A brewery that toasted its 10th anniversary last autumn, Thames Side Brewery in Staines-upon-Thames is a local institution. But long before starting the celebrated business, brewery founder Andrew Hayward had discovered a love of cask beer and also, the idea of making it himself.
I first started home brewing in 1978. Currently there is such a wide choice and availability of wonderful “Craft Beers” and “Real Ales”, it seems hard to imagine now and probably hard to understand at all unless you are over about 50, but things were very different in the beer world back in those days.
CAMRA was still a fairly new organisation when I joined in 1976 at age 19, and it wasn’t easy to get the type of beer many of us preferred – “Real Ale”.
The beers mainly on offer in the 1970’s, 80’s and into the 1990’s were pretty bleak. What is now termed “Craft Beer” was not even a twinkle in anybody’s eye!
I was never a lager drinker (except obviously with a curry!) finding that a good bitter has much more flavour, but the keg bitter that the “Big Six” brewers back then were all producing, and wanted us to drink because it was convenient for them to make in bulk, was just not good. Between them they owned most of the pubs, and their tied landlords didn’t even need any special training or skills to handle the new-fangled keg beers.
It was brewery conditioned, meaning that the beer was filtered and pasteurised, and it wasn’t exposed to the air at all between brewery and glass. The beer came in a sealed keg, was just connected to a gas bottle and served up under extraneous CO2 pressure (adding back un-naturally the natural CO2 that was removed by brewery conditioning!). It used to be said that a monkey could serve keg beer then, and it was probably true!
Thankfully there were enough like-minded people who were so incensed by what was being foisted on them as ale, that many – including myself – regularly met in the few pubs still selling “Real Ale” and became activists. This movement became the most successful consumer movement in history and basically prevented the demise of British beer!
That’s another story, but the bottom line is that while that revolution was going on, I figured that if I couldn’t always buy beer I enjoyed drinking, I could have a go at making it himself.
That and the fact that I started in the insurance industry on a very junior salary, left him finding that a pint I made himself not only tasted better, but was a fraction of the cost of a pint in a pub (when I could afford it!).
That had to be a “win/win”! This was despite the fact that both specialised equipment and good quality ingredients were hard to come by in the 1970’s.
Most homebrewers were brewing in big saucepans in their kitchens and using plastic buckets bought from Timothy Whites or Boots. Grainfathers and the like were many years away from being invented, and even if they had been would have been out of reach for most home brewers.
Whilst there were many small homebrew shops around, the hops were often on a counter, loose under glass – not vacuum packed and refrigerated like they are today.
Fast forward 40 years to 2014 and despite a reasonably enjoyable and rewarding career in the insurance industry, my job had become very frustrating and generally difficult due to a company takeover.
With my wife’s Michele’s encouragement I decided to leave the insurance world and try his hand at doing something he enjoyed. With this in mind (and not being talented at much else) I bought a book called “The Microbrewers Handbook” and read it five times.
Whilst I knew how to brew what mine and my friends considered good beer on a small scale, I knew there would be a lot more involved in starting a whole new business from scratch, and dealing with all the red tape. So, in January 2015 I decided to go on a course at Brewlab in Sunderland called “Start Up Brewing”, but to be honest, I was intending that this would scare him off of the whole idea!
It did scare me but didn’t actually put me off of the idea. I decided that I wanted to have a crack at brewing commercially, and the thought of seeing beer that I had brewed in some of his local pubs was a bit of a dream.
In mid-2015 I found small premises on the banks of the River Thames in Staines, not far from home, at Tims Boatyard, which would just about accommodate a 4BBL (655L/1152 pint) kit with three fermenting vessels, which I then commissioned. After three months of delays, I finally got brewing at the end of October 2015.
I developed a range of eight traditional style ales, and to tie in with the name, all of those beers were named after birds found in/around/along the River Thames valley & estuary. Thames Side Brewery spent four years in that location purely wholesaling beer to mainly local pubs and clubs, but realising that we were only really covering costs we decide to relocate to somewhere we could open a “Tap Room” and sell the beers direct to the public.
Most homebrewers were brewing in big saucepans in their kitchens and using plastic buckets bought from Timothy Whites or Boots. Grainfathers and the like were many years away from being invented, and even if they had been would have been out of reach for most home brewers.
We were able to lease a derelict (ex-Sea Cadets) building on the opposite riverbank which we refurbished and opened in August 2019.
At the same time, TSB invested in a 1BBL (164L/288 pint) “pilot” kit which arrived in February 2020 (the month before the first lockdown!). This allowed us to experiment with styles and recipes that we would not necessarily want to try initially on the larger kit.
Being “experimental” and reflecting my love of rock music, we called the beers produced on this small kit our “White Label” range, and gave them music themed names.
This has been a bonus as some of the beers have been so popular that we have upscaled them on to the larger kit, and it has given the brewers (Andy, Mike, Clive, Glen & Vic) the fun of smaller scale brewing again, rather than just repeatedly brewing larger volumes of the same beers. As all the brewers are friends and just do it for the enjoyment of producing good beers, this point was crucial!
The lease at the Tap Room ran out in 2022 with the building scheduled for redevelopment, so a new home was sought. A brief joint venture with a new bar proved unsuccessful, so TSB actually ended up moving twice in 2022.
We found new premises close by (on the banks of the Wraysbury River, rather than the Thames) and reopened in December, where we hope TSB has found its “forever home”.
No one goes into brewing to make their fortune – you would have to be very lucky for that to happen. We obviously have a passion for it, as do most micro-brewers, and for that reason we have found that it is an extremely collaborative and fun industry. And whatever happens, we can guarantee it is more rewarding than Andy’s time working in insurance!
The recipe that follows is the first recipe that I ever brewed (upscaled and converted to full grain). After many tweaks and modifications, it eventually morphed into our signature brew: White Swan Pale Ale.
