London – The best place to drink beer in the world

LONDON is a great place for a drink. A stroll around one of the city’s more unbuttoned districts – Soho, perhaps, or Shoreditch – demonstrates that, despite being constantly bombarded with health warnings, many of its residents remain devotion to alcohol of one form or another. Everywhere there are opportunities, at venues of all kinds, from green-tiled boozers to high-end, high-concept restaurants via the corner shop where you can pick up a can or two to keep you going.
This all means that Londoners can choose from a dizzying variety of different drinks, but beer is the city’s most trusted intoxicant. Yes, gin might have emerged in its modern form from the British capital’s 18th-century gin craze, and wine of all kinds is more popular now, with a much wider audience, than it has ever been. Cider and whisky, too, will always have their partisans. But beer has the deepest roots here (styles like Porter and IPA were born in London in the 18th and 19th centuries) and, after a sketchy few years, it has re-emerged in a new guise, as diverse in flavour as the city it is made in.

There are now more than 100 breweries in London, and only one of them – Fuller’s – existed before 1999. New breweries began to open in dribs and drabs after Meantime arrived in 2000, though, and then like a flood after The Kernel demonstrated it was possible to make good-quality American pale ales here, in 2009. Evin O’Riordain, the founder and a former cheesemonger, had travelled to New York to teach the locals about cheese, but ended up learning just as much about pale ales. Why can’t I make beers like that in London, he asked himself. Why not indeed?
Bermondsey, where The Kernel is based, has become the epicentre of the city’s beer scene. Breweries as diverse as Fourpure, Brew By Numbers and Southwark Brewing are based here, and on a Saturday most open their taprooms. It is the biggest bar crawl in town, to the extent that big-hitters from elsewhere in the UK – Moor from Bristol and Cloudwater from Manchester – have recently opened bars here too. The next few years should see others follow them, while Bermondsey’s breweries move further out in search of more space and cheaper rent.

Others part of the city are rich in brewing life, too. Tottenham has Beavertown and Redemption, plus Bohem, a Czech brewery that makes some of the city’s best lagers. Hackney has breweries in all four corners, with Five Points perhaps the best-established. It’s also home to many of the best pubs and bars, such as Five Points’ own Pembury Tavern and the nearby Cock Tavern. It would be nice to say that there’s good beer everywhere, but it’s rather thinner on the ground in those stucco-ed corners of West London which have got too rich for their own good.
The pure energy of London’s beer scene – driven in equal measure by a love for good beer and an eye to the main chance – has inevitably attracted the multinational breweries. Meantime, Camden Town, Fuller’s, London Fields and Fourpure are all entirely owned by one or other of the big boys, while Beavertown and Brixton have sold large, non-controlling shares to Heineken. Goose Island, owned by AB InBev, has a brewpub in Shoreditch now while Little Creatures, an Aussie brand owned by Lion, has just opened in King’s Cross. The waters have been definitively muddied even as beer quality has continued to improve.
There’s still plenty of evolution to take place. If London’s pubs can be the best place to drink in the world, its restaurants are often the opposite. Things are changing courtesy of two forward-thinking companies – Biercraft and Kicking Horse – but there’s still plenty of work to do. The signs are good, though. One excellent restaurant, 10 Greek Street, has its own brewery, called Braybrooke. Its based out in the Northamptonshire countryside and it makes delicious lager. You can find it in restaurants across town.

The greatest joy of drinking beer in London is the variety of its pubs and bars. This is reflected in my selection of 200 great London pubs for Pint Please,: they range from the super-modern to classic wood-panelled boozers where pork scratchings are washed down with pints of bitter. My favourites include the Howling Hops taproom in Hackney Wick, a modern version of a Bavarian beer hall where beer is served from tanks, to the Royal Oak in Borough, which is the place to go for classic cask ales from Harvey’s in Sussex, served in perfect condition. I love the Blythe Hill Tavern in Catford, an Irish pub in the very best sense of the phrase, and also Mother Kelly’s, a railway arch with 23 taps of the best modern beer.
Then there’s the White Hart in New Cross, or the Axe in Stoke Newington, which both fall somewhere in between the two. There’s something for everyone here, whether you’re just dipping a toe into London life or planning to dive right in.

– Will Hawkes

Will Hawkes has been a journalist since 2001, with work published in the Independent, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and other publications. He was the British beer writer of the year in 2013 and was nominated for Fortnum and Mason drinks writer of the year in 2018.

London Pub Guide by Will Hawkes is now available in the Pint Please app.