THE GIST
Earlier this month, one of London’s most well-loved craft beer bars closed its doors after just two years of business. Mason & Company—co-founded by The Five Points Brewing Company director Ed Mason—was located Hackney Wick, a vibrant part of East London adjacent to the site of the 2012 Olympics. According to the Financial Times, the area is also is a hotspot for first-time home buyers within the capital. Despite this, a lack of foot traffic proved to be problematic.
“There is no getting away from the fact that we opened Mason & Company in what has proved a challenging location,” Mason said in a press statement following the closure. “Sadly, during the majority of the year, outside the peak summer months, the footfall to the overall development and location has not been high enough to sustain a successful business in the long term.”
WHY IT MATTERS
The closure of Mason & Co. will be bittersweet. Its new pub and brewery tap, The Pembury Tavern, is set to open on Sept. 27 following 6 weeks of renovations. Mason has plenty of previous experience running hospitality venues, having owned the successful Whitelocks Ale House and The Turk’s Head in Leeds. In 2012, he sold Shoreditch bar Mason & Taylor to BrewDog, prior to the founding of his brewery.
Despite all the excitement it's earned in recent years, it's easy to forget how young the London beer scene actually is. In 2011 you could still count the number of specialist beer retailers on a single hand, with The Rake, Cask Pub & Kitchen and The Euston Tap—along with Kris Wines in Kentish Town—being among the only major proponents of the scene. Now, keeping up with numerous taproom, bar, and bottle shop openings can feel exhausting, with well over 100 specialist beer retailers within the capital and non-specialist retailers also diversifying into craft. And with this rapid growth it is only natural—nay, normal—that some should fall by the wayside.
The closure of Mason & Company may come as a particular shock though, in particular due to the growth of its parent company, Five Points. The brewery successfully raised £1.14M ($1.51M) via the sale of equity through crowdfunding platform Crowdcube, smashing the initial target of £750,000 ($996,000). And the resulting expansion following the investment has allowed the brewery to begin supplying major retailers, including supermarket chain Waitrose and restaurant chain Nando’s.
“It’s possible that we may be seeing a move away from ’specialist’ beer bars and maybe increasingly people want to drink great beer in pub environments.” Mason tells GBH. “The proliferation in the number of brewery outlets has led to an appreciation of and interest in independent beer. Drinkers then go on to seek out those beers and that quality in their ‘local.'”
On the same day Mason & Co. shut its doors, another London beer maker, Signature Brew, quietly launched its new taproom. Located in Haggerston, East London, the new bar is just 500 feet from the site of Beavertown’s former bar and restaurant Duke’s Brew & Que (and now home to beer focused restaurant Beef & Brew.) It’s the latest in a recent spate of new openings, including The Five Point’s own Pembury Tavern and The Experiment—a taproom co-owned by Pressure Drop and Verdant breweries. Manchester’s Cloudwater is due to open its first London taproom in October 2018.
“I think the role of the specialist beer bar has changed over recent years,” Signature Brew co-founder Tom Bott tells GBH. “Three or four years ago, offering a wide range of beers was good enough, but as we've pleasingly seen more ‘normal’ pubs adopt quality craft beer ranges the specialist bars now need go further to stand out and offer consumers something extra.”
[Disclosure: My longtime partner, Dianne Tanner, just started as part of Signature’s taproom management team.]
Similarly, the next challenge for London’s 110 breweries—as well as the remaining 2,000 UK breweries looking to tap into this lucrative market—will be finding ways to stand out as craft beer increasingly becomes mainstream. And with beer’s biggest players such as Anheuser Busch-InBev and Heineken investing in breweries like Camden Town and Beavertown, that market will continue to issue new challenges in terms of competition. It’s unlikely that Mason & Co. will be the last specialist bar to fail, but in this instance, location—as opposed to market pressures—appears to have been the root cause.
“The number of educated beer drinkers out there is only increasing and, in turn, so are their expectations,” Bott says. “I see a sustainable long-term future for specialist beer bars. Innovation and imagination is key, but that's something the craft beer community has in spades.”
—Matthew Curtis