Brewery
8 College Fields, Prince Georges Road SW19 2PT (Merton)
wimbledonbrewery.com
First sold beer: 10 July 2015
The original Wimbledon Brewery, and the last in the area for over a century, stood in the High Street between 1832 and 1889, when it burned down: somewhat ironically, a fire station was built on the site which still stands today, though converted to shops and flats.
The brewery’s legacy was reclaimed at the 2015 AFC Wimbledon beer festival when beers bearing the phoenix logo of a new Wimbledon brewery went on sale. This new operation, sizeable by the standards of modern London brewing, was the brainchild of Mark Gordon and Richard Coultart, who wisely appointed veteran London brewer Derek Prentice, formerly of the old Truman’s, Young’s and Fuller’s, to oversee the operation.
Derek devised the initial recipes and specified the new 50 hl brewhouse, supplied by OAL Engineering and installed in a sizeable industrial unit near Merton Abbey Mills, on land that once belonged to the abbey, which like similar institutions maintained its own brewhouse until it was dissolved in 1538.
Since then fermentation capacity has more than doubled, with some space for further growth on the site. Unusually at this scale, the set-up includes a gas-fuelled steam plant, so the vessels are steam-heated as in many much larger breweries. Derek is still involved on a part-time basis, and his son Michael became joint head brewer in 2020.
Two-thirds of production is cask beer, the rest keg and a small number of bottles (filtered and reseeded with conditioning yeast) and cans (unfiltered and unpasteurised), which are packaged off-site. The main malts are supplied by Crisp, and the focus is on well-balanced beers with good drinkability under locally-inspired names. There’s a shop and taproom on site.
Updated 16 December 2021.
Leave a Reply