Sitting on the plywood mezzanine in the main arch that houses The Kernel Brewery, founder Evin O’Riordain alternates between gazing at me and out over the daily humdrum of the brewery, filled with the clang of kegs and whirring buzz of people at work in the background.

“As through most things, it was a series of accidents,” he tells me of one beer’s origins, eyes flitting over the scene below. “It sounds like a story, but really it was just a few things that happened one after the other and they ended up here.”

Though many stories do indeed begin (and continue) in this way, few are so impactful on the microclimate that makes up London’s beer scene. And, I’d wager, few have produced as damn-near-perfect a beer as the one I’ve come to speak to Evin about today.

If at any point over the past 10 years you’ve set foot inside one of London’s many drinking establishments, whether intentionally or by accident, there’s a likelihood you’ve spotted familiar brown paper labels stretching around bottles, or across a tap badge.

This somewhat-ironically iconic branding—its simplicity was only ever meant to allow the beer to speak for itself—isn’t the only landmark of The Kernel Brewery. Amongst its handful of ever-changing “core” beers sits a true benchmark of UK brewing, the perennially excellent Table Beer.

The Bermondsey brewery, which has just celebrated its 10th anniversary (a splendid affair appropriately full of cheese, and saison, and wonderful people, and Table Beer, and yet more cheese) are one of, if not the most adored and well-respected breweries in London: for their role in shaping the city’s beer scene, its affable team, and the beer itself. For me though, one of the main reasons is Table Beer.

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Since it was first brewed in 2012, Table Beer has grown to be one of The Kernel’s most popular and influential beers. A beer that usually sits around 3%—though, as with all of their beers, the strength varies from batch to differently-hopped batch—this unassuming and simple pale ale has become a firm favourite for brewers and drinkers alike.

However, despite the popularity it enjoys today, Table Beer wasn’t always so universally appreciated.

“Pale Ale was our most popular beer, and it took a long, long time for Table Beer to even pass IPA. Like, five years,” Ben Landsberry, who joined The Kernel not long after Table Beer’s inception, says. “We didn’t make it that often in the beginning. When I first started they’d only made the first batch, but we only brewed twice a week then. We’d say: ‘we’ll do Table Beer this month, and then again in six weeks.’”

It’s now brewed weekly, every Friday. But although it took time to grow into the popularity it now enjoys, some found their love for it almost immediately.

“When Table Beer first came onto the scene it was the only notable beer I remember around the 3% mark,” Mauritz Borg, London’s friendliest bartender, and now The Kernel’s new taproom manager tells me. “In that period beer trends were going in the opposite direction towards bigger ABV IPAs and DIPAs. For The Kernel to have it as a core product was quite unique.”

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When The Kernel moved to their current space, a little further down the railway line towards Bermondsey station seven years ago, they occupied just one of the railway arches that make up the local community of makers. Cheesemongers, a jam company, bakers, and many more call this stretch of viaduct home. The brewery has since grown, with numerous arches burrowing through the brickwork to resemble a rabbit warren. Albeit one with vaulted ceilings, and filled with the sweet scent of freshly brewed wort that, in terms of this morning’s batch, will go on to become Table Beer.

““We drink a lot of beer. And we’ll probably live longer if we don’t drink strong beers all the time.””

— Evin O'Riordain

The story Evin tells me that leads to this beers existence starts with one Phil Lowry. Now a hop merchant for Simply Hops, based in Kent, Phil was previously brewing at the now-closed Brew Wharf in Borough Market, and, like Evin, had spent time travelling in America. As the story goes, Phil took inspiration from 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco, which had brewed a 3% version of its American Pale Ale, Bitter American. Phil’s “ABC” hopped with Amarillo, Bravo, and Citra, in turn, led to the birth of Trinity, a 3% cask beer brewed by Redemption Brewing in Tottenham, in the north of the city.

“Table Beer is our attempt to do a cask beer,” Evin tells me. “Its specific inspiration is those cask beers.”

It’s somewhat remarkable to think that it was the texture, body, and refreshing quality of cask ale—ABC and Trinity in particular—and not the American pale ales that inspired those in turn, which went on to inspire Table Beer.

“I think that cask gives a lot of body to a beer, especially low-alcohol beer; that’s one of the magical things that cask does,” Evin says. “It’s also because it’s served slightly warmer and because there’s slightly lower carbonation it becomes fuller [bodied]. We took that inspiration from ABC and Trinity, asking ‘can we put that into a keg and a bottle?’”

“Table Beer has set the standard somewhat for a lower-alcohol, hoppy beer in this country,” Sam Dickison of East London’s Boxcar Brewery tells me. “For its strength it has a surprising amount of body and drinkability, which is where these types of beers in keg have sometimes struggled, ending up a bit soda-like. It's a casual, yet full-flavoured beer.”

Sam’s words echo what numerous others, brewers or otherwise, have told me. Though not the first low-ABV pale ale to emerge in the London scene, it’s regarded as a lodestar: a beacon of refreshment, balance, and flavour, to which brewers have long aspired. In fact, it inspired Sam’s own Table Beer, a beer to which he jokingly refers to as “light mild”, in reference to his cultishly popular Dark Mild.

“It was the main influence for me in creating a Table Beer for Boxcar. I focused on a full body, lower carbonation and a flash of clean bitterness to refresh the palate. There's something quite friendly about a table beer, almost heart-warming for me,” he says.

Without particularly bold flavours or a high ABV, Table Beer has little to hide behind. Sweet malt flavours dodge and duck through bright, fresh hop character reminiscent of pine and citrus fruits, but with an intensity of flavour you'd expect from a beer a couple of percent stronger. It does have a fullness of body, achieved through high mash temperatures and oats in the grist, which greatly contributes to its characteristic balance of flavour and drinkability.

Like so many Kernel beers, it has an elusive quality, too. Something which clearly defines it as a beer brewed by those people, on that kit, in those arches; something indefinable but very much on the tip of your tongue. Something unequivocally Kernellian.

“The other thing—and I think it helps Table Beer more so than the others—is the fact that we still put all of our beers through a second fermentation,” Evin tells me over a shared bottle. “The extra little bit of yeast character and fermentation by-products that you get—hop biotransformations, too—those really hard-to-define things, they’re key to Table Beer.”

Though I’ve drunk many brown-papered beers in search of that fugitive quality, I’m reluctant to believe it’s simply down to a second fermentation. I’m much more inclined to believe that it is, in fact, a little bit of magic.

The allure, too, of Table Beer can be hard to define. What’s for certain, though, is that these magical “extra little bits” are rife within the beer itself. Delicate flavours and deft touches define this exemplary pale ale, and reel you back in for more—sip after sip, pint after pint. It’s endlessly quaffable, and there’s great refreshment in doing so, too.

Though objectively inconsistent in that its recipe and strength vary, one of the key pillars of what makes it so appealing is an unwavering quality. It’s a beer that instils in the drinker a strong belief and near-certain knowledge that when spotted on tap or in a fridge, it will delight as it always does. Personally speaking, I will never not buy it on sight.

“We drink it because it’s delicious,” says Evin, knowingly, “but it having less alcohol than anything else we make is also very significant, you know, because we drink a lot of beer. And we’ll probably live longer if we don’t drink strong beers all the time.”