Fetch The Engines, Fetch The Engines...

Yep, pour on beer, though, because London's Brewing.

After a gap of over 18 months, the London Brewers Alliance have got themselves a new, bigger fest, and it's taking place at London Fields over the May Day Bank Holiday weekend of 4-5 May.

With around 40 breweries now operational within the M25, they've outgrown the upstairs space at Vinopolis, so a much bigger fest with a ramped-up bill of fare is in store for beer lovers who make their way to London Fields. As well as over 100 beers from LBA members, there'll be street food, live music, and talks hosted by Melissa Cole, birthday boy Des De Moor, and Sophie Atherton. There'll be beer and food matching, and the event is child-friendly, even if some of the attendees [hem hem] aren't.

Also new for this gathering are awards. The breadth of beer styles coming out of London breweries is astonishing, so Simply Hops is sponsoring a programme which will recognise the best beer in nine different categories. Roger Protz is advertised as being one of the judges, so I'm hoping for some heated debate between him and his judging colleagues, since he'll be sampling more than cask beer.

There's a collaborative beer available now, a 6.8% stout which was brewed last summer at The Kernel under the benign gaze of Ron Pattinson. You'll be able to sample it at the fest, though if you can't wait The Kernel had it last Saturday.

The nice people organising the event have offered me an 'exclusive' to pass on to my readers. Of course, if you widely read UK beer blogs, you'll have seen quite a bit of bloggage about the fest, and will therefore realise this offer isn't quite as exclusive as it sounds. Still, I'm able to offer you a whopping £5 off a ticket to the Sunday session, by entering the following promotional code when you book here.

Just enter sidbogg13 into the promotional code box and you'll get a fiver off. And since it's a Bank Holiday weekend, there's no need to feel guilty about drinking great beer on a Sunday.

I'll be there at some point. It's exciting to think that London brewing has more than consolidated since the first London Brewers' Showcase in 2010 - it's grown and is finding a market. I'll be hoping for the traditional pap shot of Mark Dredge, whose book is due to be published around that week - it's been a while; and wondering if Melissa Cole will remember to bring that copy of her book she promised me. That bottle of Pliny The Elder on page 112 was mine you know...

Let's Drink London Beer!

The New Boys (3): Brew By Numbers

Evin O'Riordain told me before Christmas about a couple of lads brewing out of their kitchen in Southwark. Aha!, I thought, the nano movement has arrived in London. Then Craft at Clerkenwell did a launch of their bottles, but I didn't try one until CJ Ferrell at Cask Pub & Kitchen produced one to sample.

The new boys, set up as Brew By Numbers, got my mind racing. Well, as fast as it races these days. Small-scale? And the numbers thing. I went through all sorts of number-related scenarios. Tony Wilson, in the book of '24-Hour Party People', returning to the idea of Factory Records' "almost Babylonian obsession" with numbering things, or that scene in 'Gregory's Girl' where the kid with the camera tells Clare Grogan that "numbers make the world go round."

It turns out that the numbers here aren't that impenetrable or whimsical, but we do start our tale somewhere around the world, where Dave, one of our nascent brewers, was touring around the Antipodes and kept finding interesting beer. Around the same time (2009) Tom, the other 50% of BBNo, was being exposed to the new world of craft beer. They decided to learn brewing, and invested in a homebrew kit.

Gotta Start Somewhere...

Three extract brews later, they were ready to move on to full-mash, and in 2011 started bottling their beers and talking to people like Tom 'The Cad' Cadden to get feedback. Over that time, they've upscaled, so that by the time I pop on to see them, their kitchen has been taken over with kit, with a small area given over as a fermentation room.

They are located in a boho loft, which is actually a basement in a former hop store slap-bang in the middle of the old Southwark brewing heartland. One half of the space is Tom's flat and workspace, the rest is the brewery. I want to get to the bottom of the numbering, hoping for some obscure application. Of course, if I'd bothered to read the label on their bottles, I'd know how to decode them, but dammit, I was drinking beer.

Beer Fermenting

So, what about that beer? The lads have gone at a wide range of styles, hoovering up knowledge of beer from everywhere and testing out their recipes. The 80-odd litre capacity, while not commercially viable, does enable them to be very versatile in trying out different versions of their recipes. Splitting batches mean they can play with hopping, ageing and re-fermenting with brettanomyces. As well as stout and Berliner Weisse bottles I tried at Cask, the lads let me sample a very promising Export Stout, a Belgian Tripel they've attempted after trying Tripel Karmeleit for the first time, a stunning Imperial Stout ageing on oak chips. A brown ale I shared at The Rake got good feedback from my ad hoc tasting panel.

Simple, Distinctive Label

I asked about scale. Dave and Tom are emphatic they are not nano-brewers, though perhaps their scale defines them as that despite their protestations. The other difference is that there's no ticker pursuit of these beers despite the tiny batches being made available. I'd like to think drinkers here are just enjoying the beer.

And the scale thing will soon be part of their backstory. As I write, the lads are looking to finalise plans for a premises (a railway arch, of course) and a 10-bbl plant, so hopefully by summer there'll be a new tasting room in a London brewery. The small kit will remain, for pilot brewing and special batches.

Oh, and finally, those numbers. First pair are the style. Second lot the recipe. It's on the label. Sort of based on the US BJCP guidelines, but they'll move away from any rigid duplication as Tom and Dave brew new beers. Simple but clever, and lending their labels a bold and distinctive look.

Craft at Clerkenwell are doing a London Beer Event next Monday, 11th February. Details here. There should be at least one BBNo beer available, but if you can't wait, you'll find them in the fridges of London's finer beer establishments.

London Brewers Strut Their Stuff

I'd previously referred to the nascent London Brewers Alliance. Being based in London, with a finger on the pulse of the beer scene, the good blogger has been tracking the development of this initiative, and indeed it has been subject to a good deal of interest in the trade. I, on the other hand, found out about it when I tried to send prime mover Phil Lowry a birthday greeting via Facebook.

Phil is a Renaissance Man of Beer. His day job, Beermerchants.com has been busy encouraging the UK spoogebeerian to empty their piggybanks with his enticing range of quality craft beers from around the world. He has also 'til recently been found making productive use of the brewery plant at Brew Wharf, drawing plaudits for his (and his associates') interpretations of the New Craft Beer, turning that venue from a restaurant that sold overpriced bottled beer, to a destination bar for interesting and drinkable cask beer.

He's opened himself to beer movements elsewhere, principally the craft brewing guilds located in some of the US beer hotspots, and he decided that London needed something similar to nurture the resurgent London brewing scene. He got a bunch of brewers around a table, got himself a nifty logo (left), and lo, The London Brewers Alliance was born.

Like London itself, the Alliance is a diverse and cosmopolitan group. Members include Fuller's, who brewed almost a quarter of a million barrels in the last year; Meantime, Sambrooks and Twickenham; brewpubs such as The Florence, Brodie's and the long-established Zero Degrees in Blackheath; and recent start-ups like Kernel Brewing in Bermondsey, Camden Town Brewery, and there's a seat for the craft brewers of tomorrow who currently express themselves as the London Amateur Brewers. There are brewers from London, Austria, New Zealand and elsewhere.

From top left: meta Phil Lowry; London Amateur Brewers; Lizzie & Jackie Brodie; meta Camden Town Brewery; Simon Siemsgluess (Zero Degrees) & Evin O'Rioirdain (Kernel); John Keeling getting down; Rabid Bat Fly (geddit?); I'm not stalking Mark Dredge - honest; two responsible licensees

The Alliance hopes to see an inaugural London Beer Week in Spring 2011 (New York's is next week, San Francisco has one in March), but in the meantime, they met their public on Friday 17 September at the London Brewers' Showcase, hosted by Brew Wharf in their impressive Upper Hall. A special collaborative Alliance London Porter was brewed at The Redemption Brewery in Tottenham, and 35 firkins will be available to the on-trade. Fullers have five, and are deciding which of their pubs will have it, says Head Man John Keeling.

I'm not going to bang on about the event itself at any great length. The general point is that there is now a body that isn't representing special interests or protecting a type of dispense. It's a body that will allow the new and young brewers to network with the established producers, and vice-versa, to hopefully find new markets for their products and reinvent a brewing tradition that might have stagnated, the way London has always reinvented itself, by attracting talent, ideas and energy from elsewhere. British brewing, London brewing, is patted benignly on the head by some of our overseas friends. Garrett Oliver is the most recent commentator to declare himself "disappointed". But we are opening up to new ideas, and when they eventually express themselves more widely, it'll be as a fusion of their ideas and our tradition, and London will be at the front!

The Mighty World Of Marble

To Cask Pub & Kitchen for their latest Meet The Brewer event, featuring James Campbell and Dominic Driscoll from Manchester's highly-regarded Marble Brewery.

I'd identified Marble as one of the 'Coming Wave' of new innovative British brewers in my GBBF piece, but they're no new kids on the block. The brewpub has been established for over a decade, and they've recently augmented their original 4.5bbl plant with a new 12bbl kit. Word is out and the rest of the country are keen to sample their beers. Mark Dredge fingered them as one to watch with his last post of 2009.

Leading up to the event, I was able to uncover some information about Phil Lowry's nascent London Brewers Alliance. This is a new umbrella group for all London brewers, from the smallest (Southwark's Kernel Brewery) to the largest, Fuller's, and Phil has made room for amateur brewers as well. It was interesting to me that, in the week that Roger Protz in 'What's Brewing' recounted the apparent antipathy of 'family' and regional brewers to their smaller colleagues during this year's GBBF, that Phil should have successfully been able to establish a collective that can accommodate brewers large and small. I'm sure I'm not the only observer of the UK scene who has looked at the US Brewers Association with some envy at the way they can leverage their influence into successful programmes promoting craft beer. Somehow we need to stop the confusing babble of different voices which dog British brewing's attempts to send positive messages about good beer. I'm hoping to report more fully on LBA in the near future...

Back to Cask and Marble, and while the gathering waited for the arrival of the Marble boys and girls, I chatted with Martin Hayes of Cask. Some year and half back, this pub was the notorious Pimlico Tram. If Ofsted did pubs, it would have been failing and in special measures. In less than 14 months, Martin and Peter have turned the place around, creating one of the most impressive destination pubs in London. As well as a commitment to offering well-kept cask ales, they, like other visionary operators, don't view keg as some ghetto at the end of the bar for crap lager and Guinness. A range of German and Belgian beers sit happily alongside the beer engines, and the recently-installed fridges offer a huge (but pricey) range of bottled beers from European classics all the way up to hard-to-get American spooge.

Visit The Rake at Borough Market, The Evening Star in Brighton, North Bar in Leeds. All of them are committed to offering the best beer they can, regardless of dispense, and they're all successful. In there somewhere is one of the challenges for CAMRA's 'fitness for purpose' review. Cask isn't the only way, 'craft' is in there, too.

Peter smiles nervously while waiting for Environmental Health to start asking awkward questions; Mark Dredge looking like he'd rather be in a bath of beer; are you sure Dobber is a big marble?; Dominic with his cupcakes; a cupcake

So, after a comedic interlude where BrewDog stoat-crashed the bar following their own launch of AB:03 at The Rake the previous night, it was Marble's show...

The Unusual Suspects

Ten casks on offer, punters four-deep at the bar, and Dominic Driscoll's cupcakes. I'd tried a couple of the beers previously, so this was a chance to have a proper look. As well as their regular offerings (the magnificent Pint being a standout), they brought some of their newer beers. They explained the odd numbering/coding of the beers. Prefix 'W' is from the new brewhouse, while four-digit numbers are from the old. The 1732 was fruity and refreshing, the W90 (a sister beer with different hopping) was drier with grapefruit bitterness, the Dobber (a big marble, says James Campbell) full and rounded with a long, slightly warming finish.
















James Campbell and Dominic Driscoll do their routine. Take That are from Manchester, you know...

My evening ended with scrounging one of Dominic's cupcakes. He was a bit down about them, as it seems Phil Lowry's were better in a taste-off earlier in the afternoon, but I thought it was pretty good. He shouldn't give up the day job, though...

Several of the attendees are regular visitors to the Marble Arch in Manchester, and after last night, I mean to rectify that omission from my own pub experience.