By the time the plucky, Bavarian-trained brewmaster Alistair Hook left his position at ill-fated Manchester restaurant Mash and Air to set up Meantime brewery in 1999, he’d already built himself up quite the reputation within the British brewing industry.

Hook studied brewing at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University before attending the Technical University of Munich at Weihenstephan brewery. Lager brewing, it seems, was in his blood. In 1991 he set up the Packhorse in Ashford, Kent, a lager-focussed brewpub once described as “pioneering” by beer writer Des De Moor. It closed in 1994, but a year later Hook found an opportunity to continue brewing lager, when he helped to establish Freedom brewery in its initial home of Parsons Green.

Unable to remain sedentary, he was lured north to Manchester, where he helped establish Mash and Air with restaurateur Oliver Peyton, and chef Jason Atherton. The venue consisted of a brewpub that served beer and pizza downstairs (Mash) and a fine dining restaurant upstairs (Air). Located in a former cotton mill on the edge of Manchester’s Gay Village, the concept was a hit, and regularly saw celebrity visitors including the cast of Coronation Street and members of the then Manchester United first XI. It’s rumoured that Sir Alex Ferguson once spent an afternoon trapped inside the restaurant’s elevator.

While Mash and Air may have been popular with local celebrities, the city’s beer enthusiasts didn’t find much to like about Hook’s beers. “They are not and don’t pretend to be real ales,” wrote Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA chair John Clarke in the January 1997 edition of branch magazine, Opening Times. “[They're] being served under a mixed gas system that leaves what could be some intrinsically good beers rather gassy and flabby.”

By the time the restaurant closed in 2000, citing problems with security and theft, Hook had already moved on. In 1999 he founded his new brewery, Meantime. Located in a lock-up opposite Charlton Athletic’s Valley stadium, before moving to Greenwich, the operation took its name because it was located 0° 2’ 12’ east of the Meridian.

Things progressed steadily for Meantime over its first decade, keeping a focus on Hook’s lager-brewing training but also introducing recipes such as historic porters, a pale ale, and a raspberry wheat beer that at one point became so popular it was packaged in half-sized champagne bottles and sold in Waitrose.

In 2010, the brewery unveiled a two-fold expansion. One part saw its main production facility move to nearby Blackwall Lane, at the heart of which was the installation of a US-manufactured Rolec brewhouse, which reportedly cost £7m. The other was in the heart of Greenwich, where it opened the Old Brewery, a café and brewpub inside the Old Naval College, at the heart of Greenwich’s tourist district, where it also ran a wonderful pub called the Greenwich Union.

By 2013, Meantime was producing 50,000 hectolitres (8.8m pints) of beer annually and expected to reach its full capacity of a staggering 120,000 hectolitres per year by 2016. Riding on this success, Hook cashed out in 2015, selling his business wholesale to SAB Miller for a reported £120m, providing an instant windfall for its 60 shareholders. This eye-watering valuation was in spite of the brewery making a profit of just £1.5m on sales of £17m the previous year, demonstrating how buoyant the beer industry was perceived to be at the time.

Whatever plans SAB Miller may have had for its newly acquired brand – its first foray into modern British brewing – ground to a halt in 2016 when the South African firm was itself acquired by the largest brewing company in the world, AB InBev. The merger’s strict conditions forced AB InBev to divest multiple assets, which it sold as job lots. Meantime came bundled together with Peroni and Grolsch, and so not much longer than a year after it was sold to SAB, it had new owners in the form of Asahi.

Under Asahi, it's fair to say the brand languished. This is understandable when you consider that the Japanese brewing giant was getting its European house in order after performing a smash-and-grab acquisition of multiple former SAB assets, including Pilsner Urquell in Czechia. In 2019 Asahi made further moves within the UK, adding Fuller’s and Dark Star to its stable. Now playing second fiddle to a far more established brand, in 2022 Meantime would become short-lived stewards of Dark Star with production moved to Blackwall Lane after the closure of the former Sussex brewery’s Partridge Green site.

Fate, it seems, had similar designs for Meantime. It may have come as a shock to hear that in March 2024, Asahi announced it would close the Meantime brewery on Blackwall Lane, and relocate production to the Fuller’s Griffin brewery in Chiswick. But this is as representative of how challenging it is to operate a profitable brewery under current market conditions as it is how the Meantime brand has been battered from pillar to post in the nine years since its initial sale.

It could also be argued that in this time, the brand has been allowed to languish, and lose relevance in a market that simply moved on, failing to find footing with either the younger or older generation of beer drinkers. Then there are the beers themselves, which had become shadows of what they once were, making me recall John Clarke’s scathing quote on Hook’s Mash and Air creations 25 years ago.

The scale of the news might be shocking, and I expect painful to some – especially the affected staff, who have my sympathies. I would be more worried, however, about the security of one Fuller, Smith and Turner, and how the priceless legacy of this 179-year-old brewery now rests in the hands of a corporation that has now twice demonstrated it won’t hesitate to take drastic action if one of its assets is considered to be failing.