Last Call for Fourpure: The End of an Era

This month London’s Fourpure Brewery will close its doors for the final time. It’s a sad day for too few people, just another brewery shuttering in the ebb and flow of the craft beer industry.?

As current and former employees reach out to say goodbye, I wanted to reflect on my memories spanning four pivotal years in the business, and the role that Fourpure played, not just in people's lives, but in the larger tapestry of the UK’s brewing renaissance.

The story of Fourpure, comes with a passion and geekiness that roots itself in the craft beer movement itself. In 1978, the U.S. congress legalised homebrewing, sparking a beer revolution. For decades, macro brewers dominated the beer scene, with their emphasis on mass production over flavour. But this new law unleashed a wave of creativity.?

Breweries like Anchor, Sierra Nevada, and the Boston Beer Company pushed back, offering something different - beer made with passion, with freedom from being dictated to by a shareholders bottom line, with a dedication to flavour. By the early 2000s, the U.S. craft brewing scene had exploded, with thousands of new breweries emerging to challenge the status quo.

Back home here in the U.K., our established access to European lagers and vast range of locally brewed ales meant that the idea of a ‘craft beer revolution' was dismissed by traditionalists, soon enough though, new styles, hops, and brewing techniques began to seep in from across the Atlantic and from places like New Zealand and Australia. Breweries like Dark Star, Meantime, and Purity paved the way for a more modern brewing landscape.

By 2010, the capital had started to wake up to these more modern, flavour-forward styles of beer, providing access to London’s impressive stock of venues and the drinkers located on their doorsteps.?

Some newer breweries started to establish themselves, with Camden Town and Beavertown expanding in the North, and by 2013 a flurry of new openings saw taps opening up across the city. One of the new brewery openings in 2013 was a Bermondsey based start-up from industry newcomers (and brothers) Tom and Dan Lowe. That brewery was Fourpure.

Fourpure was born from the brothers' shared love for travel and adventure, and the experiences that came from shared moments sat over a beer. Whether the beer was a crisp hefeweizen halfway up a snow covered mountain, or a hoppy IPA, paired with a hot dog in a tucked away Californian tap room, the vision from day one was to bring these experiences to a concrete trading estate in South London.

Whilst Camden Town had anchored itself to recognisable geography and Beavertown to its distinctive aesthetic, Fourpure faced the challenge of wanting to be a London brewery where its provenance was important, whilst being defined by its quality in the ‘four pure’ ingredients that make beer (hops, water, grain, yeast), underpinned by the brothers experiences and the tagline ‘Inspired by Adventure’.?

If the brand was difficult to unpick and the positioning hard to define, no such problem existed for the beers themselves. At a time where craft beer was marred by inconsistent quality and questionable experimentation, Fourpure was establishing itself on well crafted, consistent beers and considered innovation.

Intent to push the industry forward, the brewery became the first to can its core range, showcasing a range of American style ales, a Bavarian pilsner and their take on a classic British stout. With a consistent, accessible core range and a seasonal range that appealed to the growing audience of craft enthusiasts, Fourpure finally cemented its place on the craft beer map garnering invites to leading industry events, and releasing a genuine crowd pleaser in its hop forward IPA, Juicebox.?

Despite its growing success, Fourpure continued to sit on the periphery of the hip inner sanctum of craft beer. Even with a genuine passion for the industry that translated into annual trips for team members to beer meccas across Europe and the US, investment into state of the art kit, and collaborations with some of the world’s best breweries, the ambition and rapid growth of the business was at loggerheads with the smaller scale, more laid back and independently minded approach taken by many of its peers.?

Over time, Fourpure’s expansion saw its Bermondsey footprint grow to cover multiple storage warehouses, a state-of-the-art brewhouse, a high-speed canning and kegging line, a large 40 tap venue, a sensory lab, and even its own logistics fleet. Alongside national listings in large pub groups, they also began to work with influential changemakers like Dom Hill at Tesco, helping reshape the supermarket shelf and the way we shop beer today.?

As international investors looked to capitalise on the growing craft beer boom, Fourpure had positioned itself alongside a handful of key targets worthy of investment.

By 2018, amid a spate of highly publicised acquisitions (and only five short years into its journey), Fourpure sold up and handed the keys over to Australian based Lion Brewery (part of the Kirin group). Sadly, craft beer is a volatile industry. Lion seemingly didn’t understand the market forces at play, the nuanced balance between craft producers and their customer base and the constant shifts and changes of an industry on the other side of the world.?

Soon they too would hand over the keys, with the business presumably already heading towards this inevitable departure from its once proud London home. Success doesn’t always equate to permanence.

Fourpure arrived at a time when the industry was rapidly expanding, its scale and ambition mean that hundreds of staff have passed through the doors focused on everything from production, packaging, logistics and hospitality, to sales, marketing, people and numbers. Countless staff have shovelled grain, pulled pints or shared stories at events around the globe, and the staff that passed through those doors, particularly in the early years, have helped to shape the industry as it is today - some with their own breweries, others adding expertise to pastures new.?

Whilst its time in London spans a little over a decade (the brewery will still exist in some capacity at a sister site in Huddersfield), the impact it has had on the industry is tangible, the timing of its inception and the role that it played noteworthy.?

I intend to join a significant number of current and former employees this September to share a beer and a few stories, before the brewery's tap room doors are shuttered one final time. While doing so, I’ll be raising a glass to the many people who were part of that journey - the brewers, the pubs, the loyal patrons, and everyone in between. Thank you for being a small part, of a small part, of something big.