Location: 83 Enid Street
Saturday opening hours: 1300-2300
Other days: Sunday 1300-1800, Wednesday-Thursday 1600-2200, Friday 1600-2300
Official site: https://biancaroad.com/
Last updated: 10/08/2022
We'd been running this site for about a year when something freaky happened for the first time: a brewery got in touch with us to ask if we could write about them. I mean, how could we say no? Cloudwater never did that.
Bianca Road, you'll have noticed by now, isn't located in Bianca Road at all: though they used to be, as they're a Peckham brewery that moved into one of the key stretches of the Bermondsey Beer Mile, spreading themselves over two adjacent railway arches on Enid Street. You can sit in either one of the arches: one of them contains the bar and the brew tanks, the other one contains the keg storage area and the toilets, so choose wisely. Either way, you'll find yourself in an agreeably airy open space (plus lots of post-pandemic outdoor seating), with decor consisting of lots of wood and an alarming amount of cycling memorabilia (though there used to be even more when it first opened).
Is it tacky to suggest that Bianca Road's managed to recreate a Peckham bar's vibe in the middle of Bermondsey? For a start, back in 2019 it was the first bar we’d encountered along the Mile staffed largely by people of colour (admittedly, several of the other bars have caught up since then), all having a ridiculously good time in their jobs - on the afternoon of our first visit, they were grooving along to Sylvester's Do You Wanna Funk, but not so much that they stopped paying attention to customers who needed beer. The beers they brew on the premises have quite a bit of cheeky wit to them: on a recent visit, we enjoyed a chestnut honey stout brewed in collaboration with Sicilian brewery Onei called Etna, and a peaches and cream sour called Smile You Son Of A Peach (a collab with Staggeringly Good). You could easily settle in here for an extended run through their half a dozen or so taps, which makes it a good thing that there are various street food popups that serve there.
Like I said, when this bar opened in 2019 we'd been running this site for a year. Bianca Road and Cloudwater were the two main new bars to have opened in that time, and to us they felt like the Bermondsey Beer Mile's next generation: picking up the things that made the original bars so successful, but doing them with a lighter touch and a greater degree of style (or funk, if you must). That still seems to be the case, based on a subsequent revisit in 2022, and they appear to be consistently popular. I think we can consider Bianca Road nicely settled in by now.
Now walk 19m to Craft Beer Junction ----->
<----- or go back 76m to Cloudwater
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