Progress from Pimlico to Euston

A short Victoria Line pub crawl from Pimlico to Euston confirmed an impression I had gathered over the past year during which time I have, for economic reasons, mostly had to spend my time outside England, with only too brief visits back: the London beer and bar scenes are changing considerably, and for the better, in a way we have not seen since – well, certainly the riot of activity after the passing of the Beer Orders 20 years ago. In the early 1990s, guest ales burst up across pubs everywhere, and for a short while cask beer sales rose while those for lager declined, and small brewers able to supply those guest beers thrived.

That phenomenon was, sadly, brief, stifled by the rise of the big pubcos, who had no economic interest at all in promoting guest ales in the outlets they owned other than the beers they were able to buy cheaply in bulk, and no legal obligation (unlike the big brewers, busy divesting themselves of their pubs) to provide a variety of cask brews.

The changes being seen today are based on three developments that are not restricted to London – they look to be common in large cities across the UK – but London’s is the pub scene I know best, so you’ll forgive me for talking about them in a London context. One change is the increasing realisation by pub chains – and brewery pub chains especially, it appears – that the “old-style” tenant-pub relationship is no longer a one-size-must-fit-all solution. They have discovered that returns on a poorly performing pub can often be transferred by an innovative lease with an operator who will be – horror – selling beers other than the ones you buy in for the rest of your pubs, or brew yourself, but who will boost turnover so much they’ll be able to pay you a far higher rent than some poor tenant struggling, with no unique selling proposition, to sell a beer selection little or no different from all the other pubs in a half-mile radius.

The next development is the existence of entrepreneurs with the vision to take advantage of the opportunities those new sorts of pub lease, with much freer beer ties, can provide. It remains a fact that the pub tenancy is by far the cheapest way to set up a business with virtually guaranteed instant income in Britain: the initial capital outlay can be less than £20,000, whereas you will need at least five times that much to be a franchisee with McDonald’s, or KwikPrint, or whoever. There appears to be a group of people in their late 20s and 30s with a knowledge, appreciation and understanding of beer – not just cask beer, but the wider “new brewery” American and European beer scenes – who want to bring those beers to their fellows, and who are bold enough to put their money where their taste buds are.

Third, and most vital, of course, there is now a market for good beers of every description and with a global provenance, a market that, again, from what I’ve seen, appears to be in its late 20s and 30s. How big that market is, I’m not sure anybody knows. It’s different, certainly, from the older (in all senses) cask ale market, and it may be a bit too “Hoxton” (you’ll tell me if I’m wrong on that: but “hipster” Hoxtonites have a history of beer trendiness: Hoxton was the first place in the UK I saw Okocim in a bar, 20 years ago). However, this “eclectic beer appreciation” movement appears to be powering not just a rise in specialist beer bars that are different from the “14 handpumps in a row” cask ale emporia, but also a rise in specialist beer retailers. My home in West London now has two off-licences in the immediately neighbouring suburbs that have outstanding bottled beer selections, from Europe and the US as well as the UK, good enough to make trips up to Utobeer in Borough Market only an occasional necessity, rather than the regular journey it used to be.

Many readers will have guessed correctly from the title of this post that my journey went from Cask in Charlwood Street to the Euston Tap (and yes, that’s Zak Avery you’ll see if you click on that link), though I also stopped halfway, at Oxford Street, to call in at the Old Coffee House in Beak Street, Soho. Cask – properly Cask Pub & Kitchen – was a failing, run-down pub called the Pimlico Tram, about 10 minutes’ walk south of Victoria Station, when in 2009 the owners, Greene King, of all people (because Greene King have never seemed to be the most imaginative of companies), decided to let Martin Hayes have his way with the place. Less than two years later, Cask picked up the title of “tenanted and leased pub of the year”, against competition from across the UK, in the annual awards handed out by the trade magazine Publican: let’s hope this encourages Greene King to be brave with other “failing” pubs.

The Good Beer Guide describes Cask, the very model of a modern beer geek bar, with plain wooden floors and pale green walls, as a “real ale haven”, but it’s much more than that. The six keg founts dispensing beers from brewers such as Mikkeller of Denmark and Nøgne Ø (“Naked Isle”>of Norway, and the tall glass-fronted cooler cabinets to the left of the bar crammed with bottled beers for sale from dozens of different world-wide brewers say this is not a place solely for the Camra Taliban. Indeed, it was Mikkeller and Nøgne Ø I was keenest to try.

The Mikkeller beer on tap was its DfG American Pale Ale, which punches a huge initial blast of peach and passion flower to the nose, though the taste, which is earthier and dirtier, doesn’t come up to the aroma. This is less like beer, in fact, and more like drinking slightly sour peach juice: I like my beers to have at least some clue that they’ve been made from malt. I wouldn’t want to have more than one of these super-hopped beers in a session – and it certainly doesn’t work well with (otherwise excellent) sausages and mash.

Nøgne Ø’s offering was its Saison, funky and curious, 6.5 per cent abv, and with a whiff of bruised apples: not my idea of a Saison, but a worthy beer. Before departing, I also tried a glass of Kerasus, the cherry/plum “kriek” from the tiny Belgian Picobrouwerij Alvinne, a fine, if “difficult” beer, deeper and darker than a “standard” kriek. I’d love to drink an all-plum “kriek”: in my experience plums and their cousins damsons work very well as beer flavourings.

Back to the Victoria Line, and on to Oxford Circus for a visit to the Old Coffee House, another case of a big brewery-owned pub company (here S&N PubCo, a subsidiary of Heineken – of all people – and the last faint echo of the huge pub estates once owned by Britain’s former Big Six national brewers) entering into an innovative lease, in this example with the three-year-old Brodie’s brewery from Leyton, East London. Brewers leasing their pubs to other, smaller brewers is not totally new: Everard’s, the family-owned brewer from Leicester, have been doing it since at least 2008. But again, like the deal Greene King signed on the old Pimlico Tram, leasing the pub to Brodie’s means S&N PubCo gives the Old Coffee House a usp (beers not available anywhere else nearby) in an extremely crowded market, and is much more likely to ensure good rental income for the pub owner than leasing it to a tenant who can only offer the standard ales Heineken supplies to other S&N PubCo outlets.

The Old Coffee House is a classic central London street-corner boozer, long and thin, with the bar almost all the way down one side, one entrance at the “top” end from the main street, and a second three quarters of the way down from the side-street. Brodie’s beers are firmly in the “classic” mode, too, based on my fine pint of the brewery’s English Best. It’s the sort of brown beer that too many people now seem to find it necessary to dismiss as “boring”, an attitude much the same as dismissing steak as “boring”. Yes, sushi, and Norwegian-brewed Saison, are more exotic, but properly done, both steak and bitter can and should be tremendously satisfying experiences. (Indeed, steak and bitter make excellent companions. I’m not so sure about having sushi and Saison together.)

A few more stops up the Northern Line, the Euston Tap is another take on the “modern London beer bar”, with an outlet featuring eight cask ales and 20 keg beers crammed into one of the stone gatehouses built for the original Euston rail terminus, a space about the same size as a Victorian terraced cottage. I applaud the idea of bringing an eclectic range of rare beers to North London, and the Tap looks to be deservedly popular, but is it too small? I’d hate to be in a queue at busy times for the toilets, up a spiral staircase and off the upstairs drinking area, where you’d have to stand waiting for one of two cubicles to become vacant while others drink all around you.

With the effects of several strong beers now getting to me, I had only one more at the Tap, an extremely dull porter from Saltairethat tasted of not very much at all – a slightly disappointing end to an afternoon that posed plenty of interesting questions.

Inside the Euston Tap

0 thoughts on “Progress from Pimlico to Euston

  1. Why how the beer scene has changed. It’s over ten years since I drank in that area of London as a UCL student.

    I’m pretty sure the Euston Tap was a place you could get a decent beer in the late ’90s, bizarrely located as it is (i often forgot it was there even walking past it on a daily basis). But the idea of drinking good foreign beer, let alone Scandinavian beer, in a pub was unheard of.

    And if you’d told me then that this was the future of beer I would have assumed it must mean British beer would go to the dogs!

    1. Graham – I was a UCL student 10 years ago too – but the small building that now houses the Euston Tap was a lesbian members club…..

  2. S&N and Greene King would do well to extend such liberal leases to other parts of the country. Around here I can think of half a dozen pubs off the top of my head where the self-same Greene King and S&N are actively preventing progressive licensees from selling the beers their customers want to drink. One manager told me openly, as I looked at the dreary Foster’s and Peroni fonts, that S&N were the reason he sells lots of wine and cocktails.

  3. Mikkeller don’t always hold drinkability as an important factor when formulating recipes, the Mikkeller 1000 IBU is good proof of that.

    I rather enjoyed the Nogne Saison even if it’s not all that Saison like. I suspect I might have met it at the judging table before and witnessed the odd debate over it.

    Go brown bitter!, done well its untouchable in the character : drinikability : gravity ratio.

    I think Pete Brown summed it up well in his latest video blog.

    1. I shared a bottle of the 1000 IBU with Steve Wright, the head brewer at Hop Back, on Saturday night – and several other people as well, since it’s really not something you’d want more than a whisky-glass of … didn’t really see the point, frankly, and from the comments, everybody else agreed.

  4. Try the La Penneffoise from Brasserie Ecaussinnes for a beer made with plums, well prunes anyway. – not exactly what you were after but the plum fruit does lend itself to the Belgian fruit beers!

  5. You mention two good offies for world beers in your vicinity. You’re in Teddington, no? As someone only a couple of miles down the road from you, would you care to share with me which two establishments you have in mind? I’m guessing Noble Green in Hampton is one, but the other?

      1. Ah. Of course. I don’t go that way so much nowadays, but noticed that shop last time I headed towards Richmond Bridge a few months ago. Must make the effort to pop in.

        Thanks.

  6. Just caught up with this post, Martyn. You should find much of interest in my forthcoming book, The CAMRA Guide to London’s Beer, Pubs and Bars, which points out quite a bit how the London scene has changed in terms of both breweries and beer outlets. Needless to say all the places you mention are listed in it, including the two offies! But I have some idea the Brodie family leased the Old Coffee House and their other central London pub the Cross Keys before the younger generation of the family revived the brewery in Leyton.

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