Whenever I go for a pint in London these days, I’ve a feeling that there’s something missing. I’m so used to writing about the two major London breweries that it seems odd that now there’s only one.

The closure of Young’s in 2006 more or less stripped the capital of half its existing beer culture in one swoop, leaving Fuller’s to rule the roost.

Young’s beers are still on sale, of course, in Young’s pubs, so on the face of it nothing has changed, but you know all too well that the beers are now brewed in Bedford and are shipped in, just like beers from Adnams, Shepherd Neame or Batemans these days.

Meantime Brewing keeps growing and perhaps one day can fill the void left by Young’s but it’s a big void to fill and it’ll take a lot of time.

Geographical Ambitions

One of London’s newest breweries is also hoping to fill a gap, although its ambitions are geographical rather than volume related.

Sambrook’s Brewery opened in autumn 2008, presenting its beer with the strapline ‘brewed in the heart of London’. More precisely, it is brewed in Wandsworth, erstwhile home to Young’s itself.

The modern brewhouse is functionally housed in a couple of industrial units, squeezed in among Wandsworth’s housing estates. The man behind the business is former City accountant Duncan Sambrook, who latched onto the idea of opening a brewery during a visit to the Great British Beer Festival in 2006.

He was drinking with a couple of mates, using the geography of Britain as a guide around the bars.

‘We started drinking in Cornwall and I had the idea of opening a brewery by the time we reached London,’ he says with a laugh.

Duncan may have been a number-cruncher professionally but his initial training had been as a chemist, so he had little difficulty picking up the rudiments of brewing through a course at Brewlab at the University of Sunderland and then a period of work experience at Otter Brewery in Devon.

Acquiring Credibility

His initial plans were to start small and he picked up a five-barrel brewing kit that he hoped to install in the White City area of London.

‘The one thing I lacked, however – not having been a brewer before – was credibility,’ he says. ‘That’s what I got when David came on board’.

‘David’ is certainly someone with strong credentials. He’s David Welsh, former boss of Ringwood Brewery, who had been out of brewing since selling that business to Marston’s in 2007.

Duncan had a few meetings with Welsh, just hoping to pick his brains, and then was stunned when David offered to buy into the business. It was a Dragon’s Den-like moment.

‘David said he would come in but only if we started four times bigger than I had planned,’ Duncan recalls.

So it was that the five-barrel plant was pushed aside, a brand new 20-barrel kit was acquired and bigger premises were sought in which to house it.

These were found in the borough of Wandsworth – a perfect location, given Young’s decision to vacate this part of town only a couple of years earlier.

In getting the brewery up and running, Duncan and David have focused on just one beer. They call it Wandle, playing up the association that Young’s used to have with the River Wandle that flows through this part of London on its way to joining the Thames.

It’s an amber-coloured, session bitter, at 3.8%. Pale malt from Warminster’s floor maltings forms the core of the beer, with a little crystal for darkness. Hops are whole, rather than pelletized, with the bittering hop the recently-developed dwarf variety, Boadicea.

Up the Junction

I rubbed some between my fingers in the hop store and found it pungently citrus and even a little minty. The good, old English favourites, Fuggle and Goldings, then provide the aroma input. Yeast comes from Hepworth’s in Sussex and is, apparently, a former Brakspear strain.

Sweet and fruity upfront, with hints of lemon, Wandle is soon grounded in earthy, tea-like hop notes, with a drying malt-and-hop finish. A slightly stronger, bottle-conditioned version is also available.

Sambrook’s long-awaited second beer has hit the bar this month. Called Junction, after the local Clapham Junction rail interchange, it's a 4.5% amber ale, laced with Challenger, Bramling Cross and Golding hops.

Until it picks up a following, Wandle remains the main brand. You can find it in a few dozen pubs across the city although you shouldn’t think of it as in anyway a substitute for Young’s Bitter. That remains a fine beer, even though – strictly speaking – it’s a foreigner today.

But Wandle makes a great alternative, if you want to drink local when in the capital.