Beer School: Beavertown

Beavertown Brewery, owned by Logan Plant, started back in the winter of 2011 in the kitchen of Duke's Brew and Que, in De Beauvoir, Hackney, London.

‘Beavertown’ is the old cockney name for the area and, as the guys attest on their website, it is: “famed across Victorian London for its rich characters and infinite revelry.”

The Nick Dwyer penned illustrations on the beer cans echoes this in pictorial form. There’s an edginess and a fun side to Beavertown that Dwyer’s inked brain candy for the brand perfectly encapsulates. Consider a mix of Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes ‘Spaceman Spiff’ imaginings crossed with Mike Judge’s Beavis & Butthead characterisations and now throw it all together on the Mexican celebration Day of the Dead with a dose of sugar skulls. The result is iconic and cool. 

But let’s talk about the beer, because that’s what’s really flying here. On my brew day, the processes and care taken towards making sure this was the best beer ever brewed was fanatical.

Last March, Beavertown moved to east London’s Fish Island and then in May this year the team moved to a new 11,000sqft space in Tottenham Hale as the demand for their beers grew and grew so did the team. Jenn Merrick joined, having previously brewed at York, Dark Star and Meantime breweries. Now head brewer at Beavertown, Merrick is making some amazing beers. Alongside brewer Ben Turley, who ditched his big city job to follow his love of brewing and music, work a multi-cultural brew team – Korean, Finnish, Brazilian, Kiwi, Australian, Canadian, American, English and Irish – all with one thing that unifies them: a passion for great beer.

Here are the team working with Plant, Turley and Merrick: Brandon Amond, Tiago Falcone, Christoffer Tuominen, Jonny Willetts, Seunghyeon Baek (affectionately known as Stevie) and Cosmo Sutherland. Remember their names because their dedication and know how as well as future recipes will be gold dust to other brewers one day.

At the Tottenham Hale site, Beavertown has now upgraded to a 30BBL (50HL) brew house and what the team fondly call their 'heartbeat' 4BBL kit sits next to ‘Big Beaver’ to maintain a sense of the experimental as well as, to some degree, serve to remind how dramatic this brewery’s rise has really been over the past couple of years.

The Beavertown canning line is capable of canning and packing 2,400 cans of beer in an hour and 15 minutes and the bottling line works to the same tempo. It’s impressive.

The beers are perfectly considered for depth of flavour. They perfectly balance that desire for something tasty and something moreish. They are also very very different. Each one has its place and stands out for strengths that make it most unlike the others. On my visit, we brewed Neck Oil – a well-balanced session IPA made with extra pale malt and is late-hopped with an artful balance of Simcoe, Centennial, Galaxy, Columbus, Mosaic and Amarillo. 

We began mashing in at about 68 degrees and had a bit of time before the temperature was boosted to where we needed it to be. The second stage of getting the temperature of the water up was punctuated with a lesson on using liquid acids to adjust alkalinity and to increase desirable ions in the wort.

Sometimes, when you’re brewing, you’re paying such close attention to temperatures and measures as part of the process that you disengage with how much you’re learning as you’re going along. Beavertown showed itself to be a great place to brew because of a willingness to learn and talk candidly about each stage of brewing from each member of the team.

I’ve come to understand how brewing is a precise art; a blend of accuracy and anticipation. You have to be eager about the result, but in the meantime you need to be mindful of the importance of each stage. You need to be careful. You need to be completely engaged with what you are doing at all times. This needs to be hooked up to this. Check this reading. Is it ready? Shall we wait? Can you unclip that three-way clamp and start the CIP (cleaning in place)? Can you weigh those up? 

It’s a janitorial process and so you need to keep your energy up. Every time you ascend the ladder to the kettle you need to do so with the enthusiasm of a child about to slip down the best slide in the park.

The tweaks you make to temperatures and measures in an experimental brewing sense are down to your own preference for style and depth of flavour, but to begin with there are bigger lessons to learn. Absorb instruction, get amongst things and grasp why each task is necessary by doing and by tasting. And really, the tasting – that’s the best bit.

Seek out Beavertown's beers, visit their tap house or simply give them a call to stock some. They really are all gems.

Pubs to visit: ​Dukes Brew and Que, Hackney, The Black Heart, Camden