Back in Black — How London’s Contemporary Brewers Are Reclaiming the City’s Porter Traditions

Imagine you’re standing in the middle of London’s West End. By Centre Point (the 34-story, 1960s Brutalist tower block), facing northeast towards the Dominion Theatre, to be precise. This puts you at a crossroads. Tottenham Court Road runs north from here, New Oxford Street east, Charing Cross Road south, and Oxford Street west. It’s not as swanky as the other end of Oxford Street towards Marble Arch, but it’s by no means a bad area. Walk down New Oxford Street a short way and take a left down Bainbridge Street. Turn left again into an alley that runs by the Dominion’s stage door.

Now imagine you have on your wrist a special watch. Around its face it has a knurled bezel. Turning this adds or subtracts from the date displayed on its face, one soft, haptic click for each day ticked off. Dial the date back to October 16, 1814 and press the button. The world before you blurs. Centre Point’s tower shrinks away in the blink of an eye. When the world resolves itself around you once more, the vibe has changed completely.

You find yourself standing in the infamous St Giles “rookery”—a Dickensian slum. It is home to the dispossessed and the desperate. Many are poor Irish immigrants. It is crowded, dirty, and dangerous. Above the reek of juniper and turpentine leaking from the nearby gin shops, there’s a strong smell of beer in the air. Much of the area due west, back towards what was, or will be, the Dominion Theatre, is taken up by Henry Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery. The locals are starting to look at you in a way that makes you uncomfortable, so you flip the dial forward one day and hit the button once more.

A roaring wall of liquid 15 feet high sweeps you from your feet and dashes you against people, against doorways, against debris borne along by its force. All around you timbers fall and brick walls crumble, demolished by this deadly tide. And this isn’t water: It’s dark and potent, sticky and fuming. It’s beer. There are screams. You see children pulled from their mothers. Great plumes of Porter gush into basements, but it does nothing to diminish the flow. The weight of it pummels the air from your lungs. There are bricks in it from the brewery wall that could snap your limbs like twigs. Enormous shards of iron threaten to impale you. A small girl floats by, face down, already dead.

The vat which broke and began this disastrous flood was 22 feet high and held 3,550 barrels of beer. That’s more than a million pints. The force of its explosion destroyed other vats and barrels around it, releasing still more beer. The equivalent of 7,664 barrels of Porter flooded the brewery then burst through its wall (two-and-a-half bricks thick, if you please). The beer inundated New Street in St Giles, killing eight people and destroying two houses. 

It sounds like a lot of beer—and it was, representing about one-tenth of Meux’s annual production—but the broken vat wasn’t even the brewery’s largest. In fact, it was one of the smallest. An account from 1812 suggests the largest vat measured 70 feet in diameter; cost £10,000 to construct (about £730,000 today, or a little over $1 million); was held together by an iron hoop that weighed 80 tons; and contained 18,000 BBLs, or £40,000 worth of Porter. (That would be more than £2.9 million, or $3.9 million, today.)

Nor was Meux’s the largest Porter brewery in London. It was the sixth-largest, producing a little over 100,000 BBLs each year; Barclay Perkins made over double that. And still, Porter brewing was yet to reach its peak. By 1853, the 10 largest breweries in London produced around 2.4 million BBLs a year. Picture all these barrels being moved by men, by horse-drawn carts, by ships still mostly powered by sails rather than steam. The sheer weight of it defies the imagination.

UPSTREAM

Years settle on London like the layers of silt accreting day by day out in the Thames estuary to the east of the city. This build-up of history isn’t static. Like the ever-changing mudflats, the capital’s physical structure is restless. Some old buildings remain proud of time’s high-water mark. Others are washed away by the city’s continual ebb and flow of building and rebuilding.

“Stouts are an easier get. Everyone knows Guinness. You don’t need to be into craft beer to have heard of Stout. Whereas Porters either sound like something your grandad used to drink, or it’s something you haven’t heard of at all.”

This changeable nature is reflected in London’s brewing culture. Great beers have come and gone, along with the breweries that made them. The greatest of these was Porter, which reigned when London was the richest, the largest, the most powerful city on earth.

Porter was a dark, well-hopped beer whose rather murky origins date back to the early 1700s. It was well suited for brewing in London, as the dark malt’s natural acidity balanced out London’s hard, alkaline water. It was deeply loved by the London working classes, so much so that it even took its name from the porters who so keenly drank it. (Porters played an irreplaceable role in London’s economy from the 17th to the 19th centuries that beer historian Martyn Cornell describes as “the equivalent of white van delivery driver, motorcycle courier and postman rolled into one.”) 

Porter, the beer, grew in popularity to peak around the 1850s. At that time, huge breweries had emerged to dominate England’s brewing. The largest were Whitbread, Truman’s, Barclay Perkins & Co, Hoare & Co., Watney Combe & Reid, Henry Meux & Co, and Reid & Co. England’s brewers were the richest, and the most technically advanced in the world. They pioneered the use of thermometers and hydrometers in brewing, and moved from brown malt to a more efficient pale malt base mixed with a small amount of patent malt for color and flavor.

At its peak, Porter spanned the globe, much as Lager does today. Everywhere people drank it, they recognized London as its source. City and beer were synonymous. Yet Porter too sank beneath the gray Thames mud—or nearly did. Its popularity waned throughout the late-19th and early-20th centuries as older drinkers died out and younger ones chose other beers. Brewers sought to bolster their falling profits and reduced Porter in both strength and price. By the end, Porter had become a weak imitation of its former self—and the brewing of dark beers, in particular Stouts, had moved internationally and was no longer considered London’s calling card.

This story was born as I walked along the Thames at the South Bank. I took a phone call from Dan Sandy, manager of craft beer bottle shop Kill The Cat in Brick Lane, East London. He wondered if I’d noticed, as he had, a lack of well-made, adjunct-free dark beers available at a sensible ABV. Dark beer drinkers were coming to his shop asking for “something without coffee” and all he could offer were Imperial Pastry Stouts, he said. He told me owners of other London bottle shops, places like Ghost Whale in Brixton and Brewery Market in Twickenham, were experiencing the same thing. Sensible Stouts were at a low ebb. Unless you like Guinness, of course.

Later, we discuss this sensible-Stout-drought again. This time it’s Sandy who’s at the riverside, enjoying a quiet pint. I ask him how many of the dark beers he sells would be labeled as Porters rather than Stouts. (It’s hard to define exactly when one becomes the other. Historically, Stouts were so named because they were the stronger version of Porters, but … let’s just say that line is very fuzzy.) After some thought, he says Porters are definitely in the minority. “I’ve had quite a few customers say they don’t like Porter but they do like Stout,” he says. “That always flummoxed me. That’s definitely a win for the marketers on that one.”

Either way, if you call something a Porter, he says, it hangs around on a shelf longer than if it’s a Stout. “Stouts are an easier get. Everyone knows Guinness. You don’t need to be into craft beer to have heard of Stout. Whereas Porters either sound like something your grandad used to drink, or it’s something you haven’t heard of at all.”

I ask who makes a good Porter in London at the moment. His response is immediate: “Kernel.” He says it in a deadpan, end-of-discussion manner, then laughs. “It’s like if someone knocked me on the knee with one of those [little hammers]. I just knee-jerk: ‘Kernel.’ It’s the one bastion in all of this. If there was one brewery where you’d go, ‘Yep, that’s going to do the job,’ for me it was always The Kernel. Five Points is a really good one, but that would be more on cask.”

We flail around trying to think of more, both of us well aware of London’s past. “Those guys,” he says of the big 19th-century Porter brewers, “they really were the Elon Musks and the Googles of their time. These were people that had a global commodity and had the capacity to send it around the world. London was the hub of that, and now we can’t think of four good ones.”

SPIRIT OF RENEWAL

The River Neckinger resurfaces to meet the Thames a short way east of Tower Bridge. In Bermondsey, not far from here, railway arches arose to march across the city in the 19th century, when Porter was at its peak. Some of these arches still hold Porter in their brickwork’s embrace today. They belong to The Kernel Brewery.

In the brewery’s warm room, founder Evin O’Riordain is maturing his latest batch of Export India Porter. “This one is actually terrifying me slightly,” he tells me. O’Riordain has hopped this batch with Sabro, which he says is “often a bit much.”

“But maybe…” He strokes his long, thin goatee as he thinks. “You know, the malt will tame down most of those hops so maybe a little touch of the coconutty Sabro in there might actually work really well in a dark beer.”

If you ask beer people about modern Porters brewed in London, they will likely mention The Kernel. Often it’s the first brewery they name. Often, as in the case of Dan Sandy, it has left their lips before you’ve finished asking the question.

The Kernel has been brewing Porters for a long time by contemporary standards. Dark beers made up 20 or so of its first 50 batches of beer, starting from 2009. Export India Porter came along around the time of the 50th batch, sometime in 2012, and has been part of the rotation ever since.

This beer is at once darkly powerful and refreshing. My bottle, hopped with Bramling Cross, has a hint of dark berries and hedgerow over rich licorice aromas. (Each batch has different hops.) On the palate it’s smooth and light with dark chocolate and coffee flavors. Roasted barley dominates at first but calms with each sip, falling back to keep the whole beer in balance. Again I find dark berry and hedgerow notes that carry on into the aftertaste. The dark malts and the hops work together in a way you seldom see in other dark beers. Put simply, it’s a joy.

The dark beers that O’Riordain brews stem from London tradition. This was true even before he founded The Kernel. As a homebrewer, he used historical recipes gleaned from Ron Pattinson’s blog and the Durden Park Beer Club (a group of homebrewers dedicated to recreating beers from the 18th and 19th centuries).

But O’Riordain’s beers aren’t rigid imitations of what went before. His primary purpose, he tells me, is to make delicious beer—and there’s no point in making a historically accurate beer that doesn’t taste good.

“There’s no joy in that,” he says. “When you’re looking into these old recipes there’s so much interpretation anyway. We can argue forever as to how accurate this is. And we can also argue as to how close we are to what the spirit might have been, or the intention behind the brew. What did they want that beer to be? Is it supposed to be big and bold and in your face or is it supposed to have been smoothed out and gotten mellow and aged and become calm?”

For Export India Porter, O’Riordain drew from two historical recipes, one from Barclay Perkins, dated 1855, and the other from Amsinck Brewery, dated 1868. “I don’t think it would be comparable to the Export India Porter from 150 years ago, although we’ve tried to take the inspiration from there. But we have wilfully changed its character quite a lot,” O’Riordain says. “We kept the initial impulse but it took the beer into somewhere else completely.”

“When you’re looking into these old recipes there’s so much interpretation anyway. We can argue forever as to how accurate this is. And we can also argue as to how close we are to what the spirit might have been, or the intention behind the brew. What did they want that beer to be? Is it supposed to be big and bold and in your face or is it supposed to have been smoothed out and gotten mellow and aged and become calm?”

The Kernel modernized its Porter much in the same way that IPAs have been transformed in recent years: by using mostly U.S. hops for a brighter, more intense hop character, and dry-hopping. “Dark hoppy beers don’t always work,” O’Riordain says. “But with a Porter we find it always works, so we haven’t really deviated from that. The hops change regularly but the recipe otherwise remains unchanged.”

Untappd lists 73 variants of The Kernel’s Export India Porter, no two of which have the same hop bill. Occasionally the batches are single-hopped, but more often combine two or three varieties. Chinook and Centennial appear most frequently, with Columbus, Simcoe, Bramling Cross, and Mosaic not far behind.

Both Centennial and Chinook lend the Porter an edge of citrus and hints of lime that approach a piney bitterness, and an underlying grapefruit note that provides a contrast to the dark malts. “When you get it right it’s really refreshing,” says O’Riordain.

The last way in which The Kernel has modernized Porter lies in serving the beer while it is still young and fresh. “It can age, and it ages nicely, but we tend to sell it young so the hop is forward in character along with the malt. That changes that whole beer entirely,” he says. In the past, brewers aged their Porter for anything from six to 18 months to allow smoky flavors from the brown malt to drop out. What these brewers didn’t realize was that its high hop rate allowed Brettanomyces to work on the beer while other souring organisms like Lactobacillus and Pediococcus were kept at bay. This resulted in a well-rounded beer with a touch of piquancy and a pleasing depth of flavor.

O’Riordain, quietly excited now, leads me on a winding path through the brewery’s collection of barrels to a cool corner far back in the arch. Here he keeps a vat of Porter that has been aging for some time. It’s almost ready, he tells me, but he’s still not sure what to do with it. He may release some as it is; he may blend this aged, vatted Porter with fresh Porter; or he may do a bit of both.

He pours me a sample and watches carefully as I taste. It’s a rich brown, oily and viscous in the glass, with only a few bubbles forming on its surface. It smells almost like an Oud Bruin, sour and apple-bright with a woody, treacle-like undertone. It tastes surprisingly light and gentle, lifted towards tartness but stopping just short of sour. There’s a memory of roast on the aftertaste, I tell him. He seems taken with this and repeats it to himself, stroking his long goatee.

A FAVORED POOL

Not long after, I find myself sharing a beer with Greg Hobbs, head brewer at Five Points Brewing Company in Hackney, East London. Hobbs is laid-back and friendly, with eyes that always seem to carry the hint of a smile. He exudes an inner stillness that doesn’t quite make it all the way to his hands, which contribute almost as much to the conversation as his words.

We’re drinking chilled bottles of his Railway Porter. It’s dark and roasty, but the aroma is all smooth milk chocolate and fresh coffee grounds. A touch of earthy spice from the hops keeps everything refreshing. As we talk, I look across the brewery yard, packed with tables to make an outdoor taproom, and wonder: Does he ever sit back here, or in the Pembury Tavern (a nearby pub the brewery owns), and watch people drink his beers?

“Yeah!” he says, dissolving into laughter. “It’s a bit sad but yeah I do, and I see who’s drinking what as well.”

A slightly different set of people drink Railway Porter compared to the other beers on offer, Hobbs says. “People tend to stick on it, particularly at the Pembury,” he says. “They’ll be a Porter drinker and they’ll go in and they’ll have several pints of it, and then move on.”

“I love the British brewing culture and history, the huge, room-sized oak vats that we used for ageing Porter and things like that. The historical side of brewing has always appealed to me and it just felt like we’d be missing a trick not to brew one and bring that heritage forward along with us and keep the story alive. It’s a style I love. I wish there were more Porters around.”

Our conversation drifts to Guinness drinkers, among whose ranks we have both counted ourselves. We share a moment of goofy enjoyment with the “good Guinness pub” discussion that serves as a handshake for the city’s Stout lovers. Hobbs reminisces about working in a Paris bar when he was just 18. It was an Irish chain pub, and he was tasked with pouring Guinness. “It was one of the first pints I ever poured, and I loved it. Loved it. Straight away.”

People who like dark beers often really like them. While pale beers keep you wondering what’s around the river’s next bend—new hops, a different yeast, different malts—dark beer’s slower, deeper current rewards repeat exposure. This loyalty means a drink like Railway Porter can “tick over nicely,” as Hobbs puts it, despite never selling as much as the brewery’s pale beers.

Five Points does a Pale Ale that amounts to about 45% of its total sales by volume. Railway Porter is more like 15% to 20%. “We’re not brewing it every day,” says Hobbs. “We don’t brew very much in the summer for example. We try to keep it in stock but it’s not flying out the door.” Sales trend upwards in winter, particularly in cask.

Railway Porter was the third beer Five Points brewed, and one of the three core beers the brewery launched with back in 2013. “It was non-negotiable for us. As a London brewery we felt we had to have a Porter,” says Hobbs.

If London was the inspiration, however, it wasn’t necessarily in the execution. When he was developing the Porter’s recipe, Hobbs tasted lots of American Porters, from Anchor Brewing, Alaskan Brewing Co., Left Hand Brewing, Founders Brewing Co. He wanted to recreate their intense flavors, although he stopped short of using the same robust hop bills, choosing instead to employ traditional East Kent Goldings. 

Another big influence was Fuller’s London Porter, which has long been a favorite of his. “It was a whole new world of flavors in a beer that I wasn’t used to,” Hobbs says, recalling his first taste many years ago. “I liked how it was sessionable. It was the sort of beer I could just keep drinking. It was then I realized that dark beers weren’t necessarily all heavy and strong and filling and all that.” Railway Porter ended up somewhere in the mid-Atlantic: opaque rather than brown, with more pronounced flavors than you might expect from the Fuller’s beer but less hoppy than the U.S. ones. It was modern, but drew heavily on British brewing’s taste for subtlety and drinkability.

Five Points is a brewery deeply rooted in its place. It sells nine out of every 10 pints it brews in London, and Hobbs says the city is “an amazing place to brew.” I ask if he thinks Five Points is a London brewery, rather than a brewery that happens to be in London. “Yeah, and even more than that a Hackney brewery—without the hipper elements of Hackney,” he says. “We live here, and we’re a very community-focused brewery. That’s really important to us. I’ve lived in Hackney since I moved to London 15 years ago.”

Still, I want to know, why brew a Porter?

“We want to do our part,” Hobbs says. “I love the British brewing culture and history, the huge, room-sized oak vats that we used for ageing Porter and things like that. The historical side of brewing has always appealed to me and it just felt like we’d be missing a trick not to brew one and bring that heritage forward along with us and keep the story alive. It’s a style I love. I wish there were more Porters around.”

WATERCOURSES

London is a city with many hidden rivers: the Effra, the Wandle, the Westbourne, the Tyburn, the Fleet, and more besides. Most of them flow beneath the city’s surface, entombed in sewers, ditches, and drains. They surface now and again to feed ponds or run through one of the capital’s many parks. On a map you can trace their furtive journeys to the Thames.

Whitbread was the last of London’s great Porter breweries. When it closed, in the early 1940s, Porter’s course ran underground. It resurfaced in the years leading up to our modern brewing renaissance, but never for long. People brewed it here and there, but the throughline is patchy and hard to trace.

After the Second World War and into the 1950s, Fuller’s brewed a beer that was sold as Nourishing Stout but was marked in the brewing books with a “P” for Porter. Its ABV, at 2.8%, matched the weak state into which Porter had fallen by the end of its heyday. (5.5% was the style’s average strength at the peak of its popularity.) This beer also disappeared, and it is another Fuller’s beer, London Porter, which perhaps marks a more permanent return to the light.

I’ve come out west to Hammersmith and The Dove, a riverside pub I knew well growing up. It’s a quiet Tuesday lunchtime, and I’m here to meet John Keeling, former head brewer at Fuller’s. The Griffin Brewery sits on the same riverbank a little further upstream at Chiswick. The distinctive, brackish, and muddy smell of the Thames brings back memories as I take a seat on the terrace overlooking the water. As a schoolboy I used to row past this pub, past the Griffin Brewery, further on past the Stag Brewery and as far as Chiswick Bridge. I’d ride the tide out one way and battle it back the other. Now I can sit and watch it roll by.

Fuller’s London Porter isn’t as old as I had expected: Its first release was in 1996. I imagined it had always been there, as I do with Pride and ESB, but I’m wrong about those, too. I can’t escape the idea that London Porter stretches back beyond when Fuller’s still used the old open square fermenters, and on into some hazy, mystic past. It’s that sort of beer, somehow.

I’m right, at least, that London Porter was brewed as “an homage to the past,” as Keeling tells me, following on from the 1845 beer Fuller’s released to mark its 150th anniversary in 1995. That beer was only supposed to be brewed once, but was so popular that Fuller’s kept making it. “Marketing asked for another beer,” says Keeling. “Reg [Drury, head brewer at the time] chose to do a Porter ‘because London’s famous for Stouts and Porters.’”

Fuller’s was old enough to have historical Porter recipes of its own, but Drury chose not to recreate these owing to technical reasons; Keeling says they were “much more complicated and involved different sugars.” But Drury did choose to feature brown malt and crystal malt, each making up about one tenth of the grist. “You could say it was a later-era Porter,” Keeling says. “If you ever taste brown malt, you’ll taste the flavor of Porter.” 

The grist also contains a very small quantity of chocolate malt. That innovation was Keeling’s: After taking over from Drury as head brewer, he replaced the caramel malt used in the first recipes. But the main driver was pale malt, which both kept the price down and gave a good fermentation. London Porter also marked the return of Fuggles to the brewery after a 35-year absence. Fuller’s used to hop its London Pride with Goldings and Fuggles but had changed to Target, Challenger, and Northdown in the 1960s.

Despite teething problems—“When we put the beer into cask it was flat,” Keeling remembers—London Porter eventually built up condition and became “a lovely cask beer.” But at 5.5% ABV, it was regarded as being too strong. “Beery people liked it but we weren’t going to get London Pride drinkers to try it, and we weren’t going to get Lager drinkers to try it. And we didn’t really get Guinness drinkers. It was too strong for them and too powerful in flavor. Dark beers were still not popular, so it wasn’t a hugely popular beer, but it was very well looked on by people who liked beer, and people who wrote about beer, so it got a lot of publicity for Fuller’s.”

When Keeling speaks, he does so with a broad Mancunian twang, but he’s very much a London brewer. “It’s very important to represent London,” he tells me. In the early 1970s, London was still home to a thriving brewing industry, including eight breweries each producing more than a million BBLs per year. Roughly one pint in every five drunk in Britain came from the capital. But by the time Fuller’s first released London Porter, the tide of brewing in the city was approaching its lowest ebb. There were only two breweries left besides Fuller’s Griffin Brewery: the Stag, in Mortlake, and the Ram Brewery in Wandsworth, which was owned by Young’s.

“Young’s were our great rivals,” Keeling says. “And Mortlake was piling out the beers. But London was very much in danger of becoming a city of banks and shops, and becoming very boring. Even the markets were closing down.” The Stag closed in 2015, and the Ram in 2006. Fuller’s, with its direct line to London’s past, had gone from being one of London’s smallest breweries to one of its largest. “We’re the ones that lasted the course, so to speak,” Keeling says. (Or that was true until 2019, when Fuller’s sold the brewing side of its business to Asahi to concentrate on its pubs.)

Keeling says it’s good that craft beer has come to breathe its character back into London. “Nobody can go to Bermondsey without noticing the breweries there,” he says. I ask him about Five Points’ Railway Porter, and he says it is a beautiful beer. “That has the spirit of [London] Porter in it,” he says. “It does have a direct lineage with the past.”

We’re drinking prints of London Pride as we talk. It’s the first time I’ve had it in years, and in some ways it tastes like coming home. It’s that Fuller’s yeast that does it: If, like me, you grew up surrounded by Fuller’s pubs, its esters have probably worked their way into your idea of what beer is at some deep, fundamental level.

As it often does when the subject is dark beer, our conversation slides over to Guinness. John is not a fan. “I’ve never rated Guinness as a great beer to drink in a pub; I’d much rather have a pint of cask,” he says. “Porter is far superior in flavor and texture and mouthfeel. I always preferred the Porter.”

MUDLARKING

Paul Anspach and Jack Hobday have been playing a game. The co-founders of Anspach & Hobday are listing what they like to call “monobrands.” These are beers so well known they’ve become interchangeable with the brewery that makes them in people’s minds. Beavertown and Neck Oil. Camden Town Brewery and Hells Lager. DEYA and Steady Rolling Man. Harvey’s and Sussex Best. St Austell and Proper Job, maybe Tribute.

They have been making this list because they are excited, and they are excited because of London Black, their new session-strength nitro Porter, which might just become their own monobrand beer. “We’ve always had The Porter but there are limitations because of its strength, so this feels like the first time we’ve had an opportunity to get into that sort of territory,” says Anspach.

After a few sips, I’m excited too. The Porter sits at a fairly hefty 6.7% ABV, whereas London Black is gentler at 4.4% ABV. It’s smooth and creamy yet light and refreshing. It bursts with chocolate, licorice, and molasses flavors, with just a hint of roast barley bitterness and a whisper of Willamette hops. The aftertaste lingers pleasantly on my palate. It is at once deeply familiar and bracingly new. This beer is everything Guinness wishes it were. I could drink it all day long.

If there were ever a brewery to recapture the spirit of London’s lost brewing heyday and update it for the modern era, it would be Anspach & Hobday. The co-founders built their business on the back of Porter. It was the third recipe they ever attempted as homebrewers, and their first all-grain beer. It was also their first really palatable brew. “The reason why Porter is the beer of London is because it’s very well suited to the water,” says Anspach. Their Porter was good enough to earn the pair encouragement from Evin O’Riordain, which set them on the road to launching commercially in 2013.

The Porter has been a core beer right from the start. Its importance to the brewery is partly down to this popularity—“It probably punches above its weight compared to other brewers’ dark beers,” says Hobday—but also because of its historical connection. “I think we grew into it as we grew into brewing and into the idea of having a London-based brewery,” Anspach says. “Our discovery of our own recipe design coincided with learning about the significance of the beer to its place.”

The two have leaned heavily on history for many of their other beers, including a Three Threads (based on a “very old” Porter recipe and mashing technique), a Rauchbier, and an Imperial Baltic Porter. Anspach says their understanding of what has gone before them underpins the brewery. “Definitely a lot of thought around that was put in when we were setting up and thinking about what we wanted the brewery to be, and the sorts of beers we want to make. It doesn’t apply to every beer that we make but there are certain beers where, when that’s really turned up to 11, it does feel that you’re doing something different with perhaps more meaning or integrity.”

Anspach & Hobday moved its main brewing operations to a larger site in the South London suburbs just as the coronavirus pandemic began. Before this, its base was a Bermondsey railway arch just a short stroll up the tracks from The Kernel. Space there was limited, which restricted how much it could brew. The beer was great, but you didn’t often see it outside the taproom and in a small handful of other locations, which is maybe why beer writer Will Hawkes once described Anspach & Hobday as London’s most underrated brewery.

London Black feels like a new beginning. We talk in their Bermondsey arch, which now hosts a dedicated taproom, on the day of their launch event for the beer. It is the first such event they have held since founding the brewery almost a decade ago, and this is the first of their beers not named after its style. It feels like that moment when, after jumping off the riverbank and just before plunging into the cool green water, you hang poised on the threshold between two worlds.

“We still brew in very small batches, 1,000 liters to 2,000 liters at a time,” says Hobday. “We see [London Black] as potentially being something a lot bigger.”

After just two months on the market, London Black has already drawn level with the brewery’s best-seller, The Pale Ale. In fact it has been so successful that Anspach and Hobday are restricting who they sell it to. Pubs put in dedicated nitro lines to sell London Black, so the brewery must ensure it can make enough beer to guarantee these lines won’t run dry. “You can’t go like, ‘Oh, I’ll just stick another Pale on for a week,’ or whatever. We have to maintain that consistency of supply,” says Anspach.

Fresh from securing a nationwide listing with distributors James Clay (covering England and Wales) and New Wave (Scotland), the pair want to expand production again. They plan to support this with a round of crowdfunding set to begin this autumn. They hope to install a new brewhouse, extra fermentation vessels, additional warehouse space, and a new canning line that would enable them to can London Black, which at the moment is keg-only. It would see their output increase at least threefold and possibly as much as sixfold, from 300,000 to 1.8 million liters. “We’d rather prepare for growth now than wait until we’re scrambling to catch up,” says Hobday.

The founders have talked a lot about their hopes for this beer, and specific pubs where they would like to see it on tap. Already they have sold into the Graceland group of pubs, which includes the Black Heart—a cool and grungy metal bar in Camden, North London. “It sits really nicely there, but equally it sits really nicely in some smart venues as well,” Anspach says. He recalls an example of the latter, which recently became an account. “They didn’t have Guinness, even though they had people asking for it, because they didn’t want something that didn’t have that [local] connection,” says Anspach. London Black, with its homegrown roots, was able to step in and fill that gap. “It’s just a really nice fit. It’s proper classy,” says Hobday.

RECONNECTION

London is lucky to have Anspach & Hobday, and the rest of its new breed of brewers—those who care about where they are, and have an interest in what went before. Like mudlarks picking over the foreshore, they find value among things our ancestors lost or discarded. They have taken Porter up from the mud where we cast it aside. We forgot this was ours. It can be ours again.

But it might take some convincing to get there. Today, one in every 10 pints served in London is Guinness. Every day, Londoners consume great, dark, gushing tides of the stuff. Great Britain is Guinness’ largest single market, and within that London’s is the deepest glass to fill.

Guinness has achieved something quite astounding with its marketing. Though actual Guinness branding rarely mentions Ireland explicitly, somehow Guinness, and by extension Stout in general, has become inextricably associated with the Emerald Isle. There might not be shamrocks on the pump clip, but no one’s surprised when they get a pint with one inscribed into the foam. 

There’s an irony in that: Guinness’s roots are anchored in London and its Porter. Most Guinness drinkers, even in London, have no idea that Arthur Guinness actually got his recipe here

It’s quite strange to grow up in London, once the capital of the world’s brewing culture, and find yourself loving a version of a London beer that someone from elsewhere has taken and sold back to you so successfully that you think the idea for it was theirs in the first place. I have to admit this didn’t bother me too much when I was sinking pints of Guinness in the ’90s and 2000s. It was only once craft brewing took off again in the city, and I could drink beers made by and for my own community, that I realized how much I valued that connection. Then I realized how much it had been denied to me before, and how perverse that really was.

Like me, Hobday recalls growing up and being disheartened seeing a lack of local options in the pubs. “This idea that we were a beer nation, or a city of beer drinkers, and there’s nothing local or meaningful about any of it. And to learn about the history of London brewing, and just how big it was … It was the ’70s or the ’80s before the U.K. caught up with what London was doing in the 1800s. I think that gave us a bit of confidence to have a go at dreaming, to do what we did when we started,” he says. “I think that background is a really good illustration of where London can be again if people drink good beer.”

Words by Anthony Gladman
Illustrations by Colette Holston