Brew Wharf was an eight-hectolitre brewpub located under the railway arches at Borough Market, part of the Vinopolis complex. The venue was owned by Claudio Pulze and Trevor Gulliver — the latter best known as co-founder of St John — and was conceived as a place where brewing, food, and hospitality carried equal weight.

When I arrived in 2010, Brew Wharf already had presence and ambition, but the brewery itself was still searching for a clear direction. Alongside Steve Skinner and Angelo Scarnera, I helped steer the brewing toward a more contemporary expression of cask beer — informed by American craft brewing but grounded in British tradition. The emphasis became freshness, drinkability, hop character, and beers designed to work with food and conversation rather than spectacle.

The brewery under the arches at Borough Market

Under this direction, Brew Wharf became known for bold cask beers such as Hopfather, ABC, Punjabi, and Hoptimum, alongside collaborative and one-off brews that challenged assumptions about what cask beer could be. The brewery gained recognition not just for the beers themselves, but for helping normalise ideas that would later become central to UK brewing: lower-alcohol hop character, American hop expression in British formats, and cask as a medium for modern beer rather than nostalgia.

Alongside Steve Skinner, I also brewed under the name Saints and Sinners Brewing Co — a cuckoo operation using Brew Wharf's kit to make whatever took our fancy. Our black IPA, Military Intelligence (6.8%), released in August 2010, was named by The Beercast as one of their best new British beers of 2010 — "a benchmark for the new wave of black versions arriving in the UK." That same year, the London Brewers Alliance collaboration porter was also released at the Brew Wharf showcase.

During this period, Brew Wharf became a place where ideas were tested openly. Beers brewed there, and collaborations developed around the kit, fed into work that later appeared at The Kernel Brewery, Beavertown Brewery, and Redemption Brewing, as well as shared projects with brewers who went on to form Elusive Brewing and Burning Sky Brewery.

Some of those beers continue to echo today. Elements of London Brick, first brewed collaboratively during this period, can still occasionally be tasted in versions brewed by The Kernel — a quiet through-line linking those early collaborations to the present.

One of many gatherings at Brew Wharf

Beyond the beer itself, Brew Wharf mattered as a meeting point. In 2010 it hosted early gatherings that led to the formation of the London Brewers Alliance, at a time when London's modern brewing scene was still small enough for nearly everyone to fit around one table. For a while, the brewery acted as an informal base for that community, hosting meetings, collaborations, and the Alliance's first public festival.

It was also a forum for London's beer blogosphere — writers like Mark Dredge and the late Sid Boggle were regulars — and hosted celebrated occasions for the British Guild of Beer Writers and the traditional pre-GBBF gatherings that brought the wider beer community together each August.

Brew Wharf closed in 2014, and the brewhouse was later relocated to Breakwater Brewery, where it continues to be used today. The original site has since been redeveloped, but its influence travelled with the people who brewed there, drank there, and learned there. I look back on it less as a standalone project, and more as a short, intense chapter within a wider movement that reshaped how beer was brewed, served, and talked about in London.