London regional focus: Back to the old school
If you go onto the Meantime Brewery website and click on the biography link for brewmaster Alistair Hook, you are taken to a mugshot of Hollywood actor and director Dennis Hopper.
It is rather apt for where Hopper was once a renegade film maker, Hook is a renegade brewer.
In a brewing culture where the best microbrewers are coming up with excellent cask beers in traditional British style, the Meantime brewery is a hive of American influence multitudes of styles, tastes and hops. It is unlike any brewing outfit in the UK.
Actually, stop there. In fact, Alistair might object to being called a renegade brewer. While he comes up with brews that are unlike anything you might see in the UK, he actually sees himself as a bit of a brewing traditionalist.
For while we may stare in wonder at the Grand Cru Wheat beer or Old Smoked Bock, most of his beers are actually steeped in the deepest of European brewing traditions. He is a student of brewing in the truest sense and wants to remind drinkers just what has been forgotten by British brewers in their mad rush for profit and growth.
His complaint is that British brewing has, somewhere along the line, lost its soul. In the drive to make profit it has forgotten about so many of the things that make beer great.
"When I went to Heriot-Watt University to do a brewing degree it was all about what an industrial product beer is," he says. "I had the enthusiasm really kicked out of me. It was only when I went to study in Munich for a year that I found it again." There he studied with American brewers who were soon to be legends in their own right, such as Eric Warner of the Flying Dog Brewery.
"It was fantastic and it really opened my mind. They had a reverence for beer that just didn¹t exist in Britain," he says.
After projects in the 1990s which included starting the Packhorse Brewery in Ashford and the Freedom Brewery in Fulham, as well as running a brewing magazine called Grist, Alistair founded Meantime in Greenwich in 1999.
So influenced was he by the brewing revolution that had taken place in the US in the previous 15 years that he wanted to give London a piece of it.
With the closure of the Young¹s brewery, Meantime is now the second-biggest independent brewery in London (behind Fullers) something Alistair is very proud of.
"I am a passionate Londoner and I love it here," he says. "So rather than go to the US to pursue my love for beer I brought the US to London!" And in doing so he has started to remind Londoners of the city¹s fine brewing heritage.
"London has a magnificent brewing history," he adds.
"It was the centre of the brewing world at one time. And that was because it was the centre of the industrial world. Porter and India Pale Ales were actually London beers.
"Then brewers from Burton, such as Allsops, came in, saw how much the London brewers were making and put their hand to it in fact they ended up making much better IPAs. But we at Meantime are going to claim back London¹s provenance for London¹s beer drinkers!"
