Fronting the revolution

The Meantime Brewery is known for its vast range of quality beers, but the UK doesn't necessarily appreciate them, says founder Alistair Hook. Nick Yates reports.

Alistair Hook, founder of the Meantime Brewery, is justifiably proud of his pub, the Greenwich Union. Nestling in the leafy London suburb of Greenwich, the Union serves a range of excellent beers, from a Bavarian wheat beer to a Vienna-style lager, all brewed and looked after with loving care.

In a stylish long bar and back room, knowledgeable staff advise and serve customers with the theatre and attention to detail that many larger pubcos' training gurus would drool over.

It is an uncompromising vision of quality, embodying all the values and beliefs for which Alistair Hook stands. The maverick brewing mastermind behind both the pub and the nearby Meantime operation that supplies it has been subject to controversy over the years for his policy of exporting the majority of his beer.

Far and away​

Most of the Meantime range is destined for America, where Alistair believes there are enough punters willing to pay a premium price for a premium product - unlike in the UK.

By the time he'd set up the Meantime Brewery in 1999, Alistair had worked out that there just aren't enough customers in the UK for a product that deliberately eschews the mainstream. "I'm fishing on a lake with a fly and generally where I am fishing there are no fish," he says, in an Eric Cantona-esque moment.

Where these fish are in plentiful supply, however, is the Greenwich Union. The surrounding area is affluent and full enough of Alistair's target audience, ABC1s "who like something slightly better", to enable the pub to make between £11,000 and £16,000 a week.

The pub's manager, Mark O'Gormon, explains a lot of affluent, potential customers live locally. But the Union is also a destination pub and Mark says that people regularly travel distances not associated with a trip to a local pub in the capital.

Mark adds that the pub's unusual beers build up a great sense of brand loyalty - many customers come for the raspberry beer and leave if it is not on - and that the cut-above staff are a great draw.

"All the staff get into the beer," Mark says. "We tell them if they want it easy then go work in another pub." Alistair and Mark require staff to quickly become fully versed in what they are selling, regularly sending them on training courses at the brewery and teaching them to appreciate and understand the beers.

Alistair also hopes that the waters are well stocked to take his bait around Borough Market in central London, where Meantime supplies Brew Wharf - a new bistro and brewing development.

Meantime is at the forefront of what Alistair considers a beer revolution. Studying the art of hops at Weihenstepahn School in Bavaria, the spiritual home of beer, Alistair came to believe in the power of the small brewery to battle the big boys with distinctive, flavour-packed beers. After a number of brewing ventures, he eventually set up the Meantime Brewery to fulfil his ideal to mix New World wine techniques with traditional artisan beer brewing.

To honour the occasion​

To mark Meantime's fifth anniversary last year, he turned his back on conventional lager. The brewery's diverse list of beers now ranges from a 7.5 per cent ABV IPA packed with English Fuggles and Goldings hops, to a 6.5 per cent chocolate beer, to a vibrant five per cent raspberry beer.

Alistair believes that big brewers are making tentative stabs at diversifying away from mass-produced lager to more exciting speciality beers. He points to Artois Bock, and says that he admires Hoegaarden for the wheat beer's success in "educating" customers.

However, he says that this process will be very slow, and that newbies like Bock are an example of large breweries hedging their bets, rather than having the real conviction to back something radical.

"They want to be seen to be giving consumer choice. They're not going to produce it in the same volumes as they do Stella Artois."

The difference then between Meantime and the rest of the pack is that Alistair has the courage to put his money where his mouth is, risk-taking with a daring range of beers that do not exactly have mass market appeal.

He is in a drive to take beer upmarket, to the sophisticated climes usually perceived as the domain of wine. Last spring, the Meantime Brewery invested £500,000 in a corker wirer - a shiny new machine that plugs their prestige beers, IPA, London Porter and Wheat Beer, with a champagne-style cork in a champagne-style bottle - which will soon be packing the shelves of supermarket giant Sainsbury's.

Alistair believes that Meantime is the only brewery in the UK with this facility, another factor which adds to the sense of luxury surrounding its beers.

With this approach, though, comes the economic reality of having to export. Alistair has as much admiration for the American community, where his beers are well received, as he does resigned disappointment at the stagnated British market.

He views the lagers available on the front bar of 99 per cent of the UK's pubs as a million miles from the golden liquid he fell in love with in Bavaria. "Most beers are vehicles for alcohol," he says. "You can't taste them."

In his view, consumers have become addicted to unobtrusive, unchallenging beers - a direct result of the pressure on brewers to quicken the brewing process at the expense of flavour.

Beer is a simple equation, he says. "You can invest millions in packaging and millions in brewing, but what it's all about is time.

"It's all about the length of the brew, but accountants want to dumb down and speed up. The middle ground is being torched by the big pubcos," he says.

At least in the UK. The reason Alistair turned to America is that many on the other side of the pond have stuck their necks out on interesting beers and, perversely, taken their lead from English brewing heritage.

Custodians of history​

In the 1970s, Alistair (pictured)​ believes, significant numbers of our American cousins swilled their bottles of Bud and Miller down the sink and "started to take their styles from British beers like IPA and put it in the ether. They are custodians of our history," he believes.

"They started to bring values back to beer because they talk about history. They resurrected brewing as it was before the big brewers came."

It's not quite true that Alistair has been cold-shouldered by all at home though. He describes his contract with Sainsbury's to supply its Taste the Difference range as "a life saver". The supermarket chain has taken 45 per cent of Meantime's output since it commissioned the brewer to produce a range of European-style beers that, as the name suggests, are marketed as a tier above the rest of its stock.

Nevertheless, Meantime beer does not exactly leap out at consumers either in the off-trade or the on-trade. It is a Catch 22 situation - the beer is great but it's not in plentiful supply to the customers who would lap it up.

Alistair knows this is the case, but also knows that these customers are currently too few in number to make it worth his while supplying it to them.

Tasting his IPA in the Greenwich Union, the bastion of all that Alistair Hook stands for, you start to get a sense of the problem. The Pale Ale explodes in your mouth with complex flavours, and this is an explosion that Alistair feels he is unable to let loose on the UK. For now, at any rate.