Tap rooms - Showcase and lifeline

I’m sitting on a bench, outside an ancient warehouse at Exeter Quay overlooking the shimmering waters of the canal basin, with a glass of beer in my hand. It’s a DDH (or double dry hopped in craft parlance) IPA and was brewed several metres away. A clang of metal escapes from the door to my left — the brewer is at work, I hear a saison is being made today.

This is Topsham Brewery tap, where one room in the old warehouse is home to a bar, while next door the brewing kit sits. Even though it only opened in December, the tap has become one of Exeter’s favourite places for a beer and a mooch, especially when the sun drapes its beneficent beams on the happy drinkers (there is also a beer garden to the side).

Let’s change location and head out to Hackney as I did on a recent Saturday. First of all, I visited Howling Hops’ tank bar, where the beer is made at the back and then dispensed from artfully painted containers behind the bar. Moving on, I then went around the corner to Crate Brewery, where beer and pizza made onsite were being dispensed to families, bands of beer geeks and solo drinkers. The mood was relaxed and calm, and the IPA excellent.

I have always liked brewery taprooms, those places where you drink the beer next to where it has been brewed; it’s almost like a unified theory of beer, where everything comes together. It was not always the case, though. I have a vague memory of the Firkin pubs when I moved to London, though I was more interested in German lager then and recall pulling a face when offered a pint of Dogbolter.

However, times changed for me at the start of the Millennium as I began visiting the likes of the Three Tuns in Bishops Castle and the Blue Anchor in Helston, classic brewpubs, and survivors from another time. Now, as Topsham, Crate and Howling Hops (as well as Moor and even BrewDog) demonstrate, there remains a desire tovisit where beer is made and also drunk. For a new start-up breweryfaced with pub companies and global brewers dominating possible pubaccounts, a tap-room is not only a showcase but also a lifeline.

For a start, on-trade beer sales have fallen by more than a third in 12 years — 5.7 billion pints in 2007 to 3.6 billion earlier this year according to the British Beer and Pub Association. Meanwhile, pubs are still closing, but on the other hand we have over 2,000 breweries (many of the newer ones with, or planning, their own taprooms), the most since the 1930s and there is also a bewildering amount of beer styles being produced. Want a milkshake grapefruit sour IPA? You got it.

If you are a new brewery, it certainly makes sense to have your own tap-room as the slice of on-trade cake continues to be shrunk by pub companies and the continuing merrygo-round of big beer buyouts. Given continued concerns about cask beer in the on-trade, the brewery with its own tap is also in charge of its own beer and there can be no excuses for a sub-standard pint.

The tap-room is also a living, breathing advertisement for the brewery, a place where beer-curious people can investigate the mystery of brewing and it is also a bit of a playground for the brewer eager to produce esoteric one-offs, knowing that those who visit the tap will be equally eager to try it.

As breweries continue to enter the marketplace, the tap-room is a logical choice, and the more welcoming it can be made the more it will thrive. Each brewery should be able to stamp its own branding on the establishment, give its own identity a strength that going out into the on-trade might dilute.

‘If I was to set up a brewery today, it would have to be very small with a tap-room, and I would leave it at that,’

Cheshire Brewhouse’s Shane Swindells says (he opened his tap-room last year), ‘growth in the UK is very hard, without lots and lots and lots of cash. Growth is also limited to a very limited amount of business models, with the only real way to make a decent margin being in the sale of beer direct, therefore you need to be able to run a brewery and tap-rooms/pubs.’

Is there a down side to having your own tap? Probably, as just like any business that relies on consumers for its sales, ups and downs in trade can become a bit of a seesaw of failure and success. If you have a glorious position with outdoor seating, then perhaps the weather can effect things (Topsham Brewery tap on a sunny day is a glorious spot). Meanwhile if you are small but busy it can be hard to keep up with demand for your own beer, especially if you want to send beer out into the on-trade but don’t have the capacity to do so.

For the moment though let’s concentrate on the positive and celebrate the continued growth of the tap-room. Which reminds me, Topsham’s tap is open and the sun is shining. See you at the bar.

Adrian Tierney-Jones

Adrian Tierney-Jones

BEER WRITER OF THE YEAR 2017

Voted ‘Beer Writer of the Year 2017’ by the British Guild of Beer Writers, Adrian Tierney-Jones is a freelance journalist whose work also appears in the Daily Telegraph, Original Gravity, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, Daily Star and Imbibe amongst many others.

He’s been writing books since 2002 and they include West Country Ales, Great British Pubs, Britain’s Beer Revolution (co-written with Roger Protz) and his latest The Seven Moods of Craft Beer; general editor of 1001 Beers To Try Before You Die and contributor to The Oxford Companion to Beer, World Beer and 1001 Restaurants You Must Experience Before You Die.

Chair of Judges at the World Beer Awards and also on the jury at the Brussels Beer Challenge, Dutch Beer Challenge and the Copa Latinoamericana de Cervezas Artesanales in Peru. Blogs at http://maltworms.blogspot.co.uk