The Meantime Philosophy
Alastair Hook expounds his philosophy in All ABout Beer Magazine.
  Here at Meantime we are very conscious of and proud of our Greenwich heritage.
The Thames flows past our door, and we look towards it for inspiration for the things that we do.
Once ships laden with casks of Porter and India Pale Ale, brewed on the river's banks, sailed on the ebb tide to all four corners of the globe, so we brew London Porter and IPA.
Ships weighed down with goods from the same four corners floated in on the tide past Greenwich to the London docks. Those cargoes inspired our Coffee and Chocolate beers. At Meantime we will continue to look to the timeless river to suggest new ideas and flavours to stretch our brewing skills.		 

Meantime's history

PHILOSOPHY

At Meantime we have one simple philosophy. Oddly it allows us to think in two different ways.

Our sole concern is to put before the consumer the most exciting flavours to be found in beer that we are able to create with the wit and technology at our disposal.

That is our philosophy.

We do this out of a passion for our craft.This passion is both born out of a respect for the traditions of the brewers' mystery, as well as respect for the potential flavours that that mystery can reveal.

On the one hand we are fascinated by the desire to understand and recreate the flavours of the past; beers of immense social significance, that literally changed the world, but about which we, today, understand very little. We have already started, and shall continue, to reseach and recreate these great beers.

We are not about to build great tun rooms of great, iron-hooped, wooden vats of monstrous girth, however. Nor are we about to discard the thermometer and the hydrometer and instead study the flight of swallows, collect country sayings, or heed the ancient wisdoms.

We wish to explore the past; not return there. So therefore we intend to use the most modern technology at our disposal.

Technology, when intelligently applied, is liberating. Technology has freed us from dependence on beer as a staple food, or as a sanitary precaution, or, indeed, from unavoidable, grudging acceptance of beer as something like the little girl with the curl - good when good, but otherwise horrid.

Our passion for our craft, therefore, looks forward as well as back. We are able to play with ingredients and materials unavailable or inconceivable to previous generations. To explore combinations of flavours in previously unimagined ways; to match beer and food - and reconnect beer and food - with a greater precision than ever before.

We belive this philospohy is very simple. It enables us to be avant garde and traditional at the same time, for each is concerned with the discovery of flavour.

As such, for us, and we hope for you too, there is no distinction. In the brewhouse here at the Greenwich brewery times past and times to come are as one, which, perhaps, gives an added, unintended significance to our company name - Meantime.