Matters of Taste – Small Beer, Big Flavour!

One day in a pub, where all good ideas originate, after a pint or two, Felix James and James Grundy were bemoaning the fact that it was next to impossible to get a beer around 2% ABV. Felix explains, “I was fed up with beers designed to blow your head off. All we wanted was a good tasting beer that wasn’t necessarily a mad craft beer.” Since that day five years ago, the pair have designed and built a unique brewery in order to pursue that objective. They now brew a range of beers with an ABV of 1% to 2.7% from which to choose.

So where did it all begin? Felix became involved in brewing at Mortlake and then Fuller’s but it wasn’t beer that brought the pair together; it was gin. The pair met at Sipsmiths, the distillers, where Felix was the head of operations and James was the head of sales. It was playing about on Felix’s 1.5 barrel brewing kit every weekend for a year that turned what they both thought was a bit of a joke into something they thought had a future. The next step was getting the money, which they did through a small panel of investors. This enabled them to buy a 30 barrel plant which was not exactly starting small, although their original tiny plant is still proudly on display in the corner and is still used from time to time for test brews.

The brewing kit is housed in a cavernous industrial unit, with a high ceiling, a balcony with a meeting room and another unit next door for offices. It’s large enough so that their mini (with its bar) can be overlooked as it hides in the corner and there is plenty of space to hold comedy and music events. “They are really popular”, commented Felix; “People can come along, have a few beers and go to work next morning without a hangover”. The space has been used for wedding receptions but they don’t have a wedding licence yet; there seemed to be some concerns on safety grounds about the bride coming down the high steps from the upper part of the brewery in a flowing dress!

The brewery set up is unusual. Felix explained, “The brewery suppliers wouldn’t believe my design would work but it does. We only use 1.5 pints of water to brew a pint of beer and we don’t wash down like most breweries. It’s all CIP” (clean in place). That is not the only unusual thing about the brewing process. They store their beer from three weeks for their Session Pale to eight weeks for the Lager. This maturation reduces the gluten in the beer; all the beers are low in gluten and the Lager is gluten free. The Pale and Lager are joined by a dark lager (their weakest beer at 1% ABV) and a brown beer called Steam, which is their strongest at 2.7% ABV.

Volume has been growing. It started as 80% bottle; “Selling to upmarket outlets such as the Ivy”, said Felix. After a year it was all getting a bit much so the pair brought in Mike, who came down from the Edinburgh Beer Factory to be the head brewer, releasing Felix ‘to get on with the finances’. All the bottling is done off site and they are now testing cans.

So is their idea of lower alcohol beer new? Well, history shows it has been around centuries. Sometimes called small beer, table beer or even breakfast beer, these beers are recorded in medieval times as having been consumed daily even by children, because of poor water quality. In the eighteenth century, people involved with heavy physical work would drink more than a gallon a day of this type of beer. It has also been surmised that the beer being drunk in William Hogarth’s Beer Street painting (1751), which promotes beer drinking over gin, is actually table beer.

Felix lamented that small beer fell out of favour in the 1950s. Although UK’s Mackeson Stout at 2.8% ABV is still around, beers of this strength remain relatively rare. On each of Small Beer’s bottles is an explanation that sums up their goals succinctly, ‘We are the first designated small brewery to reignite the lost art of brewing classic beers below 2.8%’. With their burning commitment and the trend towards sensible drinking, Small Beer are likely to be around for a while.

Full tasting notes can be found here.
Christine Cryne