In 2012 the London Craft Beer scene was just starting out and very much in its infancy, with just a handful of brewers in East London and South London around Bermondsey, but there was not much going on in North London and in particular Islington. After falling in love with American and New Zealand hopped IPAs and seeing his adopted home of Islington had a lack of choice of good beer in his local pubs, Lee decided to give up his day job and try and rectify that, by brewing his own hop forward beers and dark stouts. Unbeknown to Lee after buying a shiny new commercial brewery kit he found out he had a rich brewery heritage as there used to be a Hammerton Brewery, that Lee was a distant relation of that that shut down in the 1950’s. This was a bit of a shock as the history was well hidden. Karina his girlfriend and now wife decided to support the business in using her commercial experience in FMCG and take the reins and steer Hammerton in the right direction, while Lee still balanced his 9-5 day job. Many years on we have now brewed almost 5 million pints in more than 12 different styles, won many top industry awards and sold beer across the UK, Europe and as far afield as Hong Kong and Singapore.

Although we like to be experimental our philosophy is to create balanced and ‘highly drinkable’ beers, we don’t want to brew beers that are weird and wonderful for the sake of it, we want to brew using interesting and sometimes unique ingredients but at the same time whatever we create needs to be well balanced and drinkable otherwise we do not want to brew it.

What makes HB special is the fact that we have a unique background story different to any other brewery and that we can put our brewing hands to any beer style and constantly strive to create new and interesting beers for our fans and followers. From the very begining we have been focused on having a solid and tasty core range, something that hasn’t changed in all the years of brewing, however over the years we have also tried to push the boundaries and brew with exciting, exotic, new, interesting and often difficult ingredients.

Our core range and innovative beers have won many of the UKs top awards over the past 9 years and we have produced many different styles of beer but our customers do love our stouts! Since we launched an experimental brew in 2018 called Crunch, a Peanut Butter Milk Stout, which took the country by storm we have developed our Stout brewing game and are at the forefront with brewing the dark stuff. That said our brewers Alistair, Pat, James, David and Alex never sit around for too long and are always keen to tackle and develop any type of beer possible.