose)
Southey is a successor to the Late Knights brewery, founded by former licensee Steve Keegan, who helped devise Fuller’s early ‘craft’ pubs the Barrel and Horn in Bromley and the Union in Westbourne Park. He began cuckoo brewing at Truefitt in his hometown of Middlesbrough in 2012, then formed a partnership with Graham Lawrence, longstanding owner of Brockley wine bar and importer Mr Lawrence, to create a small London brewery and pub chain.
They installed an 11.5 hl kit in a Victorian building just off Penge High Street that had once served as a slaughterhouse and a candle factory but had latterly been Graham’s warehouse. At first, the facility was also home to a separate brewing company, Shamblemoose, founded by Matthew and Lera O’Sullivan as a cuckoo at Sunny Republic in Dorset late in 2012. Both brewers used the same brewhouse, with each maintaining separate fermenters.
A few weeks later, Late Knights opened its first pub, Beer Rebellion, in Gipsy Hill, subsequently adding several others including some outside London. In September 2013, Sam Barber became head brewer after approaching Steve for feedback on his homebrewed beers. The rapid expansion contributed to both financial and beer quality problems and in August 2016 the company folded. The arrangement with Shamblemoose had already ended in June 2015 when Lera and Matthew moved to Montana in Lera’s native USA.
Sam and Graham then set up a new business and following a few months of closure and £20,000 of improvements, restarted brewing as Southey in December 2016 on a 10 hl kit formerly belonging to Clarkshaws. Output and beer range were both reduced to concentrate on quality and consistency. A taproom opened in March 2018, and the brewery retains three other former Late Knights outlets: the London Beer Dispensary (389 Brockley Road SE4 2PH), the Dulwich Beer Dispensary (481 Lordship Lane SE22 8PB) and the Brighton Beer Dispensary.
Of the other LK bars, the original Beer Rebellion in Gipsy Hill subsequently moved to a next-door unit and is now Bullfinch brewery pub the Bull and Finch; Beer Rebellion Peckham retains its name but is owned by cuckoo brewer and indoor skatepark operator Hop King, founded by an ex-LK brewer; Hopsmiths in Crouch Hill is now Brave Sir Robin, sharing ownership with the Rose and Crown in Kentish Town; and the Ravensgate Arms in Ramsgate is now operated by a former LK manager in partnership with Gadd’s. Steve briefly ran a brewery called Holler in Brighton, but this has since closed.
The name Southey is from the brewery’s street address, in turn named after the Romantic poet Robert Southey, so the vowel in the first syllable is pronounced like the one in ‘tough’.
Beers are in cask, keg and can, mainly sold online and through the taproom and bars.
Laine’s Brew Lab Brewpub no longer brewing Peoples Park Tavern, 360 Victoria Park Road E9 7BT (Hackney) peoplesparktavern.pub First sold beer: February 2014 Ceased brewing: by January 2022
Laine: Acton Brewpub no longer brewing The Aeronaut, 264 High Street W3 9BH (Ealing) First sold beer: November 2013 Ceased brewing: December 2016
Laine: Thieves Brewery Brewpub no longer brewing Four Thieves, 51 Lavender Gardens SW11 1DJ (Wandsworth) First sold beer: January 2015 Ceased brewing: by January 2020
Peoples Park Tavern, London E9: Laine’s Beer Lab is in the side wing to the left.
Gavin George’s small Brighton-based pub chain InnBrighton first installed a brewery in October 2012 in its North Laine bar in the celebrated Brighton shopping area of the same name, thus the beer brand Laine which has since been extended to the whole pub group. Its first London brewpub was the Aeronaut in Acton, reopened in November 2013 following a major refurbishment with an 8 hl brewery clearly visible behind the bar. The original head brewer was Nic Donald, whose achievements included persuading brewing legend Derek Prentice to collaborate on a guest beer in July 2014.
Another 8 hl kit had by then appeared in the eastern wing of the Peoples Park Tavern, a very large pub on the edge of Victoria Park. Jim Wilson, formerly of Brentwood Brewery and Tap East, was the first head brewer, though he’s since moved on. Interestingly, this was the second brewery on the site: in 1986 the pub became the Flounder and Firkin, the sixth brewpub in David Bruce’s pioneering Firkin chain, brewing until 1999. Beers brewed here were sometimes been branded ‘People’s Pints’ though the brewery was later renamed the Brew Lab and concentrated on more experimental and ‘extreme’ beers.
In January 2015, Laine opened the Four Thieves, in a sprawling former music hall off Lavender Hill in Battersea which had briefly been an Antic pub. As well as an 8 hl brewery, the pub was equipped with a small gin distillery, with the botanicals including lavender grown on the roof in a nod to the area’s horticultural past. Brewing here was initially overseen from Acton.
In April 2016, Laine appointed Jack Hibberd, formerly of Truman’s, to oversee its brewing operations. By then, as well as brewing in the pubs, the company was contracting out some of its best-selling brands, including a tank lager, to Hepworth in Pulborough, West Sussex, one of the breweries that emerged from the closure of historic Sussex brewery King & Barnes in 2000. Hepworth moved to a much bigger purpose-built site with a 65 hl kit at Adversane near Billingshurst, West Sussex, in April 2017: that site is also now used as Laine’s ‘Brew Hub’ for its core beers, including the tank lager supplied to the pubs.
A major fire gutted Laine’s original London brewpub, the Aeronaut, in the early hours of the 1 January 2017, badly damaging the brewhouse. The pub was closed for rebuilding for most of that year, reopening in December but without a brewery.
Laine was sold in May 2018 to Vine Acquisitions Ltd, a company backed by private equity firm Patron, which also owned 1,300 leasehold pubs in the Punch Taverns estate not sold to Heineken when Punch was restructured in 2017. Laine continued as a separate unit under the existing management team led by Gavin. By the time of the takeover, the distillery at the Four Thieves was already mothballed, and the brewhouse eventually followed, with the kit removed early in 2020.
Brewing at the Peoples Park Tavern was suspended during the 2020-21 Covid-19 lockdowns but briefly revived in spring 2021 when the pub reopened.
An announcement on 15 December 2021 confirmed that both Laine and Punch had been sold to US-based Fortress Investment Group for an undisclosed sum, and subsequently the new owners began streamlining and integrating the two groups.
The brewhouse was finally removed from the Peoples Park Tavern early in 2022, with the space converted to customer use. The original intention was to resume brewing with the same kit in a standalone industrial unit nearby, but this was abandoned when the company expanded its brewing capacity outside the capital by buying former London brewery Redchurch in Harlow in October 2022. The kit has since been sold on.
The Ram Inn, Wandsworth, was rebranded by new owners Punch as a Laine pub in January 2023. The pub still houses the brewing kit installed by the previous leaseholders as the SlyBeast brewery which following the change of hands was used for cuckoo brewing by Coalition. This arrangement ended in January 2024 and Laine currently has no active brewpubs in London, and with no immediate plans to revive brewing activity, though brewing continues on a small scale at the North Laine in Brighton.
Beers were mainly in keg and cask and sold at the pub, and occasionally in other Laine pubs in London. Draught core brands, bottles and cans sold at Laine pubs are sourced from the hub brewery in Sussex, though some Brew Lab beers were formerly hand-bottled.
This pioneering new book explains what makes cask beer so special, and explores its past, present and future. Order now from CAMRA Books. Read more here.
London’s Best Beer
The fully updated 3rd edition of my essential award-winning guide to London’s vibrant beer scene is available now from CAMRA Books. Read more here.
