In the autumn of 2012 Paul Anspach was working at Petit Canon, a wine shop in the swanky West London neighbourhood of Parson’s Green. A wedge-shaped corner space with a narrow front facing the triangular Green, it had a tidy selection of around 40 beers, including Brussels’ Cantillon and The Kernel, then—as now—London’s most revered small brewery.

I remember it well, with its big windows, sparse displays and burgundy-red sign; I used to pass it on the way to The White Horse, the imposing Victorian pub a few feet to its left. One day, having noticed the growing beer selection, I emailed, requesting details for my now-retired Craft Beer London app. Paul replied, mentioning at the bottom of his message that he was opening a brewery. “If you are interested, I will keep you posted with [our] progress,” he wrote.

The world of beer has its fair share of self-promotion. In London, this is understandable; it doesn’t pay to be a shrinking violet in a market boasting over 125 breweries of various sizes, with plenty of competition from further afield, too. People don’t often ask “if you’re interested” before diving into a dissection of their latest murky lactose IPA, but Paul and co-founder John Jack Hobday, aren’t like that. “They hide behind their beer,” laughs Yvan de Baets, co-founder of Brussels’ Brasserie de la Senne, a recent collaboration partner.

Anspach and Hobday’s beers reflect this unflashy approach. While sometimes explicitly experimental—particularly when it comes to collaborations—it tends to draw strongly on tradition and time-honoured technique. Their flagship beer is a porter; they make best bitter, pale ale, and cream ale. Now they’re focusing on lager, with four gleaming horizontal conditioning tanks having been installed at their new home near Croydon.

“It’s about proper process, thoughtfully done, rather than chasing trends,” says Paul. “When we started we were probably seen as one of the more out-there breweries because we did so many styles, but now you have pastry stouts, lactose fruit sours, and our traditional side has been amplified. I don’t think we’ve changed, but it’s been brought into focus more.”

Things might be turning their way. High-quality pale lager is increasingly popular, while the recent success of The Five Points’ best bitter, brewed with Fuggles—the most traditional of English hops—is hard to ignore. Classic and understated is back in style. Could this be the moment that Anspach & Hobday, perhaps London’s most underrated brewery, emerges into the spotlight?

If so, they’ve chosen an interesting way to do it. Not many people move to Croydon in search of attention, but Anspach & Hobday recently shifted their brewery from Bermondsey, where they’d brewed since December 2013, to Unit 11 on the Valley Point Industrial Estate, a few miles from Croydon’s heart. It’s different. On Druid Street, Bermondsey, they were cheek-by-jowl with St Johns’ bakery and Monmouth Coffee’s roastery; here, they’re across the way from Chicken Cottage’s head office (and a road’s width from Signal, another brewery).

A month before Covid-19 hit, on an unseasonably mild February Friday afternoon, I went down to have a look. Paul Anspach—a relaxed, friendly presence with, it must be said, an impressive moustache—is on the brewery floor, decked out in branded hooded top and beanie, as I arrive. He’s deciding how much of this 4,000-square-metre shed should be devoted to the taproom.

It’s small by some modern breweries’ standards, but quite a step-up from their former home. The four-year-old, 1400-litre brew kit and eight 2800-litre FVs fit neatly into one half of the space alongside the four new lagering tanks. A canning line has also been installed. “It’s very different,” he says. “It feels more permanent. There’s so much more space here.”

That includes an upstairs office, complete with table and kitchenette. We’re joined by John Hobday (who’s friends call him by his middle name, Jack), who’s also decked out in Anspach & Hobday gear, including an identical beanie. They’re an interesting pair: friends since the age of four, they joke about disagreements they’ve had, but it feels a little unlikely. They’re not aggressive people. John is a little more forceful, Paul more impassioned, but both are essentially level-headed; practical rather than impulsive.

The brewery’s story illustrates that nicely. It began in a flat in Vauxhall where the pair—who met at nursery school in Epsom, Surrey—lived during their respective degrees: Philosophy at King’s College for Paul, Psychology at UCL for John. They started to experiment with brewing in late 2010, spurred on by one of Hobday’s lecturers.

Their third flatmate, Ally, was not pleased. A system was quickly developed to forestall his protests. They’d start the mash in the kitchen and then fill the kettle, a tea urn with the thermostat removed, before putting it in the bathtub to boil. It meant that if it boiled over, all would be well—and the steam was better off in the bathroom than the kitchen, they figured, after one early experiment left cold wort raining from the ceiling.

Brewing was not their first choice. They’d tried music, as writers, producers and performers under the name Great Dover Street Productions, even going so far as to build a little recording studio in the flat—but interest had been limited, despite a Christmas single in 2010. The beer proved more popular. Under a string of names—Hobsbach, Alements, and finally Anspach & Hobday, the latter chosen at least partly because of its evocation of London’s historic breweries—they honed their beer. They were encouraged by glowing reviews for their porter from well-known drinks writer Oz Clarke, who they ambushed at a wine event, and beer writer Melissa Cole.

Paul remembers it as a crucial moment. “They didn’t know us, they could have shut us down, it wouldn’t have been out of order,” he says. “But they were encouraging. We didn’t have credibility because we didn’t deserve it, but that made us believe in ourselves.”

The pair caught up with Cole at the launch of her first book, Let Me Tell You About Beer, in 2011. She remembers it well. “I was blown away that these two homebrewers were producing such a fantastic beer,” she says.

“They were so very enthusiastic and passionate that I always had really high hopes for them. They are also very nice people too, and they have gone from strength-to-strength by putting in the hard yards and sticking to their guns about the styles they wanted to brew. I admire that.”

***

There’s a selection of aged bottles on the table in front of us; every so often, Paul opens a new one. All are good—excellent, even—but the one that really shines is The Brother Sean, an 8.4 percent ABV version of their Porter. Brewed in 2016 with Westmalle yeast, it’s a delight: smooth and rich, robust but easygoing, no oxidative character, a dry finish. A masterful bit of brewing—and no tricks or gimmicks, no marshmallows or tropical fruit.

“These big beers have got so much going for them in the four main ingredients,” Paul says. “There’s so much complexity you can get with the tools we have as brewers. Why make an alcopop with your stout?”

Perhaps the greatest tribute to their approach is their popularity amongst Belgian breweries, and in excellent Brussels beer bars like GIST. They’ve worked with Brussels Beer Project, L’Ermitage and, most recently, de la Senne, in the early summer of 2019.

““There’s so much complexity you can get with the tools we have as brewers. Why make an alcopop with your stout?””

— Paul Anspach

The result was Anspach Porter, named for a former mayor of Brussels as well as Paul, made with English malts and fermented with de la Senne’s house yeast. Yvan De Baets speaks glowingly of the brewery.

“I love the sense of a place they put into their brews, taking inspiration from what was there before, adding a modern touch to it, and also that they are precise and skilful brewers,” he says. “Even with foreign styles, like their Flemish Brown for instance. Not a lot of Belgian breweries can make such a good example of the style [as that]!”

Anspach & Hobdays’s lack of stature given the quality of their beer is not just about their unassuming public persona. Until now, they’ve made relatively little. Beers like The Brother Sean are produced in such small quantities they struggle to make much of an impact. That will change now, John says: they can make 500,000 litres (880,000 pints) a year on this site, as opposed to 150,000 litres in Bermondsey.

“I just think we’ve been too small [to attract more attention],” he says. “You can’t feel too hard done by; the order book is full. The people who buy our beer and who have invested in us, they appreciate what we do. We can treble our capacity here, we can reach more people and that wider cred might come, but part of the joy of being a craft brewery is to keep it local, so we’re focused on Croydon and Sutton.”

And Bermondsey, of course. They’ve built a strong relationship with The Marquis of Wellington, a pub opposite the former brewery owned by Ei brand Bermondsey Beer Company; the pale ale is a big seller, according to former assistant manager Alex Abrey. “We put it on at the end of 2016, and it’s been the house pale ale ever since,” he says. “It sells extremely well. It’s not over-complicated; a lot of modern beers get over-complicated, but they follow traditional methods, which is cool.”

Alex now runs the Lord Clyde in Borough, also for Bermondsey Beer Co. It’s one of the area’s most attractive pubs, with its distinctive Trumans’ emerald green and cream glazed exterior tiling, traditional interior and five cask ales on the bar. Amongst them is Anspach and Hobday’s best bitter, badged as The Lord Clyde Bitter. “It’s our best seller by far,” Alex says. “It’s just a great beer.”

The new brewery site means long-cherished plans can be put into action, depending on what happens next in the Covid-19 crisis. The arrival of Anspach & Hobday cans will, they hope, see them back in bottle shops while a nitro-served porter is pencilled in for later in the year. They’ve high hopes for the lager, which will get four weeks in those horizontal tanks. And then there’s SE1, where the original arch will be used for ageing beers, and as a bar on the stretch of South London that has become known as the ‘Bermondsey Beer Mile’—home to no less than 11 breweries, and one cidermaker.

It’s a contentious term. Back in 2014, Hobday launched a website devoted to the Mile, a term coined by blogger (and friend of the brewery), Matt Hickman, AKA Matt The List. It became controversial, because some of the other Bermondsey breweries felt it was encouraging over-consumption. There was talk of “stag dos” destroying the rarefied atmosphere of Bermondsey. It clearly still upsets John.

“It wasn’t managed quite as well as it could have been by me,” he says. “The disharmony it caused broke my heart because it was from breweries that inspired us.”

“At the end of the day, if you’re going to open up [in Bermondsey], nobody is not good enough for your beer. The crowd we get in Bermondsey is one of the nicest drinking crowds you’ll ever see. Yes, there is a stag-do element. That has to be managed but it’s the sort of stag-do that, if I get married, I’d like to have.”

“Nice people go on stag-dos too!” adds Paul. “It became such a buzzword.” It’s all in the past now: The Kernel, for example, recently opened a bar a few doors down from the brewery, having closed for drink-in customers in 2015.

It means Paul can worry about other things, like natural wine. “I like things that taste good, and that’s fine. I’m yet to have a natural wine that is a patch on a more traditional product. We used to sell some wine in Petit Canon that was completely wild fermented, a Chilean Chardonnay, and it was lovely. You could taste the grape, not just funk. I love funk, but you can lose the flavour of the grape. It’s a hype train.”

Petit Canon shut in 2013; there’s an estate agent there now. Change is inevitable in London, but Anspach & Hobday’s time-honoured approach looks a safe bet to survive whatever comes next, Covid-19 notwithstanding.

“Our message about where our beers sit and what we stand for—we’re starting to get people saying that back to us,” Paul tells me. “People are maybe getting bored of the way beer is... we’ve resisted it, because if that’s what beer was when I got into it I don’t know how interested I’d be.”

John agrees. “There’s a balance of tension between a fad and a trend. We would be very silly not to keep our minds open. What we want in our beer is integrity. We’re not chasing fads for the sake of it.” he says with a smile. “That said, I’m sure there’s a natural wine out there for Paul.”