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London Beer City features live brews, tastings, tours and tap takeovers
London is abuzz with beer. Next month brings the Great British Beer Festival to town and to coincide with that, there'll be the first-ever London Beer City. Its organiser Will Hawkes reveals the highlights
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Your support makes all the difference.I've become an expert on London's industrial estates. It's not something to be hugely proud of, I suppose, but needs must: many of the city's best new breweries are to be found on them, and, well, I really like beer.
My latest industrial outing came with the opening of Beavertown's tap room at their new brewery in Tottenham. It was worth the trip: there was excellent food, a happy crowd and beer that has come a long way since the brewery was founded at the back of Duke's, a barbecue joint in De Beauvoir, in 2012.
London these days is abuzz with beer. Next month brings the Great British Beer Festival – the world's greatest cask-ale event – to town and to coincide with that, there'll be the first-ever London Beer City, a week of events at bars, pubs and breweries across town, from 9-16 August.I have to hold my hands up and admit to being the organiser.
We've got dinners (such as Camden Town's six-course affair at Caravan in King's Cross), talks (including Pete Brown's increasingly famous beer and music matching event), live brews (the most intriguing, featuring Siren at the Earl of Essex in Islington, involves punters bringing along items to go in the brew) and beer festivals (including the return of the London Craft Beer Festival, at Oval Space in Bethnal Green).
All that and dozens of brewery open days, tap takeovers, tastings and tours. It promises to be the biggest week of beer London has seen in a long time. I envisage a lot of industrial estates in my future.
Three to try
Fourpure IPA
This Bermondsey-brewed, Oregon-inspired IPA balances floral bitterness with caramel sweetness (6.5 per cent, £2.50 for 330ml, beermerchants.com)
Camden Town Hells Lager
There's a bready-lemony balance to this German-style pale lager. Just the job for summer (4.7 per cent, £13.99 for 6x330ml, majestic.co.uk)
Beavertown Neck Oil
What used to be a classic Black-Country-style bitter is now a pine-heavy pale ale, full of aroma and bitterness (4.3 per cent, £2.80 for 330ml, honestbrew.co.uk)
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