Pete Brown, founder of London’s Forest Road Brewing Company, received a message from Forest Rose while on vacation in Tampa, Florida.
Forest Rose wanted to order a Forest Road branded beanie, but the brewery’s website didn’t have an option to ship the item internationally from the UK to the US, leaving Brown in the bag. . He was wearing a beanie. He also had a car, so he decided the gas money was worth talking over there. “We tipped our hats to him, dude! That’s customer service!” Forest Rose was in San Diego.
That story doesn’t matter this This story may help you understand what kind of person Pete Brown is.
In 2019, Brown saw: online auction Formerly owned by California’s beloved Russian River Brewing Company, a 4-tank 50 beer barrel (50bbl) system with six fermenters, a bright beer tank, a water tank, a flour mill, and more brewery, he immediately sent a message to Russian River Brewery. – Founder Vinnie Cilurzo, asks what you need to buy a kit. It was an impulsive act of romance and a chance to own a rare brewery that was proven to make exceptional beer. It didn’t matter to Brown that he didn’t currently have the money to buy a brewery or that there was no space in London to set up a brewery.And he didn’t even think about how to transport the equipment to England
If you’re willing to drive 2,500 miles to hand me a hat, I don’t tend to look for reasons. do not have To do something.
Brown, a Boston native, founded Forest Road in London in 2015. After several years working at Camden Town Brewery (an ambitious independent brewery at the time now owned by AB InBev), Brown decided to start his own brewery. , after which the street was named. he continued to live.
Brown had a vision for his dream brewery from the beginning. He didn’t want to be limited to a brewery that was too small. Camden Town had a small kit and he had to brew 24 hours a day to meet demand.Brown scribbled what he wanted on a piece of paper. his notebook page: 50 hectoliter (42 bbl) brewhouse with 4 vessels and 6 fermenters. In the same notebook, he wrote the recipe for his first beer, Work IPA, inspired by basic American iterations like Maine Beer Co.’s Ranch and O’Dell’s IPA.
“He was as passionate a brewer as I was,” Brown says. “I couldn’t find anyone who would give me £1.5 million, or $1.9 million. The estimated cost of my dream brewery is $1.9 million.” Like many start-up brewers, Mr. Instead of paying to build the site, they contract-brewed and packaged their beer at a host brewery. As sales grew, Brown rented a railway arch in London Fields, which became his taproom, where he produced work, a West Coast-style IPA that’s a bright, bitter flagship with depth of malt and big notes of grapefruit hops, and Posh. It sold an all-British lager called . , which became his best-selling beer. Although his business was doing well, Brown missed brewing his own beer.
In 2019, Brown began looking for a location in London to build his brewery. He hired James Garstang, an old friend from Camden Town, as brewmaster. They negotiated with brewers across Europe and even came close to renting some premises, but were unable to find a suitable location. Discouraged, they settled on a tentative plan. The idea is to purchase a small used five-barrel brewery and install it in the taproom.
It was Garstang who found the Russian River kit listing. Russian River recently built a brand new brewery in Windsor, California, so the kit is up for sale. It was almost the same brewery Brown had fantasized about in his notebook four years earlier, but it was 10 times bigger and 10 times more expensive than what they had been looking for. Garstang sent the online list to Brown. “LOL, let’s put this in the taproom!”
Four days later, Brown was in Santa Rosa.
“It was an impulsive act of romance and a chance to own a rare brewery that was proven to make exceptional beer. It didn’t matter to Brown that he didn’t currently have the money to buy a brewery or that there was no space in London to set up a brewery.”
As Silurzo led him around the grounds, Brown remembers thinking, He’s like holding Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. If we play right, we will get the right result. ”
It’s not just that the kit proves to be pure and capable of producing world-class beer; Even after accounting for all the costs and human time spent transporting the equipment to London, it is significantly cheaper to buy used and ship it worldwide than to buy the same setup new. – probably $1 million less –. Brown offered to remove the kit from auction. It was accepted.
With the help of his father, who had flown in from Boston, Brown dismantled the brewery and prepared it for the long voyage. “My dad picked me up from all the places I was in trouble,” Brown says. “He picked me up from the detention center and he picked me up from the prison as well. But when we arrived at the scene and opened the shutters, I realized that he was I had never seen him look like that. He said, you were right. Really This time I did it. ”
The two had to disassemble the entire brewery and do all the work so it could be reassembled. The diameter of the brewing vessel is 13 feet. The largest fermenter height is 26 feet.they are connected by miles of steel pipes. There were tens of thousands of works. For four days, they started at 6 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m. I took as many photos and videos as I could.
The ship was strapped to 14 flatbed trucks and everything else was packed into two 40-foot containers and transported to the port of Auckland. The ship was scheduled to arrive in London in the first week of March 2020.
Brown relentlessly tracked the ship’s progress. During a visit to Russian River’s Windsor facility a few months ago, he stood against the wall of a container ship carrying the new brewery as it passed under the Golden Gate Bridge on its way from Germany. I was looking at the photo posted. When he saw the ship approaching the Panama Canal, he and his father flew to Panama City to “continue the tradition” and photograph the canal as it passed.
The ship carrying Brown’s new brewery arrived in London on schedule. He spent the past three months searching for a location for his brewery, finally finding a vacant old Victorian tea warehouse in Bermondsey, south-east London. But before he could sign his lease, the country fell into a national lockdown due to COVID-19. He had no choice but to pay to have it stored at Southampton’s docks for nine months.
In December 2020, a convoy of trucks finally handed over the brewery, and Brown was able to put everything back into its new home thanks to the meticulous demolition work he had undertaken a full year earlier. . On September 9, 2021, nearly two years after Brown first arrived in Santa Rosa, Brown and Garstang brewed their first batch in their new brewery.
““My dad picked me up from all the places I was in trouble,” Brown said. “He picked me up from the detention center, he picked me up from the prison. But when we arrived at the scene and opened the shutters, I realized that he was such a I never saw him make a face. He was like, “You really did it this time.” ”
In 2010, as a young beer geek, I took my first beer trip to North America. I could have gone anywhere in America, but there was only one destination and one beer on my mind. had drink.
I booked a flight from London to San Francisco and arrived in the late afternoon, only to find it dark and raining as I made my way to a bar called Toronado. I still vividly remember the excitement I felt when I said the words, “I’d like a pint of Pliny the Elder, please.” It was the most exciting beer I’ve ever had.
Pliny the Elder is Russian River’s signature beer and the best IPA I’ve ever tasted. I’ve been reading about this beer for years, had been planning this trip for weeks, and spent the last 11 hours thinking only about this beer. For people like me who got into craft beer around 2010, as well as Brown, Garstang, and many others, Pliny the Elder was the ultimate American IPA. Later that week I traveled north and stopped in Santa Rosa for one night just to drink at the Russian River Brewpub.
When I heard that Brown had purchased this kit, it struck me as unlikely or impossible that a brewery in my home town would now own the brewery that once belonged to Russian River. I even thought so. But I’ve known Brown for so long that I could trust him when something like this happened.
Walk into Bermondsey Tea Warehouse’s taproom today and you’ll see flags and skateboards on the walls and stickers on every surface. There is a large photo of a container ship passing through the Panama Canal, surrounded by many photos of the brewery’s important landmarks. Macro Brewery’s tap handles are displayed on wooden boards like deer heads in a hunting lodge. Each is a trophy tap, which Forest Road has replaced with their own beers.
Brown is a craft beer romantic. His knowledge of beer came from reading the stories of Anchor’s Fritz, he of Maytag, Ken of Sierra Nevada, Grossman, Dogfish, Sam of Head, and Calagione. These origin stories were often accompanied by photos of breweries with their first kits.
Brown now looks out over his brewery, one of London’s largest independent breweries. “This is our first kit, and it makes sense for any brewer,” he says.
He points out where the various parts come from, most coming from Russian River. Breit’s beer tanks and flour mill are made by Dogfish’s Head, and his barreling line is made by Austria’s Blauereischloss Eggenberg. He pointed to an empty area on the back wall of the warehouse. He just purchased two 300 bbl fermenters from Bear Republic, another well-known California beer company. “This is our Frankenstein,” Brown says of his brewery. “It represents everything about us.” He paused, looking around, then burst out laughing. “But it’s up to us now. If we fail, it’s our fault.”
It’s important to Brown not to capitalize on someone else’s heritage, and Forest Road doesn’t make beers like Russian River. Forest Road’s flagship beer is Posh, an all-British lager with an alcohol content of 4.1%, and the brewery focuses on brewing large quantities of beer to be sold on draft in pubs across the UK. In 2023 he produced over 1.5 million pints). The brewery has proven it can make the best IPAs for the American market. We currently produce a typical modern lager for the UK market. They got Hendrix guitars, but instead of playing cover songs, they’re playing their own hits.