For Jasper Cuppaidge, founder and owner of Camden Town Brewery, brewing is in his blood.
His family ran Queensland regional brewer MacLachlan's in Australia, and, so when Jasper came to England, it wasn't long before he decided to run his own pub. Taking over the Horseshoe in London's leafy Hampstead six years ago, he soon began brewing in his pub cellar.
Last year, he established the Camden Town Brewery - nestled beneath five railway arches on Wilkin Street Mews in North London. Today, he has four core beers: Camden Hells Lager, Camden Pale Ale, Camden Wheat Beer and Camden Bitter.
Creating a brewery wasn't just a dream, it was a birthday present to his mum - a heartfelt way of continuing a family legacy in an area of London he is passionate about. It was also the start of some outstanding beer.
When a plan comes together...
"I guess you always look at things you're doing and wonder what else you can do," says Jasper. "So, inspired by people like Adnams and Dark Star and American craft beer, I came down here and did a business plan based on getting one arch.
"Then, I thought 'I'll be out of one arch too quickly'. Then two arches seemed a bit silly, so I thought 'well, let's really go for it' and, in the end, I got five arches."
Jasper recalls that when he first met Troels Prahl, who became his brewmaster, he'd been mesmerised by a conversation he'd had with him at a craft beer expo once. "Troels is a yeast expert in the brewing industry and I knew about grains and I knew about hops, but yeast has always been interesting to me too," he says.
"I rang him thinking 'if anyone's working with great craft brewers in Europe, it'll be him', and thought I'd ask if he could put a note up on his website for a brewer. And he said, 'well, how about I come?' So there you go - he came over from Denmark, he'd never been to England before, and here we are today. The rest of the gang are advocate brewers and they are all passionate about beer.
"First there were two of us, now there are nearly six of us, and everyone does everything."
For core beers, people wanted quality to be maintained and not to fluctuate, says Jasper, explaining that "you get fluctuation from seasons, different grains and different hop varieties, but what you get from our beers is the longevity of our style and a consistency of quality".
And he's right. The beers have a crisp subtle elegance about them. "It's a flavour that's not huge and bolshy or non-existent so you're in the mass market - it's just great beer," says Jasper.
For the lager, Camden Town Brewery uses traditional German hop varieties and Perle, while on the pale ale it uses everything from Citra, Cascade and Centennial to Perle and Chinook. The British bitter is kept strictly traditional and so everything in the beer is native including the grain, while it combines Challenger, Fuggles and Goldings hops for flavour. While wheat beer certainly leans towards a yeast profile, inspired by Alios Unertl, the hops in it appear to be fairly minuscule.
Gathering inspiration
But what stands out about Camden Town Brewery as much as its style is actually its brewing team's genuine enthusiasm and care for what they are doing. It's a brewery made up of a combination of people who are passionate about what they do and the fact that they are creating something new, local and something that reflects their knowledge and understanding of beer.
Jasper explains that he and his team take their inspiration from others like Eric Toft, brewmaster at Schönramer brewery, who has visited and been a helping hand in the creation of Camden Hells lager.
They also love the Sierra Nevada brewery's philosophy and passion, which started out as two guys making beer in a bath. "We've always been fans and I think the one philosophy that we got from them is to only grow if you can maintain your quality," says Jasper.
He says that this has really helped sculpt his view on everything with which he wants his own brewery to be associated.
"At Sierra Nevada, they use the yeast from their brewery to drive their trucks and are totally self-sufficient. They make all their own power from solar and burning. It's incredible, they're something like the sixth biggest brewer in the States now and yet they're not on the national grid because they supply all their own energy," muses Jasper, clearly impressed.
For these reasons, it doesn't come as a surprise to find that Camden Town Brewery is an eco-friendly outfit too.
"We are very efficient when it comes to reclaiming energy. All the power is maintained and it heats up the building. We're also very water-efficient - we control the cold water tank so that we always know how hot it is," says Jasper. "That way, no unnecessary water will be going down the drain.
"I guess it is green intervention really. Where you would normally work on 11-12 pints, we're down to between five and six pints of water used per pint produced, which is great."
And this is where Jasper explains how the beer-making is just one side of things. Everything he is doing with the brewery is being driven by his beliefs. He simply wants to run something that has integrity; and this encapsulates success and reward in his own terms. "Even though this is an industry here, it's being driven by passion, you know?" he says.
"It has always had an ethos to deliver first and hope that the pounds will come later. If we can over-deliver in every sense of the word on our beers, even when it comes to answering the telephone, that's what we're about.
"Sure, the business has to be sustainable. But, even with the Horseshoe it was never about price,
it was about serving the best beer possible. This is just what we're doing with the brewery too."
In the pipeline
So what's next? "We're working on a red IPA," says Jasper, admitting that it's simply the result of everyone in the brewery being so passionate about working with all of the lovely things they are being supplied that they want to showcase them.
"It's a big hop-driven beer and will be really showing the quality of its ingredients. If this is a Ferrari, we're trying to put it into fifth gear and really go for it," he adds, grinning.
But, added to Camden Town Brewery's ethos for delivering great beer, it's clear that the team also has a true love of the nation's capital.
"We always brew here, never anywhere else," says Jasper. "We love London. We all live here, breathe here and all our customers are here.
"That's why we're also doing a porter - a collaboration porter with a restaurant - Caravan," he adds.
Caravan, in London's fashionable Exmouth Market, is highly regarded for its coffee.
"They are roasters; they roast their own coffee in their basement, so they're a bit like us in that they make their own things. They love our beer - it's on draught there. So we said 'let's do something together'. They're going to roast our malts in their roaster and I think it'll be really good - really interesting," says Jasper, clearly looking forward to the results.
"I guess we're a bit modern and we're stepping the porter into a new territory. So far porters have never really been about being hop-driven. This will be more of a hoppy porter. In the past, porter was really a grain-style beer, but this will have a lot more of a hop profile and a big wedge of coffee," he adds.
But the greatest thing, admits Jasper, is that people always give something local a chance.
"What you have to do is back it up - and we have. We've put our name on the street and people think: 'I'll give it a chance'. Then, they actually go back again and again and have begun to hunt our beer out," he says happily, describing the beginnings of the Camden Town Brewery's success story.
"The phone rings regularly with people wanting to put our beers into their bars now. People are emailing about it saying that they love it and it's the best stuff they