Pressure Drop Brewery & Taproom

The brewery

Back in the early 2010s, in a shed somewhere in East London, a homebrewer produced one of the beers that would come to define the UK’s then-nascent beer scene. That beer was Pale Fire, and the brewery was called Pressure Drop. A lot has changed since then, but maybe not as much as some of their neighbours. Since 2016, Pressure Drop has sat across an industrial yard from Beavertown in Tottenham Hale, just a stone’s throw from the Walthamstow Wetlands. Still indie, still roughly the same size as 2016, and still banging out a great line of forward-thinking, smashable beers, they’re well worth a visit each Saturday on their taproom open days.

The beer

It’s Pale Fire that made Pressure Drop its name, a hazy 4.8% pale that kills the balance of soft wheaty hazy and juicy fruity body. It’s one of London, if not the UK’s most celebrated pales, and one that so many breweries have tried to imitate in the last 5-10 years as the trend for the haze, juice of New England-style pale ales has led to their ubiquity in pubs all across London.

A can of Pressure Drop's Fashion London porter

Caitlin Isola

Pale ales at the taproom in Tottenham Hale

Pale Fire accounts for a big percentage of Pressure Drop’s output, but they also brew an ever-changing roster of releases with quirky names and quirkier marketing. There are more soft and juicy pales like dank IPA series Cheese, or our fave NEIPA of 2023 so far, Crab Facts (launched, of course, alongside a week’s worth of interesting facts about crabs shared on the brewery’s social media). Elsewhere, you’ve got everything from crushable light lagers to fruited sours and London porters like the Bowie-inspired Fashion.

What else

If the whole one-day-a-week in Tottenham Hale thing isn’t for you, Pressure Drop also shares a railway arch taproom with Cornish brewing royalty Verdant, and it’s only a couple of minutes' walk from Hackney Central Overground. Called The Experiment, it’s based in Pressure Drop’s original brewery building on Bohemia Place, and it’s one of the best places in East London to pick up pints and cans of those super-fresh pales.