For Mason (above) and his team, it has also only been a matter of weeks since the company moved into its new office and warehousing space up the road from its brewing site, meaning the team no longer have to shimmy their seats under their desks each time kegs and casks are passing through the brewery floor.
It is a frenetic period for the Five Points, but you get the impression they wouldn’t have it any other way. And like many of its peers, their tale is one of a company that has come a long way, in the short amount of time since they starting brewing less than three years ago.
“Greg and I had spent many years selling other people’s beers and we both harboured aspirations to move beyond that, to have our own brewery,” explains Mason.
Greg Hobbs is the company’s co-founder and head brewer. The duo met when Mason took over and relaunched the Duke of Wellington pub in Hackney in 2008, a time in which there were only a handful of London breweries, namely Fuller’s, Meantime and Sambrook’s.
Even then, the local ethos was key for Mason, with a conscious decisions being made to stock the latter as the pub’s house bitter owing to the fact that the company was local, and it was a start-up. “It’s something I wanted to support, simple as that,” says Mason.
He and Hobbs continued to harbour their goals of opening a brewery, but one in Hackney, something the former believes was deemed counterintuitive, considering perceptions of the area at the time.
In the proceeding years, the London brewing sector grew at pace and Hobbs took on an assistant brewing role at ELB, while Mason opened a craft beer bar in Shoreditch called Mason & Taylor, premises that is now home to BrewDog Shoreditch on Bethnal Green Road. But there plans were still in motion and several years later, “the time was right”.
Mason sold one of his businesses, and the available capital made it possible make the move into brewing. Joining forces once again with Hobbs, they found a suitable premises in Hackney, a location that was integral to their search. “We were, and are, local and we wanted to pursue that idea of a local brewery, a community brewery,” he adds.
