Signature Brew, E17

Signature Brew now brew in two locations in East London with this second site in an industrial estate just off Black Horse Lane joining the original location in the railway arches at Haggerston. It’s a fairly typical industrial unit site a short walk around the corner from the Truman’s Social Club, with bench type seating inside the brewery alongside the tanks, an outside seating underneath a gazebo structure and then further room where additional bench seating is put on fine weekend or when they have live music events. The bar room has a twelve tap wall at the back, one solitary hand pump ( not in use for out visit) and a limited amount of spirits and wines. But the Signature Brew craft range is the draw here and nine of their beers were available on tap with a couple of guests from Hackney Brewery. We has already tried a few of their standard beers earlier at their other outlet, The Collab in central Walthamstow so decided to try their new German festival beer Luftballon, and it wasn’t a bad attempt at a Bavarian session lager. This one opens a 4pm during the week and then at lunchtime on Saturday and Sunday. It wasn’t too busy for our late afternoon visit and we probably didn’t catch it at its best. From its publicity photos it looks much better in the evening when there are a few in and the brewing equipment is imaginatively lit to provide ambiance, or when there is live music. Music does seem to be a theme here as demonstrated by the fact that the beer tap pulls were actually vocal microphones. One thing it did have going for it was that the general consensus of the group was that the Signature Brew beers were some of the best we tried during this crawl of the so called Blackhorse Beer Mile.