The Bermondsey Beer Mile

When I was growing up in North Carolina, our state was probably best known for tobacco and basketball. Turkey and sweet potatoes were also a big deal, but that’s not typically as sexy to people. It probably wouldn’t surprise you that we had some pretty old-timey laws related to alcohol until the 70s and 80s—but eventually, we got around to legalizing brewpubs. After all, if we aren’t pairing beer with our basketball and cigarettes, what are we even doing?

By the early to mid-90s, we had microbreweries popping up all over the state, particularly in the mountains of Asheville. As most beer tours will tell you, excellent water quality makes Asheville a prime location for brewing. Meanwhile, beautiful summer scenery and frigid winter temperatures make it a fantastic place to get drunk.

From these key elements, an "if you brew it, they will come" situation evolved. Highland Brewing grew from the basement of a local taproom into a sprawling operation just outside of town, inspiring a waterfall of more than 30 microbreweries within city limits. Today, you can stumble down the South Slope of Downtown Asheville alone into no fewer than 8 breweries. Even Sierra Nevada took notice and decided our mountains are just cool as their mountains for beer-brewing. They opened a sustainable wonderland in nearby Mills River that looks like an upscale Great Wolf Lodge for beer enthusiasts. With multiple tours, a garden that feeds into their on-site restaurant, and a cozy outdoor amphitheater for bands and performances, you can easily make a whole day of it. And we definitely have.

While Asheville is a concentrated hub of beer-making, it’s not the only place in NC that figured out how to brew beer. The town I grew up in was four hours from the mountains, but Carolina Brewery still managed to spring up a few miles from my house. I was a child at the time, so the closest I ever came to a “tasting” while I lived there was rolling into their restaurant with a 10-top of high school girls to order a round of waters and french fries. Luckily, the downstream impact of a successful brewing industry continued well into my adulthood, so I can enjoy at least 4 local breweries within 5 miles of my adult home just 40 minutes from where I grew up. Vicious Fishes and Southern Peak are current family favorites, but the list of options seems to get longer every year.

Along with all this local brewing comes brewing culture. Now I don’t mean the bearded, beanie-wearing  beer-knurdery, although there’s always some of that, too. The aspect of brewing culture I’ve most personally enjoyed is the family-friendliness that has coincided so nicely with the era in which I happen to have kids. Unlike a wine bar or even a standard restaurant, breweries don’t require you to sit down for any period of time. Most of them have outdoor spaces where kids can run around and play while their parents (sometimes) keep an eye on them. Some have food trucks, but a brewery doesn’t typically give a shit how or where you get your food. You can even bring your own, which is perfect for the family who would otherwise be forced to buy a $7-set of kids menu chicken nuggets that would likely end up all over the floor anyway. But what if you don’t drink beer? Doesn’t matter. You haven’t hurt their feelings. In fact, you’ve just inspired them to come up with alternatives—like ciders and seltzers and prosecco on tap. At the very least, they’ll have a couple bottles of red and white wine stashed behind the bar. Sure, they might have screw tops, but they’re still plenty good enough to sip out of a plastic cup while you chase your toddler away from the fire pit or explain to your four-year-old why they can’t collect roly-polies in the middle of the big kids’ impromptu soccer game. 

The bottom line is that most microbreweries are family businesses, and families have kids. They don’t want to put their preschooler in a polo shirt and make him listen to the specials any more than you do—especially knowing they have exactly 30 minutes before he starts crawling around under the table. They want what you want: to have a few drinks and a lobster roll from the back of a converted U-Haul trailer while the kids lick Gerber puffs out of the grass. Like any place that serves alcohol, you won’t try to close the place down with children in tow, but most breweries are open at 11:00 am. That’s prime time for a casual pint somewhere between your play-date at the splash pad and afternoon naps on a Saturday.

As you might have guessed, local breweries have been a big part of family life for us. So imagine our delight and surprise to discover that a similar brewing culture is alive and thriving in London. The Bermondsey Beer Mile is a series of bars, breweries, and shops built into the arches of an elevated railway line. It’s located in the Southwark (pronounced “Southerk”) area of London, South of the Thames River and east of London Bridge, in the shadow of the shiny, sky-scraping tee-pee known as The Shard to Londoners (and The Shart to us). Like many formerly industrial areas, Bermondsey has experienced a renaissance in recent years. It has the artsy ethos of Asheville with the side-by-side grit and slickness of a city that’s older than dust but also trendier than your coolest friend. True to brewery form, most places open in time for lunch and much like Asheville, have very little walking distance from one to the next.

We visited the Bermondsey Beer Mile on the second Saturday of a month-long stay in London, following a disastrous visit to Borough Market, a famous tangle of food stalls in a gigantic open-air market.

The cluster at Borough Market

Super cool place, but an absolute clusterfuck on a Saturday, to the point that three-fourths of the family had a total panic attack. My older son and I ended up sharing a bagel and a log of chocolate babka that we impulse-bought because we were penned in near a bakery stall. Ray and my younger son dove into the sea of humanity and were washed back up with a pile of mussels about 20 minutes later. We ate standing up in a huddle by a set of trash cans while mapping our escape route to the exits. 

Chocolate Babka

After that debacle, we took a 15-minute walk to the Bermondsey area and wandered around looking for anything that resembled the beginning, middle, or end of a “beer mile”. Gradually, there emerged an elevated railway with an array of businesses squirreled away into the arches underneath. 

Artsy stuff en route to the Bermondsey Beer Mile

Our first  stop was called The Doodle Bar. It wasn’t actually a brewery and it was less of a bar than it was a cavernous expanse of vaulted space. They did serve a basic pilsner called “The Doodle Beer”. Whether they brewed it themselves somewhere or had it brewed for them, it wasn’t clear. At the front was the bar and to the immediate right was a sort of permanent food truck, a food stall built into the wall. The brusque, bearded gentleman therein served a short list of exactly 3 burger options and a limited set of fries, including “salt fries” and “rosemary salt fries”. His style of customer service could best be described as “grumpy” and “short’, but his french fries were right on time for a family with hungry kids. 

As you moved deeper into the arch of the cave, you passed a section of generous tavern-style seating  with rows of unassuming tables and walls covered in chalkboards, where patrons were invited to “doodle” while they drank. Rather than the obligatory penis drawings you might expect to see etched in chalk all over the place, the variety of “doodles” on the wall were primarily wholesome shout-outs to various Premier League football teams. This was a nice surprise, along with the group of adults gathered around a newborn in a baby carrier on one of the tables nearby. Clearly, we weren't the only family bringing children along for this ride.

At the back of the main bar was the doorway to a dank, rapey-looking corridor leading to another vaulted space under the adjacent railway arch. This section was well-lit and completely enclosed, with an elevated choir loft at one end and videos being projected against the opposite wall. Where the bars back home might’ve had a live stream of Fail Army or Chive TV, the Doodle Bar had kaleidoscopic screen-savers displayed to match the music, which was almost exclusively Afro-pop. You could imagine that the choir loft might host a DJ under different circumstances, but at lunchtime on a Saturday, it was conspicuously vacant. The floor of the space was populated with 3 side-by-side ping-pong tables, an array of metal seating and rustic wooden drink surfaces, and a single foosball set. On this particular day, a small group of 20-somethings  were chatting casually at the far end, completely unfazed by the presence of children in their midst. Other than that, the entire cavern of table tennis was wide open. We’d come prepared with a deck of Uno cards to help the boys pass the time during this adventure, but the unexpected opportunity to engage in sport was positively irresistible for my squirrel-y, athletic little preteens.

Knowing that London is one of the world’s more expensive cities, we were prepared to throw down the monetary equivalent of a kidney or a spleen in exchange for some ping pong paddles and playing time. Surprisingly, the only currency required was a willingness to leave your photo ID at the bar in exchange for equipment and unlimited access to their tables. As foreigners, we were a little hesitant to surrender a drivers license to some 22-year-old Brit behind the bar. But with passports waiting safely back at the flat and no plans to drive on the wrong side of the road for the length of our trip, it was kind of like handing over a Harris Teeter VIC card for as much good as a North Carolina drivers license would have done us for the next 3 weeks in London.

Once we started playing ping pong, the 20-somethings politely dispersed, leaving us more space than 4 people could possibly need in a public place. We played ping pong, drank our drinks, enjoyed some rosemary salt fries, and then shifted over to the foosball table, which was also completely free. We stayed for over an hour before deciding to move on.

Our next stop was the Moor Beer Company Vaults about 6-minutes walking distance farther down the Beer Mile. To get there, we had to go from Druid Street to Enid Street, the road running parallel on the other side of the elevated railway. We took a right through one of the arches to the other side of the tracks, which might’ve felt a tad murdery at night. Luckily, it was still broad daylight and the road running through the arch along with us was busy enough that someone was bound to notice a homicide in progress. 

View of the Shard in the distance en route between bars

Moor Beer Company Vaults was in one of the first few arches on the left once we emerged from the murder tunnel. It was smaller and less cavernous than The Doodle and felt very Asheville in its microbrewery nature. It was cozy, eclectic, and welcoming, with a view of the brew barrels extending back behind the bar. According to the brewing philosophy on their website, their beers are “always live, always natural, and always vegan friendly”--so their selection was a good bit more crafty and creative than The Doodle. For instance, they refer to their standard lager as  a “kellerbier”, which is beernerd code for “German-style lager”, with a few crunchy-granola caveats like a lack of pasteurization and a hazier quality. Their core beer selection includes all the standard craft varieties, from IPAs to pale ales and stouts—as well as a “pale bitter”, which I think of as a very British option. Their “limited editions” go a little farther into the weeds with things like smoked lagers, barley wine, and the obligatory 12% ABV imperial stout, for anyone who wants to ensure that they’re slurring by the end of their first beer. They had a narrow selection of drinks for the kids, including “lemonade” which we’d learned over our first week in London meant “slightly sweet sparkling lemon soda”. There was no room for ping pong tables in this space, but there was seating in the loft above the bar with picnic-style tables where the boys could spread out and play cards. Uno had become our go-to time-waster for the boys when mom and dad wanted to sit around doing boring adult things. Only one of them has a phone and we’ve always been the kind of not-fun family who keeps their kids off screens at restaurants. I know, I know. There may be years of therapy in our kids’ future to unpack how lame their parents are—but for now, they’re playing along.

We stayed at Moor long enough to drink a beer and grab a cardboard coaster (that now sits on the console table in our living room all the way back in the States). It was approaching 5:00 as we continued down Enid Street, so places were getting more crowded, with young professionals spilling out onto the pavement in front of the various arches. The Mash Paddle was the last stop below this section of the railway. Their interior space was narrow with more of a shipping container feel somehow, and very busy. Their front “patio”(aka, parking pad) was also quite cramped, with a cluster of picnic tables arranged in 3 tight rows under umbrellas.

A pizza food truck called The Flow was also jammed headlong into the corner of the lot, almost as if the arch was a garage and they’d been attempting to park in it. We were lucky to get a space at one of the picnic tables, so we didn’t spend any time inside. Ray ducked in to get a round of beers, emerging with a delicious dark Czech lager in a squatty barrel-shaped mug.

It was close enough to dinnertime for a serving of  pizza and garlic knots from the food truck so we indulged—mostly to distract the boys from the fact that they couldn’t spread out like they’d prefer. 

From our spot, we could see across the parking lot to a fenced-in playground that was all the more alluring for its combination basketball/soccer goals at either end. We’d already spent a lot of time kicking soccer balls around on every square inch of unoccupied green space we’d  encountered in the city. However, we’d been completely unsuccessful in locating a set of open soccer goals that any rando could use. Back home, the biggest challenge was finding a goal that wasn’t already savagely overrun by 20 other kids. In London, finding a goal period was like hunting for a unicorn. One of our go-to spots in Hyde Park was actually called “The Old Football Pitches”—and don’t get me wrong—it was a great open space for kicking a ball, clearly designed for that purpose, and yet… not a single permanent goal. In fact, my kids would usually just create their own goal, marked by balled-up hoodies or pieces of mulch driven into the grass. We’d basically resigned ourselves to the apparent reality that healthcare in London might be free, but public access to regulation soccer goals was a bridge too far to fathom.

Low and behold, on the back stretch of the Bermondsey Beer Mile, we’d finally found some goddamn soccer goals. Unfortunately… we hadn’t brought a ball. You see, if you have kids that love sports and you bring a ball, they’ll inevitably want to play with it. Not knowing what we’d encounter on this maiden voyage to Bermondsey, we hadn’t wanted to get their hopes up (or risk having to apologize to a table of beer-drinkers when my kid punted their pints over by accident). So you can imagine our kids’ disdain and monumental despair as we sat there at The Mash Paddle, looking at a set of soccer goals they couldn’t use. Nevermind that we’d found them free foosball and ping pong at the first stop. This was a parenting fail for the ages. It was time to head back across town anyway, so we took the sting out of not having a ball by letting the kids mess around on the playground that was soccer-goal-adjacent. It was a distant second to shooting on an actual goal for the first time in weeks—but we still got some fun videos of them barreling down slides and slinging themselves around on merry-go-rounds like much younger children.

As the weeks went by, we gradually checked things off our list of new and exciting must-dos in London. In our final days, we made a plan to circle back to some of our favorite places, among which Bermondsey Beer Mile was a top choice. We hit The Doodle Bar just as early and just as hard, getting our fill of table tennis, foosball, and rosemary fries before heading back to The Mash Paddle. This time, we’d come prepared with a ball. The boys found their way into the soccer/basketball enclosure, while Ray and I resumed our position at one of the picnic tables in full view of the play area across the street.

During our first visit, I’d never gone inside The Mash Paddle, but the thinner crowd on this particular weekend allowed me the option to venture in. The menu board offered two options brewed by the Mash Paddle: a westie double dry hopped IPA (whatever that means) and a mango apricot sour entitled “Mango Unchained”. Their other offerings were “guest taps” from other breweries, including Deya in Cheltenham, AxelJack Brewery in Wales, Iford Cider in Bradford-on-Avon, and Verdant Brewing Company in Cornwall. There was also a collaboration beer called “Czech Mates” by Thornbridge Brewery in Bakewell and Budvar, a Czech brewer that has apparently had beef with Budweiser over similarities in their names for some time. The guy running the taps was stout, bearded and friendly, wearing an brewery t-shirt and what my mind wants to remember as cargo shorts. He spoke like he was British, but he looked for all the world like any American home-brew dad, teetering somewhere between late Gen X and early millennial. It’s likely that I’ve just superimposed the cargo shorts on his memory because it fit his overall vibe so well—and I mean that in the most endearing way possible. It’s very reassuring that under all the buzz words of brewing, there’s almost always a guy who looks like someone you’d run into at Home Depot buying a replacement gasket for their toilet. And that even in one of the world’s most expensive cities, you can find a guy who stirs a giant cauldron of hops and water with a massive paddle, wearing the same shorts he’s had since college. In fact, I found out months later that the Mash Paddle offers classes to help you brew and bottle your own beer onsite. Had we known, maybe Ray could’ve brought his own cargo shorts and brewed up a keepsake right alongside him. 

That afternoon, we sipped our beers in a place that felt like home, watching our kids play soccer like we typically did on any given Saturday in the U.S. In a matter of days, we’d be on a plane back to a corner of the world that didn’t seem all that far away from this place, in this particular moment. It brought our vacation full-circle and solidified some of our favorite memories from a month well-spent.

Overall, the Bermondsey Beer Mile left us with a few main takeaways. For instance, if you’re a fan of craft beer, then London has something for you. Sure, they’re still famous for their cask ales and almost-cold cellar pours—and you should definitely check those out for an authentic taste of England. But there are plenty of other exciting options, too—like porters, pale ales, sours, ciders, stouts, saisons, black IPAs, dunkels, kolsches, and Belgians. We barely scratched the surface of the brewpubs available on the Beer Mile and still came across everything you’d expect to find at your favorite neighborhood brewery, including an atmosphere that’s comfortingly familiar. Is the clientele a little more young-professional and a little less family-free-for-all? Probably. But we never once got the stink-eye for bringing kids with us. Granted, our kids are older, it was broad daylight, and we never attempted to overstay our welcome. But general common sense applies in London just as much as anywhere else. So, if you’re a parent who likes to have a pint and bring the family along with you, you can easily spend the better part of an afternoon on the Bermondsey Beer Mile, sampling brews, enjoying deliciously accessible kid-friendly food, and discovering unexpected fun for all ages, from ping pong and foosball, to community doodle boards and perfectly located playgrounds. And even if beer and breweries aren’t your thing, seek out something that makes you feel at home in a far away place. Because visiting the famous attractions might give you great photos, but living out your own interests in the context of another culture gives you a deeper sense of belonging than simply standing in front of something the guide book said you should see. Find a way to “do you” in a different country. Run around in green space. Find a favorite bakery. Sit by a body of water and see who insists on feeding the birds right next to the sign that’s kindly asking them not to. Seek out your something and savor it. You’ll enjoy those memories the most.