New Year’s Trip to London: Day 5 (Jan. 3, 2020)

Today was another more casual, relaxing day. After sleeping in, we spent the morning walking around Camden Town. We ate at one of the food huts in Camden Town and then walked around and explored the maze that is the Camden Market. Camden Town always interests me because it has such a mixture of boutique style shops to flea market stalls to tourist souvenirs to obviously fake designers. We made the obligatory experiential visit to Cyber Dog and got lost trying to find the bathroom. We even went for a walk in the Vagina Museum which had a nice exhibit on debunking many myths about them.

Our final stop in Camden was the Camden Brewery taproom in the Camden Market to kick off the second half of our day. Our plan was to go to some of the breweries in London, so what better way than to start where we were. We had a Helles and a Pale Ale from Camden Brewery. Helles seems to be a popular style of beer in London, especially with the craft breweries.

Our next stop was an underground and a train stop away, Four Pure. I had previously visited Four Pure the year before and really liked both their beers and their taproom and a atmosphere. They based their brewery and customer experience off of a visit they had to New Belgium in Fort Collins so it’s no surprise I liked it so much and could’t wait to go back. While they didn’t have one of my all time favorite beers on tap still (a tanka bean white stout I still dream about) I was not disappointed by my second trip. They had tons of beers on tap (over 10 at least) with many seasonal and core beers. Joey had a few beers and I had a flight because I can never chose when there are so many options available.

The next brewery we went to was called Partizan Brewery. Like many breweries in London, it was located under train tracks because the real-estate is cheap and very limited as to what you can put in there for safety reasons. Whether it was because it was just after the holidays or during dry January, or the taproom is just usually not so full, the atmosphere was odd. Loud music, dim lights, and no one but me and Joey. They had a lot of saisons on tap with different fruit flavors like raspberry and lemon grass. After a few beers and a game of cribbage, Joey and I were off to the next brewery, Anspach and Hobday Brewery, located just down the train tracks. This brewery had a bit more lively crowd, small but filled the small space. We finished off our brewery crawl here with a few pints before heading out to find some dinner, and head back to the hostel.

On our way back, we walked past the Shard, and Joey was able to touch the Shard after spending the whole trip looking at it from afar, always finding it in the sky line to try and orient ourselves. A fitting end to the trip.