Bottle Shops

Hi

All good beer have a decent selection. Also if you see an oddbins, then take a look, as most in London do seem to carry a decent selection of local London beers. Not sure how long you have, but how about ordering online and having it delivered to where your staying, for example honest brew have a decent selection, and orders of £50- are free. If you head to Borough Market, then there are few places there, and it's not far from all good beer and a few decent breweries are also in that neck of the woods, for example Kernel. Not sure on the Cantillion, seems to be fairly rare in store and on-line.

 

This old post is still what I send everyone to reference.

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/london-beer-recommendations-for-visitors.96473/

The Kernel is bottles-to-go only now on Saturday, but the rest should be reasonably correct. Bottom line is there are no bottle shops here that will be anything close to what you are used to in the US. The local BevMo near my brother's house in San Diego has a better UK beer selection than 90% of bottle shops here. However, the shops here will have some local stuff (which may or may not be good) you can't get over there. I'm always shocked that I can buy JW Lees Harvest Ale varieties, Ola Dubh 18, and other beers like that in the US but can't get them in bottle shops here. Bottom line, it is all about the pubs here, not the bottle shops.

 

Agree with the last post, get out there and drink cask beer in the pubs! If you are looking for bottles to take back, try buying on line. Not something I have seen in the US. You can buy direct from some breweries (Siren, Magic Rock, Northern Rock, Cloudwater etc) or retailers (Beer Gonzo, Beers of Europe etc). You pay for delivery but save a whole bunch of time.

 

Thanks for the re-post!

I'm going to London in April and likely will print out some of that info as a general guide. My plan is to do all my beer buying/drinking at pubs ... seems appropriate to the milieu.

 

Not sure if this is too late, but it might be worth looking at Mother Kelly's, Kris Wines, Hop Burns and Black or Utobeer on Borough Market. These are mostly a bit out of the way, though; that seems to be a bit of a feature of decent London bottle shops,unfortunately...

 

I don't entirely agree with this, but I do think there's a bit of a weird blind spot in a lot of British beer culture for beers like Ola Dubh and Harvest Ale, ie stuff from relatively traditional breweries that doesn't fit into the "less than 5% and golden-to-brown" category - it's too weird for for supermarkets and trad pubs, but not trendy enough for a lot of new-wave craft places. Which is a shame.

 

It may be too late now, but if Green & Flavour was easy to get to, that is walkable distance to Kris Wines, which is a decent bottle shop also.

 

Interesting - I didn't think I was totally out of the London loop and it's not somewhere I'd heard of - or somewhere I can find out much about, come to that. How did you come across it?