Until recently, when a new brewery opened in Britain, it started with a bitter. It might then go on to brew a best bitter, a pale ale or even a stout but then several years ago something changed. Though some new breweries still follow what could be called the traditional path (mostly brewpubs and rural breweries), it’s becoming increasingly outdated.
On Thursday 13th October I went to a Siren Craft Brew tap takeover in London along with a craft beer Meetup group. To me, Siren Craft Brew was the first new brewery to create completely different beers not just as specials but as its core range. This confident new chapter in beer started in 2012 and never deviated back toward the norm. As a nation, we were obviously ready for this new stage in our drinking culture.
Siren Craft Brew inhabits the countryside of the home counties. It’s situated in a business park in Finchampstead, Berkshire but unlike rural names like Chiltern, Hall & Woodhouse, Exmoor, St Austell, Timothy Taylor or Hook Norton, it eschews the traditional. There are no wheat sheafs, anchors, clergy or ploughs to be seen on the pump clips. The nostalgia for the maritime and the agricultural has been replaced by a more Mediterranean guiltless pleasure.
The recipes aren’t about tradition either but indulgence. The basic range consists of silky oat bodies, fragrant aromas and citrussy new world flavours. The mainstay also sees the return to Britain of the rich chocolatey breakfast stout once beloved by labourers, and at the other end of the spectrum, the sour dry-hopped Calypso.
The artwork on the bottles is reminiscent not of session beer but of luxury. The siren depicted is a cross between a pre-raphaelite female, a Klimt muse and the character Durham Red from the comic 2000 AD. She even has a touch of the Starbucks logo about her. To my mind, a possible forerunner could’ve been the reclining figure that represents Brewsters Brewery. These women are a world away from tired British smut – the swollen women’s anatomy on Hobgoblin pump clips, naughty seaside postcards, the confessions of a plumbers mate.
Instead, it brought to mind imagery more commonly associated with high-end desserts, perfume or even wine. The website itself alludes to fine wines and some of its aged beers fulfil the analogy: I can imagine someone leaving his guests to reappear from the cellar blowing the dust off a bottle of Siren Craft Brew he laid down several years earlier and announcing the vintage.
Now on the badges, the artwork still represents sirens but also drops of oil/blood dispersing in liquid like unfurling tendrils with the hop flowers opening out at the edges. I think this was a part of an artistic meme later taken up by breweries like Cloudwater whereby those primary splashes have been deconstructed again into component parts: they’ve become the abstract shapes representing a synaesthesia of taste and aroma in Cloudwater’s own branding. Or maybe it’s just what I read into it.
Siren Craft Brew and its evolving beer range isn’t the only thing that causes me to pause in my tracks, however. There’s also the venue the tap takeover is happening in.
The Draft House on Tower Bridge Road is part of a small chain of pubs that beer lovers could only have dreamt of a few years ago. Not only does the beer occupy centre stage like a burlesque act under the bar’s seductive red glow, but there are beer menus too – a phenomenon once known only to Brussels.
I pace around the inside. In some ways it’s less comfortable than a pub. It’s certainly less intimate. The bar doesn’t have a landlord or landlady but a shift manager. There aren’t any dogs sprawled out on the floor, and yes, there is a lot of neon which I hate whether in its pre-ironic, actual ironic or post-ironic form. It also has hideous 1970s style goblet patterns on the wallpaper. Some of the seating is like an American diner. The signage for food and events is like a cinema foyer. The dimmed lights bathing each section are the hue of the coloured bulbs of an underground laboratory. Somehow these flights of ague and distemper balance each other out into a welcoming warmth
Along with the tested comfort of Sound Wave, Broken Dream and Liquid Mistress on tap, there is their chilli beer 5-Alarm, Pompelmocello – a grapefruit IPA, Amigos Britanicos – a farmhouse ale with lime, honey and chilli, and Tidal Wave – a 10% IPA based on a barrel aged cask of Sound Wave.
The grapefruit IPA didn’t taste like the Citra hop as I’d imagined, but is refreshing like the oval cells in citrus flesh are exploding on the tongue. It’s cool and sharp like zest spray. The Tidal Wave reminds me of the orange cream centres in chocolate assortment boxes combined with the cool freshness of orange peel.
From Siren’s vast portfolio, I’ve drunk beers aged on cedar wood, gorged on the clay-like depth of Ryesing Tides and wrestled with their braggot Uncle Zester. I’ve been soothed by their tea-infused beers, tantalised by their peach cream IPA and been given a wedgie by their black Brett Gose. I’ve downed seaweed and cloudberry beer, sipped a dessert of cacao nibs and cypress wood and kept vampires at bay with their blackberry IPA.
Could it be that these challenging and, frankly, mad beers become the core range of other breweries in a few years time? They could be the new norm just as the bitter, best bitter and stout were of the recent yesteryear.