London’s BEST Microbrewery in Spa Terminus (ReCap)

 

A quick recap for my visit to Spa Terminus (and to show you how effin awesome this place is (런ㄷ –> Click HERE

I visited The Kernel Brewery in Spa Terminus to ask about this sustainable space system as well as to learn more about microbrewery process (how a small regional brewery business is run)

You will get the idea of Kernel spirit and Spa Terminus spirit after watching this video 🙂

In this post, I prepared
1) short video clip that focuses on The Kernel Brewery
2) further interview details (below)
3) bits and pieces about brewing process of The Kernel (below)

One sad news from The Kernel Brewery website, but even this tells us the spirit and value of The Kernel — caring each customer and each interaction ❤

NOTICE

We no longer serve beer to drink at the brewery.

We will be open on Saturdays only as a bottle shop (for our normal hours of 09.00 – 14.00). This is in line with the ethos of Spa Terminus, whose focus is produce that can be bought to take home.

We cannot satisfactorily accommodate the volume of people who wish to come down on a Saturday: we feel that our space has been outgrown and we are unable to give our customers an experience, service or environment that we are happy with.

We are working on a more suitable way to be able to serve beers directly to our customers, but this will take some time.

This is not a decision we have taken lightly, our Saturday tap room has been a huge part of who we are and what we do. Thanks to all of you who have come down and shared it with us

outside of terminal

inside each space

2) More (revised) quotes beyond the interview…

“When we were moving here, we already knew the process, so … let’s just make it bigger! We are not making too mechanical. We enjoy this work because the process is tangible and physcial”

“We might not seem professional, since people comes and goes (wrong person interrupts to the backdoor during the interview).. that’s just our way 😀 ”

“12pm-2pm space is packed pretty much, probably fits under 50 people”

“Why Saturday only? that’s as much as we can take”

“Camden brewery has so many bars, that’s part of their business. but we don’t – probably we do not have that much time or just not interested.”

“Before in Moby street, we were sharing the space with 2 other businesses, they moved here as well.”

entrance to the stores

3) Let’s get to know more about beer brewery 🙂

Hops and molt :
Molts provide sugar for fermentation for yeast to turning the alcohol, as well as the texture of the beer. (Farmers pick fresh yeasts – dry and squeeze – packed delivery)
Hops – keeps the flavor; how the hops are and when hops are added determines the freshness or bitterness of the beer. Brew with cold water creates different aromatics. We change hops throughout the year – different harvests from different areas. Why tweak the ingredients ? We’re too small to chase the consistency. What interests people about us is the difference, variety. We mostly use non-british hops. Not deliberately not using it, but we just prefer the different hops – which is better for small brewery.

Stout : dark molt that is used has been roasted just like coffee beans

Lager : uses different yeasts. process called lagering. You want to make the good state to drink?  Low temperature is the key. Northern part of Europe (not Spain or Italy), before refrigerator was developed, traditionally only relied on climate to cool or heat.

Why Kernel does MANUAL process : partly intentional, partly because we don’t know other ways 😀
Only 3 of us have brewery backgrounds, other 2-3 had no previous knowledge –  We learn it as we go!

 

Types of Beers : We always know ahead of the time. Every week we have what styles of beer will be brewed; we set up the schedule, whoever brewing that day can decide the recipe and other precise details – mostly the combination of hops. Everyone here gets to brew, 12 ppl cannot make the same recipe — different recipes that’s embedded in the system – not repeating same thing twice. Thus, 10-12 different kind of beers spreading across 4-5 styles of beers. We don’t brew a lot, 4 times a week. Each brew equals one batch. (Pointing at their batches) 4 would be the ones from last week, being fermented.

Fermentation time : 12-14 days. Bottles – 2 weeks or 4 weeks. We do experiments. London sour cherry (which was my best beer I had, yum) is based on traditional beer, ballina vice, known to be mixed with fruits. Our next door is jam maker. Anything we want to know more about fruits, we just go and ask.