Brewery Tour Review: Fuller’s, London
Getting There
The Fuller’s website recommends getting the tube to Turnham Green Station however I found it easier to get off one station before at Stamford Brook. You need to take the Eastbound District Line, just make sure it is going towards Stamford Book. Get off the tube and you have a short 10 minute walk through leafy West London avenues until you reach the dual carriageway and you simply follow it east until you reach the Mawson Arms, the starting point of the tour.
The Mawson Arms
The Mawson Arms is a Fuller’s owned pub situated a few doors down from the entrance to the brewery. Inside is a typical English pub with mainly Fuller’s beers on tap, including 6 unique beers on cask. This is also the meeting point for the tour so I grabbed a pint of Black Cab Stout and waited for the tour guide to arrive. The food menu was typical fare for an English pub as well and priced reasonably enough for London. If you’ve not already booked your tour now is the time to do so although you save £2 if you book online. I found out after that you can join the Fuller’s Fine Ale Club for free online and save yourself another £2 on top of that as well.
Tour
Our tour guide, Susan, arrived and gathered us outside. There were 15 on the tour, all lads. Susan gave us a brief history of the Mawson Arms and then led us into the brewery. We first went to the Tasting Cellar and were told to put a high-vis jacket on, a good sign for any brewery tour. Here Susan briefly talked about the history of the brewery, the original owners and talked about how their business has expanded and modernised.
Next we moved into the brewery buildings and went to the end of the process, packaging. We were told the kegging machine is normally turned off around 3pm so we were brought here first to make sure we didn’t miss it.
We saw the kegging machine washing and filling kegs and also saw the more manual cask operation however it was turned off.
Most impressive was the robotic arm which was able to quickly pick up 3 empty kegs at a time, deposit them on the conveyor belt and then pick up 3 full kegs, as well as pallets, and stack them ready for movement to the warehouse. Unfortunately the bottling plant was not part of the tour.
After that we saw the old mashing room which contains 2 old mash tuns, one of which you are standing in when you enter the room. Here our tour guide talked us briefly through the mashing process and a little about the importance of brewing water. I heard a few others on the tour discussing brewing aspects but largely the group was made up of people with little knowledge of brewing and the tour content was mainly aimed at them. In this room we also saw 3 massive HLTs before moving on to the hop store.
The hop store was a large cold room filled with familiar boxes from Charles Farams. There was a handy chart (included at the end) which listed what hop varieties went into each Fuller’s beer and I also found a brew sheet detailing what salts were used to ‘Burtonise’ the brewing water. Here the tour guide discussed different hop varieties although wasn’t entirely aware of the reasons for using American hops (which got a boo from the natives). The tour guide then ploughed on asking the “last one out to close the door”. Had I not got a better conscience I could have been leaving with several souvenir kilos of Nelson Sauvin!
Next we saw the two grain mills, one for organic beer and one for the rest. I hadn’t realised organic beers demanded their own exclusive grain mills, no wonder they’re so expensive! We got a chance here to smell some different varieties of malt and were informed by Susan that the aspect that most effects the colour of the beer is the water and then to a lesser extent the colour of the grain. I think she was getting at London water being good for porter and Burton water being good for pale beers so we’ll let her away with that. Once again there was a sheet listing what malts are used in each Fuller’s beer.
We then made our way upstairs to see the new mash tuns and kettles. I’ve seen large mash tuns and kettles at the Lech brewery in Poland and when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all but we did get to stick our heads through the port hole to guage the size. The kettle had a boil on and we were told there was roughly 100,000 pints in it. A bucket of hop pellets (and salts) were sitting by the kettle waiting to go in but we didn’t get to see this happen. In hindsight, I would aim to be on an earlier tour as we were told that the brewers tend to be in from 6am so you’ve more chance of seeing a mash or getting to talk to them during the morning tours. Straight through then to the fermentation and conditioning room where we saw enough tanks to enable Fuller’s to brew over 1.4 million pints a week. We then walked through the storage warehouse and back to the Tasting Cellar for the most important part of the tour, the tasting.
The Tasting Cellar, aside from containing a bar, also contains a museum of sorts with plenty of brewery brick a brac, old bottle labels, wooden casks, and photographs of the brewery from days gone by. We were each given a half pint glass and were told we’d be sampling 6 cask beers, 2 draught beers and “if we were good, we’d get a treat”. The casks were 4 regulars; Cheswick Bitter, ESB, HSB and of course, London Pride. There was also 2 seasonal beers, Red Fox and Black Cab Stout and 2 keg beers, Honey Dew Organic and Frontiers, Fuller’s new keg lager. Each time we got roughly ¼ of a pint and then at the end we got a full glass of our favourite of the bunch. Biggest surprise for me had been the Frontier’s lager which differs from other generic lagers in that it has a healthy dose of American hops added in late. Bottles of Frontier are expected to be released in the next few months and imagine will make a great “gateway beer” for your uninitiated beer drinking friends. Our “treat” was a sample of 1845, a 100 day aged bottle conditioned beer. Between it, the eight other samples and the glass of my favourite I was certainly in a merry mood leaving.
The Brewery Shop is next door to the Mawson Arms and carries the entire Fuller’s range as well as a selection of Fuller’s merchandise. I picked up a bottle of London Porter and their new “double hopped” pale ale, Two Rivers and made my way back to the hotel. Overall, it was a good tour. If you’ve not been to a large brewery it’s a good as any other and worth a visit and it’s also unusual to get so much beer on a tour (especially for only £8). Total time for the tour was around 2 hours.
