These London restaurants are distilling their own alcohol

Restaurant boozing doesn’t have to involve marked-up wine lists and overpriced beer and spirits.

Chefs and bartenders are working together to cut out the middle man and create their own in-house alcohol designed to match your meal perfectly, whether it’s small plates at Michelin-starred hotspots, or the best mangalitza pork in London at Pitt Cue in the City, where beer is specifically brewed to match.

Why? Because they’re control freaks. When he opened his new site last year, says co-founder Simon Anderson, ‘the one thing we had no real control over was what went in the beer’. Welcome Alphabeta, the on-site brewery where each beer is linked as much to the restaurant as possible, down to sharing ingredients.

The yeast, for example, is the same as is used to make the sourdough (later grilled and topped with bone marrow for the naughtiest toast in town); the summer ale is brewed with the house barbecue rub; while the grains in the smoked porter are smoked over the same grill that fires the featherblade steaks.

In the mood for pizza? Head to Pizza Pilgrims and chase your smoked Napoli with a glass of Pococello — the version of the Italian liqueur made in collaboration with Chase Distillery. ‘We were really disappointed not to be able to sell a limoncello of the same quality as we were used to in Naples and Amalfi,’ says co-founder Thom Elliot. ‘When we bumped into the Chase Distillery team at Camp Bestival they were interested in helping us. It spurred us on to go back to Amalfi, source some world class lemons and make a limoncello we could be proud of.’

The peels of those lemons are steeped in Chase’s raw potato spirit for a week before being blended with sugar and water for an intense sweet liqueur. Mixed with tonic, it becomes an citrus fizz that cuts through the cushiony crisp pizza dough.

For something a little more refined, waltz over to Fera at Claridge’s for award-winning gin distilled in the kitchen using a rotary evaporator — a molecular gastronomic instrument that leaves the botanicals intact during distillation to maximise freshness and flavour. Those botanicals include juniper, coriander and apple marigold and the resulting spirit is silkily herb-sweet — especially, as head bartender Ale Villa recommends, in a dirty Martini (‘The olive brings out the flavours of the signature apple marigold’).

Chemistry lab wizardry is also deployed at Scout bar in Shoreditch, where Matt Whiley ferments in-season produce such as apple and hay in 30-litre buckets for three weeks before bottling into fruit wines that clock in at 4-8%. Great if you’re a fan of natural wine, and even better with a plate of house pickles with truffle yoghurt. Ordering the house wine never sounded so appealing.