On an unassuming industrial estate just south of the O2 on the Greenwich Peninsula you’ll find the home of London’s second largest brewery, the Meantime Brewing Company. They were established in 1999 by entrepreneur and master brewer Alastair Hook and initially operated out a facility on Penhall Rd in Charlton. In 2010, Mayor of London Boris Johnson carried out the official opening of a new purpose-built brewhouse on Blackwall Lane, and that’s where I found myself last Sunday afternoon when I took part in a tour of the facilities and sampled some of their offerings.
The Meantime Brewery Tour starts in their tasting room on the first floor, which is equipped with a full bar and which also has a view of the brewhouse through floor to ceiling glass doors and windows. Displayed around the walls are part of Michael Jackson’s world-renowned collection of beers and drinking vessels (these were donated to the brewery by his wife on his death in 2008) and hoppers which contain examples of the various malts and hops used to brew Meantime’s ales.
Our guide for the afternoon was another Alastair (unrelated to the owner) who has a rather infectious enthusiasm for beer. He showed us the ingredients used in the brewing process and then went on to talk us through the rather complex operations involved in producing a pint of beer. Between beer-related jokes, Alastair imparted some very interesting facts – for example, it turns out that the facility here is capable of producing over 17.6m pints of beer per year and, unlike many other breweries, Meantime don’t pasteurise their beer – instead they remove microbes and bacteria by passing the liquids through increasingly fine filters (the smallest one that they use has holes just 0.45 microns across – that’s about 150th of the width of a human hair).
Alastair also disclosed that Meantime make Marks and Spencer’s own-brand premium beers, and did you know that only brown glass provides protection from UV? Remember that the next time you drink something from a green or clear glass bottle that smells a little bit ‘off’. Meantime also don’t use isinglass (the dried swim bladder of the sturgeon fish) in their refinement process – instead they use Irish moss. This means that vegetarians can drink as much of the company’s product as they like, and vegans need only avoid the Chocolate Porter (which contains real chocolate).
Aftter the pep talk we then set off past the malt store, piled high with sacks, and headed downstairs to check out the facilities on the ground floor. Negotiating a forest of steel and copper pipes we saw the large German-manufactured mash tuns, fermenting and conditioning vessels, and also got a quick peek at the bottling, labeling and shipping facilities at the back of the plant. To be honest, unless they’re into home brewing I don’t imagine that most visitors will get very excited about these big pieces of industrial machinery, but the one thing I did note is how spotlessly clean the whole place is! There’s also to-do list on the wall as you get to the bottom of the stairs that’s worth noting…
Of course it goes without saying that throughout the convivial conversation we also got to sample some of the product – Meantime have ten regular beers and lagers in their portfolio, there are six seasonal beers that come around at several points during the year and the brewery also makes small runs of around twenty one-off beers over at the old premises in Penhall Rd. This allows their master brewers (who are led by Steve Schmidt – a native of Syracuse, New York State) an opportunity to hone their skills and to experiment with new ingredients and brewing techniques.
From their regular range we tried the sweet London Lager (which is brewed to German purity law standards), the fruity Wheat, the very substantial London Porter, their 7.4% India Pale Ale and finished off with a goblet of the Yakima Red. This is a ‘ruby’ beer (so-called for its deep red colour) which is made with five varieties of American hops sourced from the Yakima Valley in Washington State, which produces about 75% of the country’s hops.
I’ve tried beers from just about all of London’s breweries over the last few years including the small companies that have sprung up in the capital fairly recently, and what I think makes the Meantime Brewery’s beers stand out is their level of refinement. None of the beers that we sampled had any rough edges – clearly having twelve years’ experience of brewing lends a certain maturity to their products. I can heartily recommend everything that we tried.
The Meantime Brewery Tours take place Thursdays through Sundays each week, except on public holidays. The price of the ‘classic tour’ which I took is £15, which I think represents really good value for money given that we must have drunk nearly that much beer in value on our visit! You can also arrange bespoke tours and on Friday and Saturday evenings there are ‘Pie & Pint Nights’ – full details of the tours can be found on this page on their website.
The brewery also runs regular talks which will be of interest to anyone who enjoys beer – these take place on the first Friday of the month, although the first one for 2013 will take place in February. There’s nothing up on the website yet, but you can follow Meantime on Twitter and Facebook for updates.
If you’d like to try their beers outside the confines of a brewery tour you’ll find Meantime beers in Sainsburys and Waitrose, and also at many good wine and beer stores as well as some of London’s more salubrious pubs and bars. The brewery also owns and runs two Greenwich pubs which offer the full range of Meantime products as well as food offerings – The Old Brewery right on the Thames waterside in Greenwich Old Town (a very popular tourist haunt) and the more down-to-earth Greenwich Union on Royal Hill.
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