Inside Wandsworth's 'nanobrewery'

In a tasting room in Wandsworth’s Ram Quarter complex, beneath a portrait of the Queen Mother pulling a pint, John Hatch is telling me how he turned a former Young’s brewery into a successful indie. ‘I promised John Young I’d keep brewing alive,’ says Hatch of his former mentor.

His ‘nanobrewery’ is housed in a former stable next door. Once home to draught horses hauling beer to Young’s taverns, these now feature cunningly repurposed kit. ‘I had to be inventive,’ says Hatch of the salvaged bottle-dipper now used as a mash tun (which converts the starches in crushed grains to sugars) and the brew kettle reworked from a canteen tea urn.

Sprightly Hatch, who wears a lab coat and evokes Doctor Who, brews twice weekly to maintain the site’s title of Britain’s oldest continuous brewery, dating from 1533. He joined Young’s as microbiologist in 1988, rising to brewhouse manager. But on his birthday in 2006 he learned his colleagues, who held shares, had decided that the brewery was ‘worth more closed’. And so he stayed as site manager, attracting filming projects from MasterChef to Luther around the deserted works to pay the bills.

Compared with Young’s weekly 5,000 barrels, Hatch has, with the help of a manger-like sterilising bath acting as a fermenter, just upped his production to three quarters of a barrel. He opens the log at the page recording Young’s final brew right beside his first as an indie, ‘which shows we’re continuing tradition’.

Crafted with ‘luck’, not costly temperature control, the beers are stupendous, including silken Quaffing Ale, deeper Phoenix and perky, lemongrass-scented Lemony Cricket.

Until the rejuvenated site gets a new microbrewery in 2018, Hatch’s malt, hops and detergents are funded by donations from invitation-only comedy nights.

‘I’ve had hugs and kisses from men. But I don’t deserve it. I’m just a stubborn old man who won’t bugger off!’