While Mason and Hobbs founded the brewery, its first employee was Doreen Joy Barber, a popular figure in the London, and wider, beer scene, and a key cog in Five Points and London Brewers’ Market setup.

“Doreen, was employee number one, doing a day a week, then two days a week, then eventually full- time, an integral part of the early days and now. Sales, marketing, everything!,” says Mason.

According to Barber, a US native who had a passion for beer long before moving to the UK in 2009, a drive and passion to be more closely involved in beer led her to her role, which is a cross between marketing, sales, communication, events management and social media manager.

“I enjoyed beer, I used to work in a café in the US, did beer buying but mostly as an enthusiast, I had the passion to be more closely involved. Working in pubs such as Stoke Newington’ Jolly Butchers, which has become something of a breeding ground, an incubator, for staff and breweries in recent years, only aided that,” she explains.

And for Barber, who has experienced beer culture on both sides of the Atlantic, she finds the idea of possible saturation in the UK brewing sector as laughable.

“In the US, look how many breweries are there. And then for us, there are so many markets for us to look at in the export market that we haven’t touched. Also, when we go out of certain places, they may have heard of Five Points, but in less urbanised areas, the beer is not out there so it means that there is scope to grow. And I know that a lot of other breweries are seeing that too, so there is a lot of room for good beer,” she says. It seems that there are a lot of breweries, but the market share independent breweries have is still very small. It’s under 10% of the overall beer market, which is still dominated by the mass market and the big players.

Mason adds: “On one level, it feels intuitive to think we will hit a saturation point at some point, but then on the other, looking at the states, the Brewers Association, had a target to claim 10% of the market, and now they are on 14%, with a 20% by 2020, and we are nowhere near that over hear, yet.

“So if we are following the path, it is clear that there is plenty of potential, I’m not saying that breweries should be immune from the normal laws of economics and some will fail for whatever number of reasons and some will close, but there is definitely scope to get bigger and better.”

And that’s exactly the plan for Five Points. Despite increasing capacity at their current facility, the trajectory the brewery is on means that a new site is looking like a case of when, not if.

“Out long-term aspiration is to move to a permanent home, we’ve been trying to make our current site work. But it’s difficult to find premises that area available and can work for us,” says Mason. “But if we did move, we would want to keep our current one going, too. It’s important for us and wouldn’t want to lose that, and by doing that, it would allow us to experiment more, too, which is something we aren’t really able to do at the moment.”

But when the time does arrive, you can bet that the Five Points team will do things the right way.