Lost Breweries: L is for Little Beer

About five years ago, I was talking to a mate who was looking to get into craft brewing professionally and was struggling to come up with a name that wasn't either completely fucking shit or already in use.

Beers that never were

I suggested 'Assassin', with the strapline 'beers to kill for' and, the concept meeting with vague approval,  went away and came up with a few ideas for the brand. The beers would be named Blonde Assassin, Red Assassin, Strong Assassin, West Coast Assassin, Christmas Assassin and so on... it seemed like a solid enough idea at the time. 

Matt decided against a career in the beer business, possibly after learning that it mostly involved cleaning equipment, and Assassin Brewing was, alas, never to be.

To be honest, it's not something that particularly keeps me awake at night.

Well, not often.

 

It's the little things

In retrospect, it might be just as well that the Assassin brewery never became a thing because we'd quickly have run out of names for the beers. There are, after all, only so many words that can describe a style of beer and also precede 'Assassin'. 

And this brings me neatly on to today's lost brewery, The Little Beer Corporation - not to be confused with Small Beer - a brewery that might well have fallen into the same trap as the Assassin that never assassinated. Little Beer were based down here in Surrey, assuming brewing some time in 2012, but biting the dust of the brewery floor in 2019.

And for the most part their beers took the form Little [something] - at least until they began to run out of ideas, though, to their credit, there was no shortage of somethings to belittle. More importantly, they brewed some good beers.

Thanks, Google Maps. Thooglemaps.

I first enjoyed their Little Rosy in 2014 and was very impressed - a Raspberry Wheat on cask from a new brewery is the sort of thing that piques my interest.

This was a brewery that wasn't afraid to experiment stylistically with their cask offerings: Little Snug was a strongish ESB style beer, brewed with chestnuts; Little & Often a 3% table beer that probably should've been their flagship product; and Little Geyser a steam beer - another style of which we don't see enough.

I didn't rate their Little Haka, but then I very rarely get on with Rugby-themed ale for some reason.

The 'Corporation' was always stretching it somewhat as Little Beer never really became a household name, even among craft aficionados. I gather that they eventually began to ditch the naming conventions and concentrated more on bottling. 

My final cask encounter was the milk stout Little Smooth, shortly before Christmas 2017, which had found its way onto the bar at a Wetherspoons, though sometimes it's the deals with the bigger boys that can ultimately lead to operational issues and land smaller breweries into financial difficulties. To be clear - I've no idea what, if anything, went wrong at Little Beer and why they are no longer with us.

While I'm obviously a ticker with a thirst for anything new, I do get that brewers typically need to have a 'core range' in order to succeed in the mainstream marketplace. Unusually, I have not a clue which Little beers were 'the regulars', or indeed if I ever got to try them. Their range may have consisted entirely of one-offs as far as I know, and that might've had consequences of its own, but this is all speculation of the most speculative kind.

I'd like to have tried more Little beers, given the chance, and I take it slightly personally that a Surrey brewery stopped brewing after I moved to the county.

Little Beer 2012-2019