P132 THE HIP HOPS MOVEMENT
He may hail from libertine rock’n’roll royalty, but Logan Plant’s taste for ale is a little more discerning than your average debauchee. Meet the man who is turning the American craft beer revolution into a very British affair
Meet the rock protégé who’s put London’s craft-beer revolution on the main stage
From its woodsy brand name to the psyche-apocalyptic artwork that adorns its cans, you might expect to find the Beavertown brewery – one of the driving forces in the transatlantic craft beer wave – beside a creek in heavily wooded North Dakota, or at least a gritty Williamsburg shack. In fact, it sits next to a brook on an unremarkable industrial estate in Tottenham Hale, north London.
With his Red Wing boots and Levi’s jeans, Beavertown founder Logan Plant also looks vaguely American. An accent you might indeterminately describe as Brummie, however, gives him away – as does the Wolverhampton Wanderers mug sat proudly on his desk.
In case you hadn’t guessed from the surname, Plant is the son of Robert, the West Bromwich-born frontman of Led Zeppelin and latterly Grammy-winning bluegrass singer. Having studied sports science at Cardiff University and worked in the decidedly sober arenas of massage therapy and corporate events, Plant Jr also fronted a number of bands through his twenties. Music eventually took him across the pond where, UA suggests, the Beavertown ethos originated…
“Actually, no. The original inspiration came from the West Midlands,” counters the boy from the Black Country, now 38. Far from supping American IPAS between sets at SXSW, Plant says he acquired his taste for real beer by drinking Bathams bitter as a 19-year-old. “My friends and I would jump in the car to certain pubs to drink specific beers that were brewed up the road,” he says. “Or to the actual breweries. That was when I started to dissect what beer was about.”
STRANGE BREW
As an entry-level lover of real ale and a peripatetic musician, Plant’s rock-star approach to inebriation was remarkably scientific. “Whenever I did any travelling, I’d be taking notes on beers from all four corners of the globe,” he says.
Let’s get this straight: you took a notebook out while drinking on tour?
“Um, yes.” This unlikely dedication continued until a moment in 2011 caught him unawares. Sat in renowned Brooklyn barbecue joint Fette Sau missing his wife and children, the desire to start his own brewery came to a head. “I ate great pulled pork and drank great beer,” he says. “It was like an epiphany.”
Plant quit the band and bought a 25-litre home brew kit. “It was essentially a tea-urn-cum-picnic-insulated-box, plus a few other paddles and meshes,” he recalls. Then came the experimentation, creating beers that would pair well with the food at his nascent east London barbecue restaurant, Duke’s Brew & Que.
Originally there were just two: a rye IPA named 8-Ball (“Rye is quite spicy and earthy, which goes great with the spiciness of our pork”) and Smog Rocket, a smoked porter (“The smokey, raisin-y characteristics work brilliantly with the beef ribs, which are all molasses and char”). In between, there was a lot of trial and error, reading of internet forums, and questions asked to members of the London brewing network, such as Kernel in Bermondsey, south-east London.
With his early attempts surprisingly successful, Plant upgraded to an 800-litre kit he squeezed into the kitchen at Duke’s. He brewed during the day and served the results over the bar at night, enabling instant feedback: “It was killer for me as a brewer to have strangers come up and go, ‘ I really liked this.’ Or, ‘Fucking hell, that is burning the enamel off my teeth.’ In which case I knew it was time to go back to the drawing board.’”
Brewing, Plant quickly discovered, is part science, part art. “You can apply the specific mathematics to the extraction
and bitterness you’re going to get from a certain hop, or the amount of sugar you will gain from certain grains,” he says. “Then you drink the end product and it’s much more of a sensory thing.” His guiding principle is balance: neither too bitter nor too sweet. “That’s always a good place to start,” he says. “Then you can start to push things by infusing spices or manipulating yeast strains.”
BLOOD, SWEAT & BEERS
Today, Beavertown brews 90,000 litres of ale a week. Aside from its taste, what marks it out is its branding. But this, as with most aspects of Plant’s business, was more happy accident than marketing strategy. A friend suggested the name Beavertown, an old cockney sobriquet of De Beauvoir Town, where Duke’s is located. “And it just happened to be perfect for a UK take on a US brewhouse,” says Plant. “Which was fortunate because I had so many terrible names lined up.”
Meanwhile, the Day of the Dead-style skulls that adorn everything Beavertown – from the cans to the office walls, even the brewery tanks – came care of Nick Dwyer, a waiter at Duke’s who studied illustration at Central Saint Martins art school. Now Beavertown’s creative director, Dwyer devised the livery for the brewery’s most recognisable output, a “tropical” American-style pale ale called Gamma Ray. Featuring UFOS, skeletal spacemen and a bright blue and orange lunarscape, the determinedly avantgarde aesthetic has proved to be its USP. “I remember someone in a bar in Shoreditch saying to me, ‘Everyone just wants the spaceman beer,’” recalls Plant.
Five years ago, you couldn’t walk into a pub and expect to find an American pale ale. Now, the surprising thing is that a) you can, and b) many of them are, in fact, British. So how has it come to this?
“The US market prior to craft beer was bad,” says Plant. “There were a couple of big players producing the same yellow fizz. In the ’80s, a few craft brewers came here, drank some amazing ales, then said: ‘ Well, this is a bit flat, but it does taste of something.’” Using their own ingredients (their hops are very different to ours), the Americans started creating beers that are, in turn, inspiring a new batch of British brewers like Plant. “Now you’ve got two amazing brewing centres. The US have 4700 breweries and we’ve got about 1700,” he says. “And we’re all about the same thing: producing great beer.”
It would be wrong to call the rise in craft beer – as of last year, a government marker of inflation – a trend. Rather, it represents a bona fide cultural shift in common with the renaissance in coffee and gin before it. There now exists a greater variety, a greater appreciation of what makes it special and a willingness to pay a higher price for the privilege. But thanks to the likes of Beavertown, ale is now accessible and, yes, cool – shorn of its erstwhile connotations with pipes and beards, socks and sandals.
But not everyone is so merry: purists like the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) take issue with Beavertown’s use of carbonation over the traditional method of adding sugar and allowing the yeast to do its thing. “I’m sure at some point there will be a recognition that we’re all batting for the same team,” says Plant, diplomatically. In truth, they should probably be thanking him: at a time when pubs are closing at a rate of 27 a week (according to CAMRA’S own figures), as many as 600 people visit the tap room at Beavertown every Saturday. That’s a lot of prospective CAMRA members.
Despite having to drink beer most days just to do his job, Plant has no belly – an outcome he credits to genes, moderation and knowing his limits. He also tries to have two nights off a week to avoid hangovers. But if all else fails? “Marmite on toast is really good, with all its vitamin B,” he says. “And obviously there’s more yeast too, which is great.”
“Whenever we were on tour, I’d be taking notes on beers”
Sometimes you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Jamel Shabazz grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by National Geographic images, his father having been a photographer in the Navy during the ’50s. But it was a spell stationed in Germany with the military that opened the young Shabazz’s eyes to decadent youth cultures and new forms of photography.
Upon returning home in 1980 and being struck by how much his community had changed, Shabazz began shooting all over New York, from his native Brooklyn into Manhattan and beyond, capturing street scenes of kids at play, putative gang bangers and urban dandies. He found himself chronicling the birth of hip-hop as both style and lifestyle, a moment immortalised in his seminal book, Back in the Days.
His methods were unorthodox. Instead of snatching vulnerable, unscripted moments – the modus operandi of the reportage photographer – Shabazz would ask his subjects to shape up for the camera and project themselves the way they wanted to. The youth of the five boroughs did not disappoint. Shabazz’s images are a style menu and a message across the years. This, say the anonymous B-boys, would-be DJS, MCS and early-days hip-hop heads, is the way you do it.
Who are these particular three guys? We don’t know, but names are not important. What matters here is the raw bravado – the indomitable sense of young men doing exactly what they want, how they want, maybe for the first time. It’s the grammar and glamour of early hip-hop translated into clothing and stance: fat laces on Adidas Superstar sneakers so white they dazzle; a boombox the size of a suitcase; caps and Kangols; jackets symbolically tougher than leather (even if the material was almost certainly more affordable).
It’s not often in life that people get it right first time, but this look and style of dressing has informed street style and culture ever since. The mix of sportswear and technical outerwear, the slim legs on the trousers, even the flat cap the guy stood in the middle is wearing are still referenced today by brands including Stone Island, Nike and, of course, Adidas. Even more enduring, however, is the way it makes you wonder what’s in that liquor-store brown bag. You look at the photograph and you want to know what’s blasting out of that radio – the sort which LL Cool J famously couldn’t live without. You wonder where these kids are now.