Captain Hook

For those in the know Meantime is Britain’s most exciting brewery and it makes worldbeating beer. Ben McFarland speaks to the maverick behind it

A non-descript former tramshed in an unexceptional industrial park in Greenwich, South London, is hardly an obvious setting for a cutting-edge microbrewery. Yet within its deliberately unimposing walls is the headquarters of the United Kingdom’s most outspoken and maverick brewer, Alastair Hook.

Renowned for brewing some of the country’s most unusual beers and world class lagers, Alastair has been mischievously poking his mash fork in the sides of the British brewing establishment for the best part of a decade now.

He’s a man on a lifetime mission against the mainstream. One that began on a teenage trainspotting jaunt with his music teacher and a pal in the Black Country.

“I was in a punk band and all my mates were getting into drugs but I wasn’t up for that at all,” he recalls, keen to point out that his attendance owed more to booze than the choo-choos.

“This guy was a total real ale buff and we went round some pubs where the Black Country beers I tasted bowled me over and I couldn’t understand why people drank what they drank,” he said.

Alastair enrolled at the Herriott-Watt University in Edinburgh where he studied brewing to degree level before embarking on a post-graduate brewing degree at the much revered Weihenstephan School near Munich in Bavaria, the spiritual home of beer.

It was in Bavaria, where the art of the brewer commands an almost sacrosanct status, that Alastair acquired both instruction and, vitally, inspiration.

“I found that people had respect for .....

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By Ben McFarland

Section : Beer Spotlight

Page number : 50