Britain, and London in particular, was once host to a multitude of giant breweries which produced world-famous beer.  In the last few decades, however, they have been closing, one by one.  There are hardly any left, and the backlash of that has been the appearance of microbreweries, places that produce local beers on a smaller scale – perhaps a maximum of 10,000 pints a week.  Some are even smaller.  Below are a range of breweries for you to visit if sampling beer is your thing!

Fuller’s Brewery – www.fullers.co.uk
Let’s start big.  Fuller’s has been around since 1845, owns over 300 pubs in the UK, and its brewery is located in Chiswick, West London.  Prior to Fuller’s taking over, beer was brewed on the site for a couple of hundred more years.  Its most popular beer is London Pride, which is the UK’s leading cask ale, but it also concocts another thirteen core beers along with a changing seasonal range.  As such, a tour around the brewery is likely to be quite illuminating in terms of tasting!  Being very old and productive, tours around the brewery are very interesting and in-depth; and being huge and popular, there are about twenty of them every week, so it’s not hard to schedule in.  Tours cost £10 per person in advance (including all the samples); £12 on the door.  

Meantime Brewing Company – www.meantimebrewing.com
On the other end of the spectrum history-wise but nevertheless a fairly major microbrewery we have Meantime.  The brewery has been running for over a decade and is based in Greenwich, and they have two pubs from which they distribute their fermented wheaten goodness.  Being newer it is a lot less traditional and a lot more quirky, with home-brand drinks including chocolate and coffee infused ales.  It provides 13 staple beers and some seasonal ones, too.  Being newer, the tours are scheduled and can be found on the website, rather than you just being able to turn up.  On the other hand, they will run the tours with even just one person if you like.  The tours take two hours and cost £15 per person.  They also have tour-and-dinner packages if you feel like making a full trip of it.

Zerodegrees – www.zerodegrees.co.uk
This is one for the mixed pairs – if you fancy drinking unique beers in a brewery but your girlfriend really has no interest and would rather relax with a glass of wine, then Zerodegrees might be the microbrewery for you.  It’s basically a bar within a brewery – a swish, upmarket bar at that, which sells wood-fired Peking duck pizza, and has a good wine list to complement the beer-making apparatus about the place.  They produce four regular beers as well as seasonal and fruit beers; you are not there for a full on tour, exactly, so much as being surrounded by the process for you to take as much or as little interest as you like.  And the whole atmosphere is very cool.

The above places are speciality breweries or bars, but you’ll find that most London pubs (pubs, mind, not bars, which tend to have a small range of international favourites ) have a decent variety of ales on draught for you to try.  Go for the weirdest named one: how about Fiddler’s Elbow, Seriously Bad Elf or the incredibly popular Old Speckled Hen.  A great way to give being British a go.