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“Get your nose in there and have a good sniff – you taste 90% of beer with your nose”, says Beerbods co-founder Matt Lane as he guides a couple of dozen beer enthusiasts through the first of four carefully selected beverages. Together with his beer bud and co-founder Gordon Stovin, he is arranging a craft beer tasting session in one of the trendy, dimly lit, intimate spaces that make up Old Street underground station. Whether you’re a megafan of microbreweries or just curious what the craft beer hype is all about, make sure to attend the next one.

 

In front of us are hundreds of local London craft beers, all lined up to the point of perfection and sorted into the four different kinds we will be treated to during the hour-long event. “They are all from the Bermondsey Beer Mile”, Lane explains, referring to the new name for the booming stretch of up-and-coming microbreweries in south-east London.

 

His love for beer began early, as a 14-year-old pot washer in a local pub he started receiving half-pints at the end of his shifts and soon found out he looked more forward to the beer than the money. After ten years of “bullying friends to drink better beer”, he hosted his first beer-tasting sessions in the spring of 2011.  

 

The following summer Lane created a one page website, to explain and market his idea. If 20 people signed up within the first week, he would turn it in to a business. More than 250 people registered within the first 24 hours. Today, Beerbods has grown into a full-time business with thousands of subscribers. For £3 per week, they deliver a different, exciting craft beer to your door every Tuesday. The following Thursday they arrange online tasting sessions, where they tell you the story behind the beer and let the subscribers pop their bottles at the same time and engage in discussion as they taste it.

 

For this special live tasting session, they have teamed up with The Cheeseboard, a very similar service for fine artisan cheese. “We’re quite big on pairing cheese and beer, some find that a bit unusual but beer tends to be more versatile and flexible than wine”, their representative Tom explains as he serves a Morbier cheese, from the Franche-Comté region in France. This semi-soft, ivory coloured cow’s milk goes encouragingly well with the Fourpure pils, the only can beer in the tasting session. Inspired by the city of München, generously hopped and with classic Bavarian yeast, it’s Bermondsey’s take on the original German pilsner. This exquisite combination really set the standard for the rest of the event.  

 

Minutes later, the region of Franche-Comté in eastern France once again combines with Bermondsey to treat us to another delightful culinary experience. The Smoked Brown by Anspach and Hobday is a dark beer with an aroma of smoked cheese and oaky vanilla. As we pair it with the lovely Comté, a similar cheese to the Morbier but with an 8-12 month aging time, the Beerbods explain to us the beauty of smoked beer.

 

“We’ve seen quite a lot of more experimental brewers re-introducing the idea of smoked malt into the brewing”, says Gordon Stovin. “It’s quite a difficult process”, adds Matt Lane, “back in the day, in the 1800s, it was done really erratically, the malt was often burnt and smoky and this is what the beer would be like at the time – smoked malt profile beer was the prominent drink. It tastes like a tree, and you find more and more breweries doing that. People want different.”

 

Anspach and Hobday brewery is indeed providing the different. Much like Beerbods, it was recently founded by two young entrepreneurs in pursuit of a better beer experience. Along with all the other microbreweries in the tasting session, they set out to create beer types that are not available anywhere else. These experiments leads to new, innovative flavours as well as recreations of old classics and some amazing discoveries in taste along the way.

 

The rounds progress in a tempo worthy of a bachelor party during the 45 minutes long session. Next up is Partizan Saison Lemon & Thyme, a light ale with a hint of lemon and herbs. The abstract, quirky and colourful bottle design by Alec Doherty has quickly become the trademark for Partizan, which started just a little over two years ago. “The interesting thing about it is that it’s a bottle conditioned beer, they’re allowing the beer to continue to mature and develop while it’s in the bottle”, says Gordon Stovin. Paired with cheddar from Somerset, it provides a welcome break from the darker beers.

 

The fourth and final beer, 03/01 Original Porter is the first edition in the 03 series from Brew By Numbers, a brewery that sorts their beers numerically. Matt Lane says: “A lot of smaller manufacturers do it like this, simply because they want to make the best beer possible. Why should they be stuck with an amount of one type of beer, when they could play around with it? That’s the single most exciting thing about small breweries, they are just not afraid to experiment at all.”

 

Thankfully. Brewed with seven different types of malts, including chocolate, crystal and brown malt, this Original Porter has a rich aroma and taste, with notes of roast, coffee and dark chocolate. Together with Fourme d’Ambert, a mild blue cheese from central France, it formed the best combination of the evening and crowned what had already been a delightful tasting session.

 

Most attendees seemed to agree. On a show of hands towards the end, all beers received votes but the last pairing came out as the crowd favourite. A big round of applause was given from a crowd slightly happier, tipsier and more knowledgeable about local beer than the one walking in less than an hour earlier. Surely, most people would’ve happily stayed for many more hours, with continuous serving of cheese, beers and banter but despite the duration of the session; the Beerbods offered one heck of an experience for only £5.