Biers to talk over, not about

By Phil Mellows

It was during a lovely stay in the Cotswolds a few weeks back (thank you, Brakspear) that I noticed I was within a country stroll of a brewery I’d never heard of. The name alone piqued my curiosity, so off I went.

Google Maps took me across some fields to the village of Andoversford before turning onto a glum industrial estate. Until the brilliant This Country hit our television screens, few could have imagined that the Cotswold Hills, green and pleasant emblem of the English rural idyll, could harbour ordinary working life in this way. Though 21st Century beer hunters are used to finding this kind of place, of course.

Dodging the lorries, I turned another corner and there was the industrial unit I was looking for, the home of Werkstatt Bier. The tap room was open, consisting of a few tables and a tiny bar.

The splendidly named co-founder Joe Wild-Grout, pictured, stood in front of taps pouring Werkstatt’s core range: Pale, Dark and Wheat, the chalked descriptors suggesting there could be something unusual about this brewery.

For the Pale is in fact a Kolsch, beer of Cologne, so light and fresh it’s frequently mistaken for a lager. The Dark is an Altbier, a style originating in Dusseldorf, and the kind of beer they used to drink in Germany before lager came along. The wheat is a yeasty Hefeweizen.

Werkstatt translates from the German as ‘workshop’, and it looked like one, though rather bare. I ventured that perhaps the brewery itself was in an adjoining unit, but no. Joe pointed at a tub at the back of the room barely larger than my mum’s old-fashioned spin dryer, the kind you have to hold the lid down on to make it work and stop it jumping around. (Still, a step up from the mangle, and mum was very excited when she got it.)

Anyway, only a few months into the business, Joe and the other half of Werkstatt, Sam Alexander, are working with this tiny one-barrel brewkit (a brewer’s barrel is 288 pints), though they hope soon to expand to 10 barrels and start supplying pubs. At the moment, you can only buy it in the tap room and in cans.

The German inspiration comes from Sam, who was an apprentice brewer at Sheffield’s lately, and sadly, departed Kelham Island Brewery before moving to Munich, where he discovered styles of beer that made a refreshing change to the highly hopped brews that dominated the UK craft scene.

“I’d had enough of IPAs,” he admits. “Drinking a Helles lager from wooden barrels in a German beer garden, I realised just how good it tasted. There’s something so drinkable about European beers, they slide down so easily, and there’s something more sociable about them. Unlike a triple IPA, you don’t feel you have to discuss what you’re drinking all the time!”

When he met Joe at a home-brew club, he found a like mind, and the pair decided to have a go at making their own beers “to talk over, not about – sound, drinkable beers for people who want to have a conversation.

“I liked the limited choice. But what would that look like in the UK? Could we achieve that? So we’ve given German-style beers an English twist. They’re slightly hoppier but still dry and well-attenuated.

“Initially, people here were surprised, then they started to enjoy themselves. It’s a risk, a craft brewer not having the usual hoppy focus, but there’s a market for these beers.”

And others would agree. Brewers specialising in European-style beers have already established themselves in the UK. They include Bohem Brewery in north London, which brews a range of Czech lagers according to strict traditional principles, and Solvay Society in east London, which is having great adventures in “truly inauthentic” Belgian-style beers from blondes and tripels to witbiers and saisons.

Bristol’s Lost and Grounded Brewers is also worth a mention, producing German styles such as Helles and Keller Bier alongside Belgian Dubbels, wheat beers and saisons.

Seems when it comes to beer you can take Britain out of Europe, but you can’t take Europe out of Britain.