Brewery Below Review

Brewery Below is a new nano-brewery (like a micro brewery, but, you know… diddier) and event space under the little glass Borough Wines shop at 344 Essex Road. They produce very limited edition beers, fun boozy experiments, and collaborative ventures with guest brewers.

We were ushered through the back of the little glass shop on Essex road, down into a cosy but clean white-tiled brewery liberally festooned with hop-flowers. The space is available for full 4-5 hour brewing sessions with the larger brewing equipment (30-40 litres).

We were doing a much shorter 3 hour process to try out the Brewery Below’s new 5 litre Home Brew Kits. These are designed to be a manageable, clean and fool-proof introduction to home-brewing. I’d say its a comfortable middle ground between those ready- made cans of home brew you might be familiar with (easy, zero mess, but you don’t get to do any of the interesting stuff or handle any ingredients), and sourcing ingredients such as malt and hops yourself (could get messy, and better if you know what you’re doing in the first place). So: a good first step, and in a small enough quantity that you don’t have a gigantic keg tripping over your flatmates. We were brewing the Citra Pale, which is a heavily hopped, light, crisp beer with grapefruit flavours.

While we nurtured our brew on its precarious way to beerhood, we were treated to short but informative mini-lectures on the reason for each stage. This included the effect different methods would have the end product, and we were treated to beer tastings illustrating the different ways a beer can go through the process. For instance, how lower boil temperatures producing lighter beers, and higher ones produce darker beers through to stouts. The resident master brewer Eddy is a font of hoppy wisdom and quickly and efficiently set us on the right course when we (repeatedly) strayed from the instructions (we had… been drinking).

This is definitely a whole evening and nibbles were provided (this may vary depending on what event you are doing) but given how close this is to Upper Street and Angel you really ought to try lining your stomach at one of the trendy restaurants or bakeries in the area. Brewery Below itself will be hosting chef Adam Rawson’s Sakura pop-up, with a varied menu of 12 dishes based on Japanese Izakaya (traditional Japanese tavern) from Thursday 16th March to Friday 31st March.

Reporter: David Brown

Twitter and Instagram: @salomebloke

Location: Brewery Below, Borough Wines, 344 Essex Road, N1 3PD

Social: @brewerybelow @boroughwines