For those of you who don't know: the Bermondsey Beer Mile is a loose amalgamation of brewery bars and bottle shops, located along a stretch of railway arch that's closer to two miles long nowadays. The one thing they have in common is that they're all open at roughly the same time on a Saturday afternoon, giving those of you who fancy some exercise the chance to indulge in a rather fine pub crawl. As long as you can find your way between all the bars, of course.
And this is the problem: because the Mile is something that's grown organically over a period of years, and there's no definitive central resource you can consult in order to find out where all the bars are. New ones keep opening, and old ones change location. Virtually all of the documentation of the Mile on the internet consists of one-off blog posts that quickly go out of date. I should know, as I wrote one of those myself back in 2014, and it's full of mistakes now.
(I'm Spank The Monkey, by the way: I've had an arts and entertainment review blog on the internet for over two decades. Most of the words you're going to see on here are mine, with additional contributions and photography by my pal The Belated Birthday Girl. If you're curious to see what the Mile looked like in olden days, here are some pictures The BBG took of it back in 2014.)
In the absence of any official site relating to the Mile, we've decided to start an unofficial one. We'll attempt to document all of the bars currently on the route, and how to get between them all: and whenever we hear about any changes we'll update the site as soon as we can. (You can help with this - feel free to drop us notes in the comments boxes if you find that anything's altered since we wrote about it. We've included links to the official sites of all the bars, which should hopefully have the most up-to-date information.)
Here's the route as it currently stands. (You could start at the other end and work in the opposite direction, but I'll explain why we're doing it this way round in the first post.) Links with distances in them will give you a map of how to get there: links with a bar name in bold will take you to a separate page with more details about it. Bars with an asterisk next to their name also brew beer on the same premises. It may be worth checking the individual Twitter feeds of the bars before heading out there, just to check their current status.
- Start at Maltby Street Market (not actually a bar, more of a pre-Mile breakfast location, though there are bars in the market too)
- Walk 170m to Southwark Brewing*, 46 Druid Street [Twitter]
- Walk 3m to Kanpai Taproom & Kitchen*, 48 Druid Street
- Walk 160m to The Barrel Project, 80 Druid Street [Twitter]
- Fabal Taproom, 88 Druid Street - full review to follow soon
- Walk 79m to Billy Franks Craft Beer & Snack Shack, 104 Druid Street [Twitter]
- Walk 81m to Hiver, 56 Stanworth Street [Twitter]
- Walk 150m to Anspach & Hobday, 118 Druid Street [Twitter]
- Walk 180m to It Ain't Much If It Ain't Dutch, 67-68 Enid Street
- Walk 30m to Moor Beer, 71 Enid Street [Twitter]
- Walk 15m to Gosnells, 72 Enid Street
- Walk 10m to Cloudwater, 73 Enid Street [Twitter]
- Walk 76m to Bianca Road*, 83-84 Enid Street [Twitter]
- Walk 19m to Craft Beer Junction, 86 Enid Street [Instagram]
- Walk 13m to Enid Street Tavern, 87 Enid Street
- Walk 25m to Mash Paddle Brewery*, 92 Enid Street [Twitter]
- Walk 270m to Old Jamaica Business Estate, 24 Old Jamaica Road (not actually a bar, but a useful halfway point for stopping to eat something)
- Walk 260m to The Kernel*, 132 Spa Road (ignore the map for now) [Twitter]
- Walk 1km to The Outpost – Three Hills Brewing*, 7 Almond Road [Twitter]
- Walk 26m to Battersea Brewery Substation*, 8 Almond Road
- Walk 130m to EeBria, 15 Almond Road [Twitter]
- Walk 550m to Fourpure*, 25 Bermondsey Trading Estate [Twitter] - closing down around September 19th 2024
- Walk 500m to Small Beer*, 70-72 Verney Road [Twitter]
In memoriam section:
- The Bottle Shop, 128 Druid Street - closed down March 2019
- uBrew, 29-30 Old Jamaica Business Estate, 24 Old Jamaica Road - closed down September 2019
- Affinity, 7 Almond Road - moved out July 2020
- London Calling Sweden, 72 Enid Street - closed down Spring 2021
- Hawkes Cider, 92/96 Druid Street - closed down January 2023, didn’t admit it till August 2023
- Partizan, 34 Raymouth Road - moved out March 2023
- Brew By Numbers, 75/79 Enid Street - moved out May 2023
- Spartan, 8 Almond Road - closed down June 2023
News (15/09/2024)
Some major comings and goings to report - the relevant pages on the site will be updated when we can, but here are the headlines.
- As previously noted, Fourpure is just about to move its brewing operation out to Huddersfield: the news we've heard is that the taproom will shut up shop around September 20th, so you'll need to hurry if you want to pay them a final visit.
- Fabal Beerhall is now fully open at 88 Druid Street, serving up an interesting range of lagers. Full review to follow.
- The Kernel has moved! They'd been in their new location for at least a month before we found out about it, but they're now comfortably settled in at 132 Spa Road, just around the corner from the old Arch 7 taproom. I guess we need to redraw the map of the Mile again now.
