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Opening time for historic brewery that was a tonic to Greenwich's old sailors
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent22 Mar 2010
An old brewery at one of Greenwich's most historic sites has been brought back to life and is set to start serving beer made to ancient recipes.
Master brewer Alastair Hook, 46, is using a building where retired sailors from Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Naval Hospital once received a "restorative" ration of three pints a day.
A tailor-made brew for tomorrow's reopening of The Old Brewery - built in 1831 - is the aptly named Hospital Porter, as well as a Belgian-style beer, Abbey, inspired by the site's former connections to the abbey at Ghent. An earlier brew house was built to supply the hospital in 1717. Plans now include beers made from Tudor and other historical recipes with ingredients like bog myrtle and wormwood as well as contemporary brews such as Mojito Pilsners.
A restaurant in the Old Brewery's main hall - which is dominated by eight copper-clad vats or tuns, each able to hold about 1,500 pints, will offer a menu designed by head chef Daniel Docherty to go with the beers on offer. The main hall will also operate as a café during the day, and there is a bar for those just wanting to sample the microbrewery's drinks.
The Royal Naval College venture is part of a new £6million culture centre, Discover Greenwich, designed to offer visitors and locals an introduction to more than 500 years of the area's history embracing its royal and maritime connections.
Mr Hook, who founded the award-winning Meantime Brewing Company in Greenwich a decade ago and is now London's second biggest brewer, said they would produce about 100,000 pints a year at their riverside microbrewery.
They will offer tutored tours including visits to the oak barrels in the vaulted cellars where some scenes for the Mummy films were shot.
Visitors will be able to view some of the 8,000 beer bottles collected by Michael Jackson, the late founder of the British Guild of Beer Writers.
Mr Hook, who was born in Greenwich, said: "My mission is to recreate respect for beer. Why we don't have the same reverence for our beer as the French do for their wine is a mystery to me."
The brewery in the Pepys Building is next to the new free Discover Greenwich exhibition which includes dozens of objects, some never before displayed.
They include Tudor armour originally made in Greenwich, the original architecture model of Wren's designs for the Royal Hospital and the model of a nuclear reactor that was used to train Navy officers when the hospital became the Old Royal Naval College.
The development has been planned since the Navy moved out more than a decade ago.
Too many of these porters and I'll end up trolleyed
Nick Curtis
Readers, never doubt my dedication. It is 8am on a Monday and I am sampling several extremely strong beers in the Old Brewery at the Royal Naval College.
The dark, smoky licorice-tasting Hospital Porter, an approximation of a classic London beer from the 1750s, is a hefty eight per cent by volume. The ginger-hued, zesty Abbey-style beer — brewed for the reopening of the Old Brewery, and echoing Belgian beers from the 1500s — is a liver-clobbering 10 per cent.
The lighter Keller Bier, fresh from the brand-new copper vats and not yet fully aged, is perhaps better suited to breakfast-time at a mere 4.6 per cent. Alastair Hook, the evil genius who created these concoctions, refers to anything weaker than this as “shandy”.
He is working on an even more pungent, potent brew based on Tudor recipes, celebrating Greenwich's connections to Henry VIII. It will be ready in a year, will be “infected with bacteria and virtually undrinkable”.
The Tudor beer is aimed firmly at the connoisseurs who have joined Hook's College Beer club, and will get a bottle of a new brew, made in limited editions of 800, every month. By 9am it feels like the most natural thing in the world to be drinking beer in the morning. I think I might make my excushesh, and shtay.
Reader views (1)
That will be the only place to find a pub soon ..in a museaum....because pubs are places where people meet, greet, chat, 'organize and protest' ..and the politicians do not want any of that..so the War on Pubs was instigated and now we have Museaum Pubs and drinking at home.
"They did not want us to organise because they understand the dynamics of power better than we did.
1926 Gen Motors Srtrike ( USA )
- Clif, London, 22/03/2010 18:42
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