Brew//LDN serves up a worthy beer fashion show

If you thought that maybe the current fashions in craft beer were wearing thin, think again. At least, that’s my takeaway from an afternoon at Brew//LDN, the tradeshow-cum-beer festival at London’s  Old Truman Brewery this week. Almost every brewery stand seemed to feature at least two out of a “dessert beer”, a sour of some sort and a hazy IPA, and sometimes all three.

I suppose the popularity of dessert beers – by which I mean all those rich and dark concoctions from pastry stouts, through milk stouts and Baltic porters, to barrel-aged Imperials and so on – shouldn’t surprise. After all, I don’t expect dessert to go out of fashion either.

Still, it was a bit of a surprise to hear just how fast they can sell. For instance, I stopped by the London Beer Factory bar to hear from brewery rep James that they were down to their very last keg of Gateaublaster, their 11.1% Black Forest Gateau stout. “They’re not core, but people love them,” he said.

Barrel-aged Baltic Porter on cask!

It was a similar story at Fourpure, where I was told that “dessert beers are big business.” They had not one but two on – Into The Woods is a 5.9% ‘festive gingerbread ale’, while Midnight Diner is a 7.5% New York cheesecake stout. Oddly though, I found that while both were almost spot on in aroma terms, the flavours didn’t match up. Oh well.

Roll out the barrel

As already hinted at, another way to get that dessert quality is barrel-aging. This can be a tricky one to get right, ensuring that the barrel complements the beer rather than overwhelming it. One that definitely managed it was Double Agent from Legitimate Industries of Leeds – all its beers have ironic crime-related names. Although it had spent an amazing two years in bourbon barrels and could have been harsh as a result, Double Agent’s heavy body and 10.4% ABV had instead left it mellow and rich, with smooth vanilla and cocoa notes.

Whisky barrel aging also did the job for Good Chemistry Brewing’s Becoming North, which easily qualifies as dessert despite being a ‘mere’ 6% ABV. Its smooth chocolatey texture is a result of the bottom-fermentation, according to brewery co-founder Bob, and while Baltic porters can be overly sweet, in this case the woody warmth keeps that in balance.

Sour, not 'just a bit tangy'!

Tart and tangy currant Gose

As to the sours, there’s been way too many naff ‘fruited sours’ in the shops that’re basically just sweetish beery fruit juice. So I was pleased to find several here that were actually sour or tart – not as mouth-puckering as a Lambic or Flemish Red, say, but tart enough to be interesting. The first I tried was Blackcurrant Brine Springs, a fruited Gose – I normally find these fit that ‘naff’ category extremely well, but this one was a revelation. Coming from Redditch’s Lab Culture Brewing – yet another brewery new to me – it even uses local salt (from Droitwich, one of several historic English Spa towns). The key is that there’s enough of that and the tart currants for their flavours to shine through unsweetened.

The second I’ll mention isn’t actually a sour – it’s a raspberry Witbier. It comes from another newcomer, Möbru, which has taken over this and other fruited Witbiers from Elgood’s (who now brew them for Möbru). The nice thing is it’s not over-sweetened, allowing the tartness of the berries to complement the tang of the beer. 

And what of the hazy IPAs? I’d a few of these in Germany last week, where some modern craft brewers make almost nothing else, and there’s no sign they’re going away in the UK either – though fewer and fewer people seem to be using the ‘New England IPA’ label now. But while some are delicious, others are just fruity hop soup – and a few have been harsh, with unpleasantly clashing textures and flavours.

Mantis passionfruit IPA

Thankfully, none of today’s fell into the latter group – for example, there was passionfruit IPA Mantis, from new gypsy brewers Flowerhorn, which was deeply herbal and dank thanks to its mix of Mosaic and the new Strata hop, and lightly tart from the fruit. And then there was Kveik Your Eyes Peeled, from Dundee’s 71 Brewing, was estery, tart-dry and funky-sweet, no doubt thanks to the use of orange zest alongside the eponymous farmhouse yeast – though hey guys, it’s Kveik, not ‘kviek’, and Kveik means yeast so you don’t write ‘Kveik yeast’.

Ageing hops in hazy IPAs

Talking to various brewer folk both here and in Germany, it seems there’s a few keys to getting these bigly-hoppy hazy beers right. One is the right hops and brewkit, but perhaps more important is the way the hops age. Straight from the fermenter they can be dank and fresh for a couple of days, but then there’s a period of at least a week and maybe longer when they roughen, before smoothing out again. It’s all most odd, and I welcome any clarifications or additional info from those in the know!

Anyway, it was a good afternoon out with an amazing range of beers (plus some ciders and other drinks) from all over the country and around the world. Yes, there’s big brewers there too, but as equals – it’s not ‘their event’. There’s still two Saturday sessions to go, and you have tickets – Eventbrite seems to think “this event has ended” for some reason – you’re in luck.

Craft beer rises into Brew London

Apologies, but I missed a London winter event off my last post - somehow Brew//LDN 2020 had completely failed to appear on my radar. Was it the tricksy name? The fact that it's taken over from Craft Beer Rising, but without taking over CBR's media list because the CBR founders jumped ship? Who knows!

Anyhow, it's a drinks industry showcase with producers of all sizes and origins booked in, ranging from lots of UK microbreweries to international brands such as Guinness (via its Open Gate brand/subsidiary), Brooklyn and Lagunitas. Obviously a lot of the overseas names will be via their UK distributors - for example, as well as Mikkeller I see other Euroboozer clients such as Steigl, Schremser and To Øl on the list. There's also several drinks other than beer represented.

And although there's macrobrew names involved, the 'LDN' name is not at all unjustified - there's a large chunk of the London microbrewery scene booked in.

The people behind Brew//LDN are the ex-founders of CBR, which explains a lot. For example it's at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, which was formerly the venue for CBR, and at the same time of year - which this year means Thursday 27th to Saturday 29th February.

The format is remarkably similar too - the Thursday and Friday afternoons are trade sessions while the others are open to the public, with tickets starting at £15 plus fees.

CBR got a lot of stick from some people for the way it mixed genuine independent craft producers with brands owned by multinationals. But while some macrobrewers are guilty of deceptive practices in making their products look like independent craft, and they can use their weight and distribution strength to squeeze the independents out, I always enjoyed CBR when I went along to the trade sessions. It was interesting to see what 'the big boys' were up to - it gave a more comprehensive view of the overall market. Plus of course the big boys have money, which I'm sure helped keep the event afloat!

Brew//LDN will undoubtedly get similar criticism. Plus there's the question of how successfully you can turn what's basically a trade show into a beer festival for the paying public. Especially when there's already a lot of competition in London for events targeting the drinks trade, what with The Pub Show next month, Imbibe Live in June, and several others including trade days at GBBF and elsewhere. It will be very interesting to see how it goes - I'm looking forward to it!

PS. If you're wondering what happened to Craft Beer Rising, as far as I can tell the company running it first got sold to a midsized drinks company, then that company was bought by an even bigger one. After that, the founders jumped ship and the CBR company was closed down. 

Personally, I'd argue that a drinks company has no business buying or running a trade show, but what do I know? The company backing Brew//LDN, Brewbroker, looks a rather better fit as it is more of a beer industry intermediary. 

Chop and change at Craft Beer Rising

At last year’s Craft Beer Rising, and in the run up to this year’s edition of the show, most of the conversations I had with brewers and others in the trade centred around how it had become largely a trade and show-off event. No one expected to sell anywhere near enough beer to recoup the costs of being there – a serious four-figure sum for most of them – so they were there to promote their brands, network with others in the business, discuss work opportunities, and so on. Or in several cases, they were not going to be there, because they didn't feel the need for those things.

As Pete Hughes, head brewer for the Brewhouse & Kitchen group, told me last year, “We’re here to build awareness and to participate, we don’t think of this as a money-making event. If you’re already at maximum [production] capacity you’re here for fun or to make contacts.” Sure enough, when I met Pete this year he was enjoying the event, but just as a trade visitor, leaving the awareness-generation to those in more of it.

Bellfield, a newer brewer

And what a lot of them there were – from small first-time exhibitors, through local brewers trying to break into Craft or out of their local region, to well-known brands ensuring that they stay that way.

Which makes it a little surprising that the organisers had apparently reined back the availability of tickets for the trade session – or they had done in the run-up, anyhow. When I turned up with all my paperwork ready as instructed*, no one actually looked at it and there were no queues or checks beyond a spoken “Got an invitation, yeah? Alright.” Upstairs, the halls were surprisingly quiet, so perhaps they overdid the restrictions!

My initial aim was to work out where the talks were being held later that afternoon, as I wanted to attend Goose Island’s class on beer & cheese pairing. This gave me a destination for a leisurely meander route through the halls, spotting sights of interest along the way.

One of the first was Mad Squirrel, a name I already knew as the crafty brand of Hemel Hempstead’s Red Squirrel Brewing – except that it turns out that the craft side has staged a takeover and the whole brewery now operates under the Mad name, with keg the majority of production.  (They still brew their cask ales though, which have quite a loyal following around the Herts/Bucks area.)

Operations and marketing manager Tim confirmed what many people have suspected: with the craft revolution and the number of new brewers competing for space on the bar, it’s not enough just to brew great beer any more. “Competition is massive for the free trade,” he said. “Branding is increasingly the thing. We wanted to do more hop-forward and contemporary beers, but the branding was holding back sales – buyers were looking at our Double IPA and saying, ‘you’re not going to be good at that.’”

On the other hand, Tim also highlighted a welcome result of all this, which is the return to vertical integration, where the brewer is also the retailer. Mad Squirrel now has five outlets around the Chilterns (including the brewery tap), which Tim characterises as half bottleshop, half bar. Indeed, where five years ago Red Squirrel employed seven staff, the company now has around 50, two thirds of them on the retail side.

I tasted two of the Mad Squirrel beers on tap. Kodiak was very pleasant, but odd – described as a American Brown but more of a dark amber, and hoppy like an American Pale, with little of the malty toastiness one tends to expect in a brown ale.  The other, Ascension, was a gorgeous Farmhouse Ale, strong in the Belgian Saison vein at 6%, and richly hoppy thanks to an unusual extra dose of hops in the mash, alongside the usual boil hops and dry-hopping. Sort of a Saison/New England IPA hybrid.

Further along, I spotted Edinburgh’s Bellfield Brewery, which is one of several gluten-free brewers that have emerged lately. Having spoken to a number of others in this area recently, including Autumn Brewing Co who I met at PubShow18, I will write more about gluten-free beer soon.

Next to catch my eye was the Marston’s nano-brewery DE14, which is where the brewers from the big Burton brewery get to experiment and try out new ideas – and also where they host local homebrew clubs and the like. The latter is where Morgan Silk, their lovely New England IPA, came from – it is named after its creator and was originally his response to a challenge set to the homebrewers to create a beer using breakfast cereal – I’m told his prototype had Special K in it! That had to be swapped for equivalent base ingredients for rebrewing on DE14’s two-barrel brewkit, but the result remains juicy, creamy and spicy-fruity.

Most DE14 brews aren’t widely sold – they might go into the brewery taproom, a few local bars, and local beer festivals, say. But at CBR I also got to see cans of the first two DE14 brews to graduate to full commercial production: End Point, described as ‘a modern take on the historic Burton IPA’, and Flight Suit, which is a pale ale with both Mandarina Bavaria hops and orange peel for added citrusness. Needless to say, these are brewed on the main brewery, which can brew up to 500 barrels at a time with a minimum run of 60 barrels (hence the desire for a smaller experimental brewkit).

This was about when I spotted the talks room – more on that later!

*With no press registration offered for the trade session, I had originally decided I wouldn’t be going this year. However, I was chatting with Hannah, one of Goose Island’s UK PR team, about their plans for the event. She knew of a writer who had a ticket via Goose Island but couldn’t now attend, so at the last minute I was able to substitute for him – thanks Hannah, and thanks Goose Island! Sad to say though, the restrictions on trade ticketing were such that even Hannah and her colleagues couldn’t attend, despite their work on promoting the event. Most strange. 

Fuller's Unfiltered bid for craft keg

When I first heard about the launch of London Pride Unfiltered at Craft Beer Rising earlier this year, my first thought was, oh-ho, a hazy rebranding for the craft generation. But could Fuller’s make the idea work, or would it be like an embarrassing parent trying to be hip? And was it just a rebrand, or a genuinely new beer?

I had all those questions in mind when I got the chance for a brief chat with Fuller’s head brewer Georgina Young – over a couple of glasses of Pride Unfiltered, naturally!

First, a bit of background – I’ve seen this sort of relaunch several times before, especially in Germany, where the marketeers have done a great job persuading the average Josef that all beer is yellow, fizzy and clear as a bell. The industrial Pils that you see advertised everywhere, in other words.

But for the Craft Bier pioneers a few years ago, this heavily-marketed industrial Pils was the enemy, and the easiest way to state your non-industrial credentials was to make cloudy beer instead. Cue lots of murky unfiltered Pale Ales, IPAs and others.

The German industrial brewers seem to have caught up much faster than the UK ones, with Naturtrüb (unfiltered and cloudy) Kellerbiers and others widely available there for a couple of years now. (Amusingly, many of the German craft brewers have now swung the other way, producing clear as a bell dry-hopped Pilsners and the like.)

The first thing George pointed out was that Pride Unfiltered is hazy, not murky or cloudy. More significantly perhaps, it needs to be reliably hazy – consistency is absolutely essential for a brewer such as Fuller’s.

“It’s really hard to get this level of haze just right,” she said, adding that “The haze is not yeast, it’s protein – quite fine.” She also stressed that while the basic recipe “is pretty much the same” as regular Pride, including Northdown and Challenger aroma hops, there are changes. Most notably that Unfiltered is also dry-hopped with Target.

Not too surprisingly, Unfiltered is very like regular Pride, but is drier and less malty-fruity, although that will in part be due to the lower serving temperature. There’s earthy and spicy hops on the nose, then it’s lightly fruity and dry.

And it seems to be doing well – on a recent visit to a Fuller’s pub which had Pride Unfiltered on tap alongside a couple of guest keg pale ales, the barmaid said it was pretty popular. The notable thing is it’s definitely not aimed at the keg Pride drinker, and indeed the Fuller’s folk say there’s no plans to replace keg with Unfiltered.

George also had some news about the Fuller’s beer range continuing to expand. “We’ll do eight new beers this year, four of them cask, plus Unfiltered of course,” she said. “We also have seasonal cask and keg beers and then monthly specials.”

They’re also increasing the range they distribute from other breweries, with Sierra Nevada the most prominent example. One of Fuller’s sales team noted that “We brought over 14 Sierra Nevada seasonals last year, this year there’s six definites plus maybe two or three more. This year’s list include Otra Vez, Sidecar and Tropical Torpedo.” Yet more reasons to visit the bigger Fuller’s pubs – although I don’t expect to see these in my local.

So that was Craft Beer Rising - London 2016

Quite a queue

I’m a couple of weeks late saying it, thanks to paid work intervening, but this year’s Craft Beer Rising was a blast. Despite the fears of some, who thought high cost of booking a stand and the increasing presence of Big Beer would dumb the event down, there were interesting new beers and brewers from all over the world, all eager to offer their brews to a thirsty British audience.

I especially liked the layout – all the beer bars in one long room, plus a second room for Cyderspace, the "Craft cider" section, and then another room for the music and stuff (of which there was none during the trade session). There was yet another space for talks and food, but I had enough to do in the main space and never got that far!

If there was a problem, it's that there was too much to explore in just a few hours. I started by the entrance and then worked my way around the outside – there were two long double-sided parallel rows of bars down the middle of the hall, plus more all around the edge of the room. OK, so I did spend a fair bit of time at each stop chatting to the exhibitors, especially the overseas ones to learn more about where they came from and their home market, but I ran out of time before I got to visit most of the bars down the middle.

Although I did visit a couple of brewers I knew that had new beers to try, all the rest were breweries I'd never met before, and mostly ones from overseas. The first of these visits killed three birds with one stone, because it was a bar shared by three brewers, all from Northern Ireland – and with a three-way collaboration IPA on tap to boot. Each of the three has a bit of a speciality: Farmageddon tends to hoppier beers, Hillstown to Belgian styles (although it started brewing solely for its beer-fed Wagyu beef cattle!), and Pokertree to Irish styles.

It seems like the craft beer scene isn't taking off in Northern Ireland anything like as strongly as it is south of the border though, thanks in large part to the alcohol laws having been written by Presbyterians who'd prefer it 'dry'. A particular bone of contention is that 2016 is NI's Year of Food & Drink, yet the threesome told me that small brewers are largely shut out. Not only does Big Beer already have the main events and much of the licensed trade sewn up, but NI law makes it impossible for the new brewers to sell direct, which means they can’t open brewery taps to pull in the tourists, or even sell online.

And yes, Big Beer was also at CBR in volume – though mostly incognito. For example, the Backyard Brewery turned out to be Carlsberg Sweden in crafty guise, Marston's was there as Revisionist Brewing, Diageo/Guinness as The Brewers Project, and Goose Island was one of I think several AB-Inbev properties present.

On the other hand, it was interesting to see that even UK microbrewers are now getting into the craft beer import business. London's Truman's is now distributing Lonerider from North Carolina, for example, while I was told there are family links between Charles Wells and South Africa's Devil's Peak Brewing Co, whose beers Wells is going to bring in. It turns out South Africa is an interesting – in the Confucian sense – market for microbrewers. It is largely sewn up by SABMiller (SAB of course stands for South African Breweries) which also owns all the South African hop farms!

Gradually though the SA micros are converting drinkers away from the ubiquitous yellow fizz – Devil's Peak has a pretty toasty and fruity IPA for instance. However, it looks like Wells will lead in the UK with Devil's Peak's 4% craft lager, a sessionable and inoffensive brew that apparently hits an emerging sweet spot in the UK market – think Beck's Vier and Holsten Vier, I guess.

It wasn’t all foreign beer though. Next to catch my eye was Peterborough’s Nene Valley Brewing which is one of a growing number of breweries making gluten-free beer – indeed, brewer Paul Woodcock said that all NVB beer is now gluten-free. He doesn’t use alternative GF grains such as sorghum to make it, either. Instead it is deglutenised during fermentation by a special enzyme, taking it to less than half the 20ppm cut-off point that the law defines for ‘gluten-free’ labelling. And to judge from Release the Chimps, NVB’s fresh and fruity American IPA, there’s no reason to miss gluten.

It was off to Spain next, but not one from the established craft beer heartlands of Barcelona and Madrid – Mateo & Bernabé is from the famous wine region of La Rioja, and it makes use of the fact in several of its beers. These include its dry-sweet and winey Little Bichos Spider, which is an 8% Porter aged 10 to 12 months in wine barrels. “It goes in black and comes out deep mahogany,” said M&B’s international rep Dominic Lombard.

Also barrel-aged but this time in Pedro Ximinez sherry barrels, is Little Bichos Mosca IPA PX. This time the result has almost Lambic aromas and dry bitterness, with sweetish sherry notes. Barrel-free but still unusual was a brown ale brewed with a local rum & raisin cake called Trenza added to the boil. According to Dominic, Spanish consumers like to look for something a bit out of the norm, though he added that many people only accept that Spanish products are good when someone abroad validates them, which is why M&B went first for the export market – it exports 98%, he said.

And they claim that the brand name is not as rude as it sounds to an Anglophone. Bichos is local dialect for a small creature (in Portuguese it means vermin!) which is why all the labels carry animal pictures – there’s a spider, a moth and a crab, for example.

Next stop was back in the UK, and a part of the country I know fairly well. Electric Bear Brewing might sound and look American, but is actually from Bath – although brewer Guillermo does indeed hail from North America, being from Mexico. It was also one of relatively few bars present to be pouring cask beer as well as keg. The beers I sampled were good, one of the stand-outs being his Samurye, a complex winey and almost Saison-like beer brewed with 50% rice in the grist and a Sake yeast.

We also talked about his Heisenberg’s Double Decoction, a Doppelbock produced as the name suggests by the classic Continental decoction method, where the mash is heated by moving a portion of the wort to a separate kettle for boiling, then returned to the mash tun to share its heat with the rest of the brew. Even in Germany, while some still swear it produces better beers, many have given it up as too awkward and moved to infusion mashing as used elsewhere.

And as Guillermo admitted, doing it on the wrong brewkit was even more awkward. “Engineering a double-decoction mash in a traditional English brewkit with an infusion mask tank was a labour of love,” he signed. “It was one of my famous hours!” The result was not exactly refined but was otherwise pretty authentic – rich amber, with dusty toffee notes and hints of peach and strawberry.

I already mentioned the Backyard Brewery that turned out to be the 20 hectolitre pilot brewkit in Carlsberg Sweden’s Falkenberg Brewery. They’d brought over cans of The Bee 17 (Bomble Bee 17 in Sweden) which is allegedly a dry-hopped Pilsner though it’s more like a faintly honeyed Eurolager, and Lawnmower, a sweetish and lightly toasty amber lager. More interesting than macrobrew for sure, but very much a big brewer trying to do crafty.

The one other foreign beer scene I learnt a bit about was Austria, thanks to a chat with Michael of Vienna’s Brew Age. I was intrigued to learn that not only are some of their traditional beer styles different from the German equivalents, but that Austria never had a Beer Purity Law as such. Instead, its brewers are preexhibitotty much in the position that many in the anti-Reinheitsgebot camp want for Germany, which is that if an ingredient’s safe and legal in food, it should be OK in beer too.

So while artificial additives are banned (and no, I don’t yet know how they’re defined), things like honey and fruit are allowed. Michael said they can even use up to 25% of adjuncts without having to declare it, although he added that most small brewers are proudly all-malt. As in most of central Europe, the craft beer scene there is very young – he reckons it only took off three years ago. Inevitably there’s plenty of beers styled after American IPA and Pale Ale – Brew Age’s Hopfenauflauf (Hop Casserole) was a drinkable and pleasant example of the latter.

They’re also experimenting though. For instance, Brew Age’s excellent Dunkle Materie (Dark Matter) is presented as a Black IPA but comes over more as a hybrid of that and a Munich Dunkel, beautifully rich and marrying its bright hoppiness with roast coffee and dark chocolate.

Amusingly, the last unfamiliar beer to catch my eye as the festival session ended was almost the opposite: Fireweisse is a German style brewed in West Sussex. It’s from Firebird, a brewery that’s only three years old but has a long heritage – it's the latest project of career brewer Bill King, formerly of King & Barnes and then WJ King. Fireweisse’s texture nodded slightly more towards ale (interestingly, this was also true of the American Hefeweizen from Lonerider, mentioned above) but it was otherwise a sehr typisch Hefeweisse, crisp and dry-sweet with banana and bready notes.

So that, mostly, was my time at the London Craft Beer Rising this year. I learnt (and enjoyed it) a lot, with my one caveat being that I was there for the trade session and could not get to one of the public sessions. As a result I found myself wondering (as fellow blogger Sophie Atherton did) whether it would have been as much fun if I was there as a paying punter.

Did you go to one of the public sessions, and if so, what did you think? Were you able to explore and learn, or was it a fight to get to the bar?

London beer week is go!

The 2016 London Beer Week is well underway now. It's hubbed at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, where Craft Beer Rising also takes place on Friday and Saturday. I'll be over there this afternoon to see what's happening - apparently there's various pop-up bars, including one from headline sponsor Sharp's and another for Guinness's crafty The Brewers Project micro-brand.

There's a whole bunch of other LBW16 activity taking place around the city too. Some of this needs a £10 wristband which you can buy at the OTB hub and elsewhere. To quote the organisers, it gets you access to the "self-guided Beer Tours", that’s £3 speciality beers and £5 boilermakers (AKA a beer and a shot) in more than 100 of the best beer bars and breweries in London. 

They go on to list several of the beers created especially for LBW16:

Oatmeal Cookie Stout: A rich, chocolatey brew with roasted nuts and caramel created by Brew by Numbers. Available at Hawksmoor Spitalfields Bar – 157b Commercial Street, EC1 6BJ

Chilli Oyster Stout: A tasty collaboration between Well & Bucket pub and brewers Anspach & Hobday. Available at the Well & Bucket – 143 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG

DrinkUp.London Session IPA: Tropical fruited scents, with a hint of brown sugar and a dry fresh finish. Created by Melissa Cole and 40ft at Cotswold Brewing Co. Available at The DrinkUp.London Boilermaker Bar, The Old Truman Brewery, E1 6QL

LBW Tropical Hopjuice: Rich exotic tropical flavours to taste, an incredibly light and refreshing brew. Created by Durham Atkinson of Hops and Glory, and available at The DrinkUp.London Boilermaker Bar (Saturday only), The Old Truman Brewery, E1 6QL

Mizzen Stout: A dark, strong stout with hints of chocolate, coffee and malt sweetness. Brewed by Sharp’s Brewery’s 2015 Brewing Adventure Winner, Dylan Jones. Available at the Sharp’s Brewery London Beer Week Hub, Ely’s Yard, The Old Truman Brewery, E1 6QL

They are also promoting “hoptails” or beer cocktails, at £5 for wristband wearers, for example:

Kernow Gigglemug: Sharp’s Chalky’s Bite, gin, roasted fennel seed syrup, citrus and caramelized kosovar juniper foam. Complex and fresh. Available at Worship Street Whistling Shop – 63 Worship Street, EC2A 2DU

M-ale Tai: A traditional Tiki rework made using Brewdog Punk IPA and Scotch. Punchy and reviving. Available at Craft Cocktail Company – Arch 253, Paradise Row, E2 9LE

Peroni Sour: Peroni Nastro Azzurro, Calvados, lemon juice and bergamot reduction. Autumnal, elegant flavours. Available at Union Street Cafe – 47-51 Great Suffolk St, SE1 0BS

The Tank Old Fashioned: Pilsner Tank Beer, Woodford Reserve Bourbon, beer sugar and orange bitters. Rich and aromatic. Available at The Duck and Rice – 90 Berwick St, W1F 0QB

Apri-Hop Sour: Bulleit bourbon, lemon juice, apricot liqueur, Hop House 13 Lager.  Smooth and warming. Available at Hop House 13 LDN (LBW pop-up) – 7 Dray Walk, Old Truman Brewery, E1 6QL

Huggalicious: A specially created hoptail made using Big Hug ale, tequila, lime juice and agave syrup. Available at all London Cocktail Club venues.

Have you tried a beer cocktail? What did you think? I've not had one in years.