Beavertown has just thrown open the doors of its new brewery in Ponders End, Enfield. The facility, will create up to 150 jobs, and enable the company to produce up to 500,000hl and to brew in 150hl batches, equivalent of 90,000,00 pints per annum, on its Krones brewhouse. We spoke to Beavertown founder & CEO Logan Plant and their lead brewer, Chris Lewington, to learn more about the challenges involved that faced them with such a major project.
So the story goes like this…
In the early spring of 2007, Joe Carroll would open Fette Sau, a BBQ joint with a bar that focused on local craft beer and small batch American spirits.
Located on the sprawling Metropolitan Avenue, a street in northern Brooklyn, New York City, the restaurant boasted the perfect marriage of excellent beer and Texas-style BBQ.
Opposite Fette Sau is the Knitting Factory, a popular concert venue where you can catch a gig most nights of the week. And some ten years ago, that very venue played host to Sons of Albion.
After the gig, the hard rock band, fronted by Logan Plant, were in the mood to eat. And following a personal recommendation, there was only one place on their minds.
“I was ravenous!” he recalls, and Fette Sau was their destination.
And after passing through those doors, there was no looking back. Overwhelmed by the unmistakable aromas of BBQ smoke, the tender steam-grilled sandwiches called sliders and the wealth of amazing local beer, Plant had found his true calling.
It was time to turn his back on the music industry and follow his love of all things beer.
While the visit to Fette Sau may have been an epiphany, Plant’s appreciation of beer has been developed long before, nearly 4000miles back home in the West Midlands.
And a decade on from that fateful night Plant, and his team at London’s Beavertown, have just opened their new brewery in the capital, one that is capable of producing some 90 million pints each year.
Beavertown was founded by Logan Plant back in 2011, and in that time it has gone on to become one of the UK’s most popular names in the brilliant world of beer.
And to call the last two years something of a whirlwind for Beavertown, is to probably underplay it.
In the summer of 2018, Beavertown announced the sale of a minority stake to Dutch business Heineken. In doing so, the £40m investment in the London outfit would enable Plant to realise his ambitions of building a brand new brewery and in doing so, get Beavertown beer on every street corner.
The following spring, Beavertown and Tottenham Hotspur would officially open the doors of its state-of-the-art on-site brewery, the only one of its kind inside a football stadium and a spot that swiftly became a go-to destination for a match-day beer.
While the stadium brewery officially opened in early 2019, work had already begun in earnest on an even bigger project – the construction of their new brewery in Ponders End, part of the London Borough of Enfield.
Some 18 months on, that new brewery is very much a reality. Christened Beaverworld, the facility will create 150 new jobs.
And with equipment from manufacturers such as Krones, its Steinecker brewhouse can produce up to 500,000HL a year, while KHS technology means they’re capable of filling 30,000 cans and 160 kegs every hour.
The Beaverworld build was a major undertaking at any point in time, it just so happened those involved had a global pandemic to navigate during the project, too.
And despite these major accomplishments, even Plant has to take a step back to take in the brewery’s journey and development over these last 10 years.
“Eight years ago I was at the kitchen table pissing (wife) Bridget off, making a mess and stinking the place out and generally constructing some sort of a dream with the first recipes of Neck Oil, Eight Ball and Smog Rocket. So to think that now we’re opening London’s biggest brewery, you know, bonkers,” he explains.
“I think it’s a testament to the hard work of people like Chris (Lewington), who’ve been amazing parts of the team and all the people that have been with us. It just shows what you can achieve when you’ve got an aspiration, a dream and a vision, then you surround yourself by amazing people. And here we are.”
Long before Beaverworld, Plant’s professional foray into the London beer scene was through the opening of Duke’s Brew & Que in 2012.
Based in Haggerston, it was the first home of Beavertown. Serving up authentic BBQ and their own craft beers, the brewpub and BBQ joint was Plant’s way of recreating the perfect harmony of flavours and aromas he had experienced in Brooklyn two years prior.
It was here he would also meet Nick Dwyer, the brewery’s creative director responsible for the unmistakable artwork and branding that has adorned their cans, keg founts and merchandise ever since.
A move to a bigger brewery in Hackney Wick followed in 2013, before growing demand would see the team move to Tottenham Hale the year after.
The Lockwood Industrial Estate has been the brewery’s home ever since, with an increasing number of units catering for additional tanks, storage, taprooms and fulfilment.
And while the Tottenham Hale site will still play a key role for Beavertown going forward, the need for a larger, new facility was evident many years back. Along with the wealth of new kit that would come with it.
“It’s something that has obviously been in the pipeline for maybe four and a half years,” says Plant. “Understanding when we were coming to that point of reaching capacity, knowing that we were going to hit that, and asking ourselves how we are going to keep going and make the most of this moment?”
“We were asking ourselves how we are going to keep going and make the most of this moment?, Logan Plant, Beavertown
After assessing all of the options available to them, the brewery opted to raise capital for the new site build through the sale of a minority stake to Dutch business Heineken.
Beaverworld could become a reality but, unsurprisingly, it was impossible to predict a global pandemic would hit mid-construction. But thanks to their relationship with manufacturers such as Krones and KHS, alongside their German contractors, they got the job done.
“It was really dramatic. We kept having those conversations between Krones’ HQ and the commissioning team around the time it looked like the borders were going to close that night,” says lead brewer Lewington. “The team would head to the hotel pack their bags while we were still brewing. They were scheduled to leave that night but then they got called to they’re not gonna close the borders and we’d be brewing again tomorrow!”
He adds: “We got four brews down with the whole Krones team and then for the fifth one it was us. We were working with them over VPN and Microsoft Teams.
“Of course, you lose that personal touch having someone so instead, there was three or four of us with headsets all day going around this whole new brewery. It was a huge responsibility and it was super challenging time but it was also the best way to learn because as as result, we now know every single facet of the brewery.”
The centrepiece of Beavertown’s new brewery is its bespoke Krones Steinecker Brewhouse.
The five vessel brewhouse comprises a Variomill, Mash Conversion vessel, Lauter Tun, Wort Kettle, Whirlpool and an Equitherm energy recovery system.
In the cellar Krones has provided 38 fermentation maturation tanks ranging from 150hl – 600hl in size along with centrifuge, filtration and an automated dry hoping dosing system.
While the brewhouse is considerably different to the system the team were used to brewing on in Lockwood, it’s a change that Lewington has fully embraced.
“Lockwood doesn’t have a single bit of automation in the entire brewery,” he explains. “So with Beaverworld, the whole concept of brewing basically changes. As anyone who has worked in automated breweries will understand that it’s very different. It’s a different way of approaching brewing.”
He goes on: “If a brewer’s biggest adaptation is that they’re no longer having a direct influence on the actual process of brewing, then their whole thought process is different.
“If you’re no longer operating valves then you move to looking at trends? You ask yourself about pump speeds I looking at pump speeds and how you’re going to achieve the same numbers every single time.
“It’s just a different way of approaching the production of beer. And for the team here we love it.”
“They were scheduled to leave that night but then they got called to they’re not gonna close the borders and we’d be brewing again tomorrow,” Chris Lewington, Beavertown
Lewington and the team are now working with 600HL tanks, six times the volume of the FVs housed at Lockwood in Tottenham.
He adds: “It’s a whole different ballgame and you have to be super focused all the time. And even when the computer is running itself, it’s also a computer at the end of the day, and it does what it needs to do.
“It’s entertaining. You’re trying to mash at 64.1 but you’re only one decimal point away from 6.41. When you’re mashing in by hand you’ll never get to mash in at 6.4 degrees but there’s an opportunity to do so in production brewery!”
Beavertown’s lead brewer Chris Lewington started brewing professionally at Harrogate’s Daleside Brewery at the beginning of 2015. Later that year he moved to the brilliant Thornbridge before the capital came calling in May 2017.
Joining Beavertown, Lewington has carried out a range of senior brewing roles, including managing quality across five different contract brewing sites.
Now, as lead brewer of the new Beaverworld site, he works alongside a team that includes Nikola Marjanovic, Beavertown’s head of brewery operations and expansion.
“I’ve been incredibly blessed by having people like Nikola and Jan who supported me throughout,” says Lewington. “They’ve given me a lot of responsibility and hopefully I’m repaying that faith. it’s it’s very rewarding.”
In addition to the impressive Krones Steinecker Brewhouse, Beaverworld also boasts a raft of kit from KHS.
The complete KHS can line has the capacity to fill up to 30,000 cans per hour in 330ml format, while the process is fully automated from start to finish. Palletised cans go in, get depalletized, rinsed with ionised air, filled, sealed, coded and packed in cartons or in trays prior to palletisation.
The filling process centres around the computer controlled KHS Innofill DVD filler, with 50 filling heads, with electronic flow metering to accurately control can contents.
The machine delivers several design features to ensure hygiene and flavour stability, and a highly efficient CO2 saving can purging system with minimal dissolved oxygen pickup.
Elsewhere, the KHS keg line can fill up to 160 kegs per hour in 30l format and the ability to be expanded in the future to an ultimate capacity of 240 kegs per hour.
Empty kegs are fed on to the line where they are de-palletised, washed and sterilised prior to filling precisely filled to a pre-defined volume, then capped and coded prior to being palletised.
The investment in equipment was in-line with the ethos for the new facility, which as Plant says, is to invest in best.
“When I started to look at possible expansion, we looked at all of the options available. We knew the industry was changing, and our position in it had changed, too,” he says. “We came to the realisation that the new brewery needed to be the biggest and best it possibly could, so we’re fortunate we’ve been able to do that.”
The new equipment that makes Beaverworld tick allows the brewery to produce, package and distribute more beer than ever before.
But for people like Lewington, it’s also the potential to refine their processes on an ongoing basis that really excites him about the facility’s capabilities.
“For me, the most exciting thing is that we have all the equipment and all the tools, along with all of the understanding, to really push this site to like the ultimate level that Nikola and I have always discussed,” he explains. “The ultimate goal for this site is that there is no limit regarding innovation. Going forward, we will have all the tools to be an incredibly innovative site so we can actually start to create research from here, to generate as much information as possible and I think that’s always been the goal.”
“The most exciting thing is that we have all the equipment and all the tools, along with all of the understanding, to really push this site to like the ultimate level, Chris Lewington, Beavertown.
While it’s full-steam ahead at Beaverworld, Plant is keen to point out that seasonals and collaborations are still a major part of the brewery’s output going forward.
He also recognises the incredible growth the core range such as Neck Oil and Gamma Ray has experienced in recent years. Neck Oil accounts for around 65-70% of production, overtaking Gamma Ray, which filled around 55% of the brewery’s tanks several years back.
But the world of Beavertown, like all of its peers, exists in a changing landscape.
Plant explains: “We were lucky to have a brewery in the stadium at Tottenham, with 60 to 80,000 people there every game, a real broad spectrum of society.
“For Neck Oil to be 40% of the beer drunk in the stadium shows you that I think we’ve got a long way to go, as a beer category, to grow into the mainstream.
If craft beers are six, seven, maybe 8% of total beer production in the UK, and you’ve got 40% of people drinking that in the stadium then if we can push it up to 15 or 20% nationally, that to me shows that the beer industry or craft beer industry has got so much further to go.
Going forward, however, Plant is optimistic about the future. When those initial plans for the next evolution of Beavertown were in their infancy some four years ago, nobody could have envisaged the way the world would look when their new brewery eventually threw open its doors.
And it’s another reason for his overwhelming pride in his team.“I’m unbelievably proud. Honestly, I can’t believe, and I must say, I know it sounds a bit weird. I’ve really embraced this time. It has really brought our team together,” he says. “It’s great to know that a lot of people want to come back into work, and that camaraderie has become even stronger than before.”
Lewington adds: “I think one of Beavertown’s overriding characteristics is its adaptability. I think that throughout throughout all circumstances we have ever been thrown, especially the brew team, which I can speak from firsthand.
“And so when COVID happened, we just sat down and asked how are we going to get this to work? And that’s the attitude of the whole company.
It’s because everyone wants to be here. That’s the best thing and everyone loves to be part of being here.
“Of course, we were helped by the fact we got to commission a brewery and if anything, it keeps you on your toes!”
