A taste of Freedom

Freedom was once the beer of choice for Soho trendies. Now a successful television script writer has relaunched it. Ben McFarland reports

If you were an uber-fashionable Soho soand- so in the mid 1990s, there was only one beer to be seen drinking and that was Freedom. The Freedom Brewing Company was set up in 1995 by a number of entrepreneurs including, among others, Alastair Hook of Meantime fame.

It was a stark antithesis to the big, behemoth and mass-produced brands of the time.

Unpasteurised, brewed in small-batches within the trendy confines of four central London brewpubs and cooler than a dude on ice, Freedom’s beers were the must-sip of any media-type worth his haircut.

They were blessed with the secret recipe of both style and substance and, thanks to an approach straight out of the ‘tap-the-side-of-your-nose and-tellyour buddies’ school of marketing, Freedom’s Pilsner and Organic Lager were charming the taste-buds of all the right people in all the right venues.

Equally, the Freedom Brewing Company brewpubs were widely held in high esteem among the denizens of London’s discerning drinking scene.

But by 2002, owing to a number of factors, the future for Freedom was not looking quite so bright. Notwithstanding the fickle nature of the cool brigade, the alcopop plague had gripped the fridges of bars, the original founders had gone their separate ways and progress was being shackled.

Before long the brewing of Freedom Organic was farmed out to Germany and a ‘come and get us’ plea by the then owners fell on deaf ears.

By 2003, the brewery was dismantled and all that was left of the Freedom Brewing C.....

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By Ben McFarland

Section : Beer Trends

Page number : 16