Meantime founder brews success on refusal to compromise

Compromise has always been a dirty word for Alastair Hook, the founder of London's Meantime Brewing Company, which SABMiller, the world's second largest brewer, bought on Friday for an undisclosed sum.

Since founding the brewery in 1999, Mr Hook has built the business into the capital's largest independent brewery - making 11.35m pints last year - and railed against the strictures of the British beer scene, criticising pub companies for excluding small producers in favour of "big-barrel deals with ailing conglomerates".

He ditched a European and Social History degree at York university in favour of a brewing education at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University, however Mr Hook felt constrained by the lack of imagination at Britain's leading brewing school. "It was very industry-focused; it was all about chemical engineering," he told the Financial Times in 2005.

The university threatened him with expulsion after he made unkind remarks about keg beer in the programme for Heriot-Watt's beer festival, which he founded.

He felt more at home in Germany, at Bavaria's Weihenstephan brewing school, where brewers are as important "as the local vicar, the mayor or the lawyer", he said.

When he returned to the UK to run the Packhorse brewpub in Kent, he began to make a name for himself and finally took the chance to start his own brewery when restaurateur Oliver Peyton sought him out to open a new brewpub-restaurant concept. "Oliver wanted a bottled beer, and I couldn't find anyone to do it properly . . . So I thought 'Here's my opportunity'."

Meantime quickly outgrew the UK beer scene, which Mr Hook derided as a place where "if you brew without compromise . . . you go out of business".

He pushed sales in the US, where years earlier he had found inspiration to become a brewer in the nascent craft beer scene.

Now, under the ownership of one of the world's largest brewing conglomerates, he hopes that Meantime's beers can truly take the world stage by storm.

Without compromising, of course.

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