ABOUT US

The Five Points Brewing Company is an independent brewery based in Hackney, London, brewing with a commitment to quality and the community since 2013.

We brew beer for anyone and everyone to enjoy–accessible, consistent, and well-made beers that can be enjoyed in your favourite pub or bar, or at home while taking it easy at the end of a day.

Our History

The Five Points Brewing Company was founded in 2013 in a railway arch underneath Hackney Downs train station, just off from the 5-way junction the brewery takes its name from.

Ed Mason ran hospitality venues in London and Leeds, including the early craft beer destination Mason & Taylor, which operated in Shoreditch from 2010 until 2012, and was known for serving a wide variety of beer from the US and Europe, as well as championing a nascent UK craft beer scene on its taps and in its fridges. 

Through his ownership and management of hospitality venues, Ed met Greg Hobbs in The Duke of Wellington in Dalston. From pulling pints in the pub, Greg moved on to working for East London Brewing Company to put his enthusiasm for beer and his background in Chemistry to good use as a brewer. Throughout this, Ed and Greg kept in touch, while the early ideas of a microbrewery based in Hackney began to develop. 

In the early days of 2013, Greg was trialling recipes for the initial three beers of the Five Points core range on a small pilot kit in a chilly railway arch at the end of a cobbled road near The Pembury Tavern, a pub that would be later owned and operated by The Five Points five years later. The first commercial brew took place on the 9th of March, 2013, on a 16hL brewkit that had been installed the month before. This first beer, racked into cask, would be delivered by Ed himself in a branded Five Points van to the brewery’s first customers.

The first few iterations of what would be the core beers were released as “Trial Brew” beers, in a bid to be transparent about the iterative process of creating and garnering feedback from customers, and tweaking the recipes based on that feedback–or not, as in the case with one of the beers, Railway Porter, whose recipe is pretty much unchanged from its initial pilot brews. Thanks to the feedback from these early brews, we launched the three initial core beers in the summer of 2013: Five Points Pale, Hook Island Red and Railway Porter. The beers were distinctive and notable, not just for their flavours, but also for their wonderful packaging design and branding developed by Kate Lyons.

From those early days in the railway arch, the brewery has since grown and expanded–more staff, more fermentation vessels, a larger brewhouse, an off-site warehouse, external fermentation vessels, export markets, another railway arch, and many, many more beers.

In 2021, after years of operating split sites between the brewery in the railway arch and the office space and warehouse located a mile away, we were able to consolidate our company together under one roof and refitted our Mare Street warehouse to be the brewery’s new home in Hackney. That same year, a new taproom space was built within the site to serve as a new social spot for folks to meet with friends and enjoy some of the freshest pints in the borough.

In May of 2023, we opened up The Five Points Courtyard–an expansive outdoor space to enjoy incredible drinks and food in an ideal East London location. Since its opening, it has been a showcase of fantastic barbecue and smokehouse cuisine by From The Ashes alongside tank-fresh pints of Five Points beer. The Courtyard is our old Five Points Yard Parties made permanent, with sports screenings and superb atmosphere–and plenty of cover for the English weather!

We celebrated Ten Years of Five Points in 2023, and are looking ahead to what the next ten years will bring, as we continue to evolve as an independently-owned brewery and champion better ways of working and living while making some of the UK’s best-loved beers.