Beer School: The Kernel
The morning I showed up, clutching a box of pastries – a canny trade and exchange for the fact that I knew I’d be loitering around asking questions and generally being a pest - there were old Sonic Youth tracks blasting out of two huge speakers on a set of shelves crammed full of beer bottles.
“They’re from our travels,” said O’ Riordan. “All the pales go in the fridge and so we finish them really quickly. I’m not sure there are even any left in the fridge. Anything on the shelf is a bit more challenging, so it goes but not quite as quickly.”
Brewing with O’Riordan are Toby Munn and Chrigl Luthy and the brewery is a hive of activity. The long arched corridor, which has a retro trike hanging from the wall among stacked boxes and rolls of bottle labels, leads the eye down to where the kit is housed right at the back of the space. Once you reach the end of the arch, an L-shaped bend to the left leads to a storage area for tanks, casks and bottles.
Just one look at the barrels at the back and you can tell there’s also a touch of experimental ageing going on too. The place, also, smells divine. A mix of wort steam as the mash begins alongside the fragrant zing of hops. There are only two scents better than this – freshly tumbled laundry and the waft of baking bread.
I can’t help being a pain most of the time. Asking questions, constantly. O’Riordan listens to each one I ask carefully and responds with his trademark long pause before offering up the most considered and thoughtful reply imaginable. His core focus is on ingredients.
In English terms, we don’t tend to have a way for describing how once we’ve tasted something we want to immediately replicate it. It’s a term somewhere between ‘moreishness’ and ‘craving’. O’Riordan calls it “chasing flavour” - a way of satisfying our palate. It’s a wonderful description.
It’s about the way certain beers can make your tastebuds sing and, afterwards, your desire to re-experience their complexity or subtlety again can make seeking them out a healthy obsession.
That’s what you’re getting with The Kernel.
“Why do you always change the hop combinations you use?” I ask. “I may have found one I really like, but then the next batch is different.”
O’Riordan admits it’s because the team don’t want to waste time just churning out beer on demand. They want to stay interested in the art of brewing and assess how each adaptation or change to a recipe can affect the outcome, regarding the process of brewing as more of a journey than a continuous repeated task to generate something the same every time.
And who would want nothing to ever change?
Pubs to visit: The Crown & Anchor, Brixton, The Draft House, Tower Bridge
