Fuller’s Brewery tour – The Fresh Pint

If you are willing to shuffle down to Chiswick on a week day for a two hour tour you should go down to the Fullers brewery.  For £10 you get a tasting tour where you get to try anywhere between 6 and 10 beers, depending on your guide and how much time you have.

The sign outside the Fullers Brewery. Photo: Faisal Latif

Admittedly this is a great way for Fullers to advertise their product, but the brewery tour is a unique experience. You’re walking around a working brewery so from the moment you step past the 200 year old wisteria and on to the factory floor you are in someone’s workspace. This also means you get to wear a nifty orange vest to make sure no one mistakes you for any thing other than a member of a tour.

The tour starts off next to the Thames. No, the brewery does not use that water, not because it’s gross but because it is salt water. The water they use to make the beer comes from the main London supply.

Currently the brewery is owned and operated by two of the original three families, Fuller and Turner, Smith was bought out several years ago. The First Pint was lucky enough meet a gentleman whose family worked in the brewery for generations.

Jim Lockie worked at Fullers for 43 years as a driver, delivering and loading the casks to pubs owned by the company. He was on the tour because his son, who does not work at the brewery, wanted to visit and look around. Jim said: “Of course it’s all different now.”

A different lorry from what Jim used but still a Fullers delivery truck. Photo: Alissa Smith

His family began working in the brewery in 1870 with his grandfather and the family’s traditional occupation endured until 1994 when Jim retired. “Between the blokes who worked there they’d say that there were so many Lockie’s working here it should be called Fullers Smith Turners and Lockie.”

During the time that Jim worked in the brewery it was a wet brewery, which meant that each worker was given an allowance of three pints a day direct from the freshly brewed stock. But as a lorry driver, Jim would have his first pint before he left on his first delivery at around noon and then another at each pub, though he admitted to sometimes having two.

Generally though, your tour of the brewery will only have the tour guide to tell you entertaining stories or facts about the beer. For example I was informed that you need four things to have a great pint of English ale:

- To be in England
- Get a good brewery
- A good landlord (one who keeps the pipes clean)
- A good drinker

A cask of Fullers should be drunk with in three or four weeks and four to five days once opened in the pub. They produce one million pints a week in the four or five batches they make in a day.

At the end of the cacophony of smells and noises that you are bombarded with in the brewery you are taken back to a small museum where you get to try the beer if you’ve paid for that exciting experience. The tour could last as long as the group wants but the shorter the tour, the more time you have to drink, so keep that in mind.

While you can call to set up a tour for that day, its recommended that you sign up via the website before hand because they only do five tours a day and even then that’s only on the weekdays. This of course makes it difficult for the workers of London to get down there and try almost every single beer that Fullers makes.

If you do go, be warned, if you don’t have a good meal before the tour you might get a little buzzed at the end.