Chaos on the Bermondsey Beer Mile

Jono Lipfriend is reminiscing. Specifically, he’s recalling the moment, after months of planning, interviews, fit out and meticulous financial forecasting, he was finally able to open his craft cider bar Against The Grain, last May. And on a balmy summer day, his first customer walked through the door and immediately posed an insane question:

“Am I okay to do gear in your toilet?”

The answer was, of course, no, Lipfriend assures me. A well groomed, energetic 35-year-old, he’s a fairly recent arrival to the Bermondsey Beer Mile, a line of dozens of craft beer breweries and taprooms that’s become a London institution. But his story is indicative of the rumours I’ve been hearing that the strip’s popularity with lads, desperate to drink from one end to the other, is increasingly causing unbridled chaos every Saturday.

Between this havoc and the private equity-owned landlord that has been increasing rents since taking control over the mile, many breweries are worried about being priced out of the small strip of arches they call home. So, on this alcohol-fuelled reporting trip south east of London Bridge, I’m attempting to find the answer to a simple question: is London’s “craft beer Mecca” losing its soul?

Missing handles, costume bans and defecating on the floor

The Beer Mile was born almost by accident. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the city’s upstart craft beer scene was struggling to find affordable brewing space. The arches — then being used as garages, storage units or by many of the city’s food and drink producers — were a perfect solution. They were never intended to be open to the public, let alone become a drunken tourist destination.

It kicked off with just four breweries: Partizan, Kernel, Brew by Numbers and finally Anspach & Hobday. The last two are the only survivors of those early days. “Before it was just an extra thing on Saturdays, the breweries opened up to sell a little more beer; you know back in the days when things were looser and simpler,” says Mauritz Borg, the general manager of the Kernel's new site, which sits just off the mile proper. 

The name was coined by Matt Hickman — known as Matt The List — a photographer and amateur food, drink and travel writer back in 2013. It was a genius piece of marketing, a way to give a sense of community and identity to an area that coincidentally had a collection of indie brewers. It ended up being a shot in the arm for the capital’s craft beer sector, which even on a good day is defined by high taxes, insane licensing laws and almost non-existent returns.

But over the ensuing years, something changed. The number of breweries grew — attracted by both the cheap rents and the Beer Mile community — and the brewers professionalised their occasional Saturday beer sales into full taprooms. And with these changes, the name — the enticing idea of a whole mile full of dozens of breweries — became a gauntlet. Doing the mile has become a drinking challenge irresistible to stag dos, birthdays and streams of lads from the Home Counties.

If you speak to any of the owners on the mile, they now draw an almost church-and-state style separation between the “beer people” and the “Saturday crowd”. The former are who the Mile first started for: the craft beer nerds who can tell the difference between different subspecies of Sussex hops. The latter come in and ask for eight pints of lager before throwing up in your urinal. The problem is, the latter far outweigh the former — to the tune of thousands a week.

The chaos they bring can be extreme: swastikas carved into toilet doors, glasses filled with vomit left on tables, old ladies in dry robes getting into fights. One bar manager tells me they’ve dealt with at least two different punters defecating on the floor, in one case in protest at being denied service. 

Some of the stories are simply absurd. There was the man who meticulously tied dozens of complimentary tampons left in the toilets to the emergency cord of the disabled loo. Or the stag do lads who came dressed in a couples costume of President Trump and a Mexican migrant tied together by the border wall, who kept forgetting about the cord tying them together and drunkenly walking off in opposite directions, only to be cartoonishly pulled back into each other.