Many London breweries set up shop in railway arches but, in 2015, the 40ft brewery decided to do something a little different, opting for two twenty foot shipping containers! Their story however started some time before that. A visit to Cologne proved an excellent opportunity to meet up with Ben Ott, one of the brewery’s founders. Ben did his brewing training in Berlin, after which he worked for a small brewery that subsequently closed. He needed a job and decided to try his luck in England. He started with Black Country Ales, moving then to Purity in Warwickshire and finally to London and a job with London Fields. After a while, Ben was headhunted to join Truman’s. Some time later, he was approached by three home brewers: Lars Fredrik Pettersson, Lars Andreas Pettersson and Steve Ryan who wanted help with some home brewing. Ben said, “I wasn’t a home brewer. Brewing was my profession and music is my passion but for these three, brewing was their passion. I first met them when they attended a brewing course that I ran at London Fields.”
From there, they formed the idea of starting a brewery. The three persuaded Ben to leave London Fields and join them to provide the commercial brewing expertise. They started looking for premises and came across a disused car park in Dalston, on which were sitting two 20 foot shipping containers. The brewery moved in and they gave the brewery its name. Ben continued, “We got some second-hand maturation tanks from Beavertown but, for a while, we brewed elsewhere until we got some kit from Oban Ales. The original idea for the yard was that it was going to be a hipster area and there were many plans for the yard but nothing happened. Today, there is just us and the bakery, as it was when we started.” We continued along the Thames Path past Butlers Wharf and crossed over Tower Bridge. From there we walked through St Katherine’s Dock to Wapping.
The brewery has grown steadily, with more containers being added; the brew length is now ten hectolitres and the tap room spreads out across the yard. Ben decided to return home to Cologne but he remains the director of brewing and has oversight of the brewery. “Steve is doing a great job and I am proud of what they are doing. 40ft has managed to get the beer into a number of high-end restaurants thanks to Lars and his photography contacts. It’s all steady,” said Ben.
These days Ben teaches brewing locally. He explained, “This is the only technical brewing course in the area. Students follow an apprenticeship scheme for three years and each year they must do twelve weeks of schooling, broken down into two lots of six weeks of theoretical classes. They have to brew a beer each week. I finish with a term on hops and have been getting them to brew a beer with non-European hops. This is a very conservative market and I am trying to open minds.”
So what of the beer market locally? Of course, Cologne is best known for one beer style, Kolsch, which is a top fermented lager style beer, usually served in 20cl glasses with the waiters using distinctive multi glass trays. There are around nine large brewers in the area plus a number of smaller ones alongside a few cuckoo brewers. This provides places for around 50 apprentices. Most of the breweries in Cologne are independently owned. There are meetings between the brewers but Ben said it wasn’t like the London Brewers Alliance and that he missed London and its beer creativity. Given that he has a German father and a Scottish mother and has a young family in Cologne, Ben will probably boomerang between the two countries for a while yet. For more information on what Ben helped to establish, go here.
Christine Cryne