Mark Pether, brewer at Crate Brewery and an integral cog in the company’s machine, has seen a lot in the four years he’s been working for the East London brewery. Hard-working and determined, he’s not afraid to get stuck in. But like all of us he has his limits, too.

You see Queen’s Yard, and the surrounding areas of Hackney Wick, haven’t always been the magnet for young Londoners and the like wanting to eat, drink and be merry. And much of that change is down to the hard work put in by breweries like Crate and members of the team such as Mark.

Famous across town and further afield is Crate’s pizzeria, where you can devour fantastic pies both made and cooked on the premises while washing them down with excellent beer made by the Crate brewery team. To one exit you have the River Lee, an idyllic spot to while away on the hours on a summer evening.

To another, you have Queen’s Yard. Looking out you have a wealth of office and other creative spaces. One such space is the Crate Brewery itself, and near it, a warehouse venue facility known as Mick’s Garage. A nightclub in the wee hours, the vast room also acts as a store for brewery stock and above that, offices for the team. But it was not always thus.

“When we moved into that space it had been, until very, very recently, a sex club. Little was left to the imagination. Those rooms were to become our offices so with that, we needed to rebuild and refurbish everything,” explains Pether.

And one day the team were tasked with removing….an old dentist chair. Complete, you guessed it, with heavy duty handcuffs still attached to each arm.

“You wouldn’t believe the weight of it,” says Pether. “We managed to take it out but we the had to get it down the stairs! One person had the easy job at the top while a colleague and I had to navigate it from below.  Of course, the weight got the better of us and it started sliding down with us racing to do the same. Once it hit the bottom, it smashed. A bit at the bottom immediately fell open and an old, used condom flopped out.”

“I was done with it all that point and walked off!” he laughs. But thankfully, he didn’t.

Four years into his time at Crate Brewery, Pether is as enthused as ever. Because just how the area has transformed around him, so has the dynamics of the business. It’s improved in every way, and you get the impression they’re just getting started.

Most recently the brewery, which was founded by by Neil Hinchley, along with New Zealand-born siblings Tom and Jess Seaton, completed a smart rebrand that coincided with the team securing a nationwide listing for four of its beers at Tesco stores nationwide. The supermarket chain now stocks its Lager in bottle and can formats, as well as its IPA, Pale Ale and Session IPA in cans.

The 3.6% Session IPA delivers on flavour without the high ABV. Its 4.5% Pale strikes a fine balance between malt and hops, while the IPA at 6.0% offers up at toffee malt backbone with prominent aromas.

These are only part of the story, though. They complement output that includes a Stout, Golden beer, sour beers and on-going seasonal output.

Pether is excited by the nationwide listing, and is confident it will act as a further boon for the brewery.

“Alongside the new rebrand, which was carried out by Dapple Studios, we’re quite confident that the rate of sale will be strong. I feel that what we offer in Tesco will be different enough and with that, stock should move at a good pace. If the stock moves, then you have less to worry about when it comes to the shelf life you’re required to offer such chains,” he explains.

Pether is also hopeful that the increased exposure will help the brewery further achieve its one simple goal. To be known more for its beer, and not its excellent pizza that throngs descend upon the Queen’s Yard for day-in, day-out.

“One of the problems I think we still have is that people associate us with the brewery we were four or five years ago. The beer has always been good, but it’s also far better than it was then. You hope you’re always improving. We’re using better quality ingredients, we’re more consistent and the whole team is happier with the beers we are putting out. Working at a brewery means you should always be striving to be better than you are currently,” he says.

“We have quite a few jokes in the brewery that when you tell some where you work, the immediate responses are along the lines of ‘Oh yeah, the pizza is good there’. But people never immediately say they love the IPA or our sour beers. The quality of the pizza means we’re a victim of our own success, but the beer is spot-on, too. We want to change that perception and that’s why we’re so excited about them going nationwide with these new listings.”

Pether joined Crate a little more than four years ago. He caught the bug for brewing while at university studying history. He remained in contact with a school friend who was studying at Bristol, and during one meet-up, said friend enthralled him with the magic of making beer.

“He had been reading online about making beer. I’ll be honest, until that moment I didn’t know you could just make beer yourself. So we went out and bought the ingredients and a copy of Charlie Papazian’s book, ‘The Complete Joy of Homebrewing’ and off we went,” he recalls.

The first beer the duo tried to make was a Pilsner which was, as Pether explains, “ambitious” as a first brew. It was something that ended up looking and tasting more like a Newcastle Brown Ale. However, it turned out drinkable and also carbonated in the bottle.

“We weren’t entirely sure what we were doing, but things were working in some shape of form,” he says.

For Pether however, it wasn’t success that led him on the brewing path, but failure.

“The thing that really got me into it was that the second batch was awful, as was the third one. Both had to be poured down the drain and I was at a loss. I was doing everything the same as before so what went awry? It made me question where I was going wrong,” he says. “If I had smashed out three beers in a row, I would have dusted myself off, been happy with the outcome, and got on with my life. But because that didn’t happen, I simply needed to know why.”

So by the end of university, he knew it was crunch time. None the wiser on his career path, Pether looked at what he enjoyed: Music, video games, art and brewing.

“When it comes to video games, you really needed to know your stuff and with music, I wasn’t really into the modern bands so I would have gone for an interview and end up looking like an idiot. But with beer, I knew I could brew my own beer with varying success and was far more comfortable in that area,” he explains.

His foray into professional brewing came at Meantime Brewery where Pether was part of the brewing team, which also encompassed roles such as cellaring and packaging on rotation.

“Seeing volumes that were equal to half my annual homebrew output poured down a drain in five seconds really freaked me out. But I learned a lot there,” he says. ”It just didn’t take long before job satisfaction declined as you’re working in a factory environment and with a minimal level of creative expression. Some people love the idea of the factory setup, of course, but it wasn’t for me.”

It’s been rewarding, and satisfying, then for Pether to have made his mark at Crate by both dialling in existing recipes and formulating new ones, too. However, whether it’s their Golden, Session or a Sour, he’s equally as keen on the dialogue and interaction a brewery maintains with its consumers.

“You need transparency in the brewing industry and there’s no harm in being honest with people. If you’re not honest and they find out you’re hiding something, the question of why you hiding it in the first place emerges, and that’s not a good look,” he stresses.

Crate’s cider is produced at Sheppy’s while its lager is contract-brewed at both Alechemy in Scotland and in Austria.

He adds: “Contract brewing has been a great asset in helping us cater for the demand that comes with the rapid growth we’ve experienced.

“But if you have a beer brewed, or packaging carried out, elsewhere, then it’s your duty to let people know. If you have nothing to hide, then why bother? You only risk damaging your reputation otherwise.

“If you’ve got a state of the art brewery overseas offering to make beer, then why not it. We can’t make lager on the kit we have here, so it’s a no-brainer. I don’t agree with misleading people that the beer they’re drinking was brewed 50 yards away when it was produced in Holland or Belgium.”

For Pether and the team, it’s hoped that in time, such production agreements won’t have to exist at all. Future expansion is planned, and in time, a site move too. Development is planned in Queen’s Yard as developers eye the opportunity for further gentrification. Though there is no fixed date on these plans, Pether admits the finite nature of their setup will result in such a move.

“I think we’re overdue an expansion. We’ve been given a Skoda and we try to compete in Formula One. So to be producing the beers we’re doing right now shows we’re doing very well indeed,” he explains. “We’ve got to a point now where the next logical change is the equipment. This area is set to transform in the coming years so we will have to move anyway. And if you’re going to move you may as well use that shift to take the next step elsewhere in the business also.”

Pether concludes: “The long-term vision for this brewery is to be right up there with the big London outfits and to please even more people with the beers we brew.

“I’ll be a very happy man once I hear even more people up and down the land come across the Crate name and say ‘Oh yeah, I love your beers!’”.