Great Brews!

Getting ‘hands on’ with London’s youngest brewer, sounds like it should be fun, right? Our intrepid reporter Melissa Cole thought so too, right up until her first job of the morning was shifting 25 kilo bags of grain around the place

When a good-looking bloke says: “Melissa, why don’t you spend a day brewing with me?” It’s not an offer I have to think about for more than a nanosecond – but a bit of warning about how much hard work it is to brew in a five barrel brewpub (with limited space and technology) would have been nice!

My day of brewing Bonobo, a 4.5% beer that’s named after a libidinous monkey, started hilariously early on a Saturday morning with me wending my way from south-west to south-east London; my bus ride only punctuated by a strange man staring at the side of my face from approximately two inches away for a good 20 minutes.

But this was all forgotten as I arrived at the beautiful venue that is the Florence in Herne Hill, sister brewpub to the Cock & Hen in Fulham.

The Florence is a quality addition to Herne Hill, as the Cock & Hen is to Fulham, serving high-end food and drinks – and the added attraction of an in-house brewery.

As you will see from the pictures the Florence doesn’t have a huge space to work in, enclosed as it is by glass walls and constrained to not taking up too much potential customer space, but it is pretty perfectly formed.

MAINTENANCE OF STANDARDS
After stopping briefly for a cuppa the brewing process started with weighing out the grain, which involved shifting around seven or so 25 kilo bags of grain (which I tried very hard to avoid and failed) after which it was time to apply hot water to the grains as they entered the mash tun to ensure that the process of r.....

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By Melissa Cole

Section : Spotlight

Page number : 20