The Hepcathlon
By guest blogger, Ben Jones.
Well, with a pun that good, how could we not?
Seven pints of Gipsy Hill’s Hepcat – SE27’s finest session IPA – in seven reputable South London hostelries. A summery Olympian Odyssey, where every athlete is already a gold medallist before the first event even starts. It’s mid-afternoon on a sunny Friday in July as we converge for our first event.
The Great Southern
The Great Southern is a grand, airy boozer perched halfway up Gipsy Hill, for which the brewery itself is named. A Hepcat session IPA, with its endurance-event-friendly 4.6% ABV, is the order of the day. Not just for us, but for the chap before us at the bar…and also the chap after. We take this to be a good omen.
The bar staff tell us it’s one of their best sellers, and sure enough, it’s sitting proudly on most of the tables in the Southern’s garden as the work week dissolves. Martin, our first chatty rando of the day, overhears our Hep-chat, and tells us that under any other circumstances, he would drop everything and join us for the rest of the night. ‘But my boss has just emailed and if he knew I was in the pub, he’d grab my balls and do this…’ His wrenching motion is evocative enough that we all wince. No worries Martin. This isn’t your year, but keep that fitness up for next time.
Gipsy Hill Tap Room
We’re on a tight schedule, so as soon as our pints are drained, it’s down the hill and onto the Hamilton Road industrial estate, to the unassuming but charming Gipsy Hill tap room. Our round of Heppopotami is kindly underwritten by the brewery itself for this inaugural event.
We take our golden hoard out to the sunny patio, the pub benches nestled amongst the industrial units all around. A dozen or so other drinkers are toasting the imminent weekend.
When the story of the craft beer explosion of the 2010s comes to be written, one of the more curious chapters will be about how people suddenly decided that spending their time sat at a bench on a grotty industrial estate, guzzling ultra-fresh ale was, actually, a brilliant idea. It does feel in line with the general post-millennial trend towards celebrating infrastructure and industry: megaclubs done up like warehouses, conspicuous air-conditioning ducts in event spaces, skin-on fries served in a tiny bucket. The Hamilton Road estate isn’t pretty, and we can’t hear ourselves over the forklift truck moving barrels and pallets, but it feels real and honest so it must be good.
The cans and bottles peering down at us from above the Tap Room bar bring up real nostalgia – old branding, discontinued lines, experimental brews of years gone by. Matt can’t resist the urge to ask if they’re ever going to brew the Baller again – a cracking New England Hazy, long-gone and much-missed. The barkeep is nonplussed.
Gipsy Hill Brewery‘s history is typical of the craft beer explosion of the early ’10s. Two friends put together a tiny brewing operation and a loyal following, and explode in popularity. Distribution ramps up, staff are hired, a tap room is founded in and amongst the brewing operation, and a community grows where once were empty warehouses. Everything goes swimmingly until a global pandemic rolls into town. Even after reopening, costs rise across the board, and suddenly the beer and money stop flowing. Tale as old as time.
The axe fell swiftly. Herne Hill’s Canopy brewery called time for good in 2022, while Fourpure, Brixton, and Brick were all acquired or folded into bigger operations. To their credit, Gipsy Hill continued to trade independently until late 2024. A final round of crowdfunding didn’t deliver what was needed, and despite Hepcat’s popularity and reach continuing to grow, they were picked up by Sunrise Alliance Beverages. Still, on the spectrum of options from noble oblivion (Canopy) to cynical megacorp acquisition and terminal quality dilution (Brixton), Gipsy Hill’s fate doesn’t look so bad.
As we talk through the pros and cons, we raise a glass to the fact that the tap room itself has survived the takeover, even as the majority of the brewing operation was moved to Sunrise’s Ashford site. It remains a lovely place to spend time, if a little tricky to get to. We wave goodbye and continue our walk northward along the Rosendale Road, for event number three: A Lovely Pint Of Hepcat.
The Rosendale
On to The Rosendale, a huge, well-to-do family gastropub on the edges of West Dulwich. Happily, a new keg of the Hugh Hepner has just gone on as we sidle in, so it’s a foamy wait while our round is poured at the small main bar (because gastro), but it’s worth it.
Finding seven pubs serving what remains a modest-volume craft beer has been embarrassingly easy. It’s actually harder to find spots in SE27/24 that don’t serve it. Pleasingly, it’s also becoming a fixture in local supermarkets, and even in pubs north of the river; especially around the City, where it makes an attractive counterweight to your Madris, Staropramens, and black stuff.
Hepcat is an audaciously floral sup, Mosaic and Citra to the fore, Motueka and Ekuanot adding the twist. There’s an up-front whack of grapefruit that’s almost tart, before a solid bitter counterweight keeps it all in check. It goes down a treat over any distance from ten-minute sprint to all-day marathon. We don’t get served a bad one all day, though we do briefly bemoan the rebrand the brewery went through in 2019. That saw Gipsy Hill ease out the charming pop-art drawings of early employees that adorned the cans and bottles in the early days, in favour of something a little cleaner and cooler. It remains a very pretty pint in the slim GH-branded glasses.
Round Three passes pleasantly in the Rosendale’s glorious sun trap beer garden, nestled away from the main road. Doug is getting peckish but we need to keep the tempo up to reach the final stop before Belgium’s World Cup quarter-final with Spain.
‘Can’t we just have two Heps here and order some food?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ chides Dads, draining his pint and standing up. “It’s a Hepcathlon. If Denise Lewis doesn’t fancy the hurdles, she doesn’t ask if she can do the javelin twice, does she?’
The Great North Wood
The walk to the Great North Wood takes us through West Norwood cemetery, one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’. Somehow packing 69 listed buildings into 40 acres, it’s gorgeous in the blazing sun, and the change of pace does us good. The GNW, perched atop West Norwood train station, is worth the walk. The pub always pours a cracking pint, and looks after its modest cask selection, which they rotate at a decent clip.
Gipsy Hill did put out Hepcat on cask some years back, in very limited batches. It went down nicely, but it’s as a cold, crisp pour from a keg or a can that it really shines. As our tray gets filled up on the bar – tall golden pints with just a lick of foam – we ask the bar staff if they are fans. ‘No, I’m not a big beer drinker, but if I was it would be something good like Hepcat. I mean, no one’s going out doing a Madri-thon, are they?’ This gets a big cheer from the athletes.
The rest of our route will take us straight up the Norwood Road to Tulse Hill. So far we’ve been following the Effra, one of London’s historical lost rivers. It runs along our full planned route, almost uncannily so, drawing us along invisibly somewhere under our feet.
This remains prime boozoir territory on the SW/SE border; despite the recent demise of the Queen of the South, which never quite seemed to find its clientele. We’re pleased to note that all the other stops along our route are well-attended on a sunny Friday evening. We pour one out for the Queen, and the other nearby haunts and breweries that fell along the way: Canopy, The Red Lion, Music Bar, The Dogstar, Pratts & Payne.
Knowles
Onward to a newer spot. Knowles of Norwood dominates a stretch of the Norwood Road near the B&Q, and is part of the Portobello Pub Company’s set of well-run boozers. The pub operation is backed by private equity these days, while Portobello Brewing, whose beers they serve, was sold to none other than Sunrise Alliance Beverages in October 2024. Knowles boasts a cavernous interior, twice the size of its earlier incarnation as an Antic property. Decent kitchen, event space, cask line, pool table in its own room – tick, tick, tick. The Portobello range of brews, including their wonderfully crisp pilsner, are all on show, but we make straight for the Hepp Blatter.
Once again, the garden is the only place to be, a few scattered clouds keeping the heat just about bearable. Knowles offers something worryingly common these days: a ‘work from the pub’ daytime deal involving all the wifi and coffee you can take on; but by this time of the day, the media darlings shouting at Zoom faces on a laptop are comfortably outnumbered by the oddballs and hounds of SE27. We give as good as we get amidst the growing session haze.
Doug and I work out that the last time we saw each other was the summer before, on the Shirk, Rust and Pray bus tour, run in part by this very parish. I had managed to start that day by giving myself a grade 2 calf strain while running for a train, and spent the rest of the trip hobbling around on a makeshift crutch and supping medicinal ales.
Later that same day, a skinful of Elusive cask ale on board, Doug had struck up a rapport with a highly game and enlivened young lady. After ten minutes spent sucking faces just outside the Shirker’s Rest, she peeled away to introduce him to her equally-game husband, who, it transpired, had been standing a few feet away, watching on eagerly. Doug swiftly switched his focus back to the beer.
Railway Tavern
The end is in sight now, and we press on into Tulse Hill proper, up Station Rise, to the Railway Tavern, just next to the station itself. The place has navigated the various hazards of London pub management with aplomb this past decade. Most of this has been based on, as Heath Ledger’s Joker put it, aggressive expansion. A covered upper terrace, then a lower terrace, ate up half of the old garden, which itself is now a sea of tightly-arranged tables and raised wooden huts. The legendary Thursday open mic night met its demise some years back, but the younger crowd still descend in droves for the weekend DJs and live music. A few missteps aside on the food partner front, things appear to be going great guns.
The garden itself remains large, dotted with palm trees and oversize plasma screens. The beer selection is pretty static here, and quality does vary, but the Heptimus Prime is delicious. In any case, we are in no position to leave tasting notes by this point.
We find a big mounted table outside and watch as Franco tops up his cue-ball scalp liberally with factor 50. We hunt around for some red face-paint to complete the look, but get no joy. Not to worry: England’s World Cup knockout game isn’t until tomorrow.
Tulse Hill Hotel
The shadows are lengthening as the deciding event looms at the nearby Tulse Hill Hotel. We navigate the notorious accident black spot of the Tulse Hill/South Circular gyratory adequately well, all things considered, our group crossing the various overstuffed carriageways in about a dozen distinct combinations. Every incoming councillor and MP in living memory has promised to fix this section of road – maybe one day it’ll be true.
The tee-double-aitch was built in the 1840s, and the building is as handsome today as it appears in photos from the time. From the sixties onward, it was known as the Tulse Hill Tavern, and its reputation wasn’t the best up until it folded in 2014. The site was swiftly snaffled up by Metropolitan Group (a Greene King holding these days), and it soon reopened under its original title (‘Hotel’), with a better selection of beers, fewer punch-ups, and the sort of food menu where the name of every dish has seven adjectives.
Enjoyably, the nearby southbound bus stop was still called ‘Tulse Hill Tavern’ for a few years after the re-re-brand, though you can’t blame the TfL boffins for biding their time to see if it went straight back under. None of it: it’s another gastro-heavy spot, but they’ve recently added pay-per-view sport to the offer, the beers are pricey but good, and there’s usually at least one cask line on (though often provided by the Greene Thing itself, so rarely of note). The garden is always a shady, well-kept treat: the seventh straight corker of the day. And to think, some people actually choose to live north of the river…
We’ve reserved a table, though late-stage capitalism has conspired against us. As with modern taxis, takeaways and tickets, some skiv with a platform now has to take their little slice of pub table bookings; so all we’ve had is a web form to fill in, rather than a human to talk to about tables, screens, spaces, options. Luckily, it’s much quieter than the last few spots, so we have our choice of tables anyway.
As the final round of Heppyphenomenon gets slowly drained, Spain duly put a limited Belgium away. Extra Time looks inevitable for a while, until Mikel Merino pounces on a spill by the keeper to win it very late in normal time. This is probably for the best, as we are now seven sheets to the wind. An attempt at a game of Hop Trumps descends into anarchy – no one can agree on whether Siren’s Lumina is under- or over-priced for Hoppiness.
A few tasty, pricey sharing platters bolster us, and a couple of us stick around after full time for a celebratory warm-down pint of the Everyday IPA by the wonderful Jiddler’s Tipple brewery. Plans are laid to manage hangovers in time for whatever England serve up against Norway the next day, and we call it a night.
There’s no question about the man of the match today though: the Hepcat has carried us through. Medals? It’s a dead heat with 7,000 points for everyone involved. Whether the Hepcathlon becomes a permanent Olympic fixture probably depends on the shady powers that be: the International Olympic Committee, Sunrise Alliance, and the various pub conglomerates consolidating their empires. But, while there’s a tasty beer with local roots being served, you can bet that the hard-working amateur shirker will turn out and compete for that greatest of prizes: a sunny pub crawl with their mates.
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