Craft Beer Taproom Near Me in Bermondsey: Anspach & Hobday's Arch House

Anspach & Hobday pours its porters and pale ales from The Arch House, a railway arch taproom at 118 Druid Street, London SE1 2HH, roughly a 700-metre walk from Bermondsey Underground and about 1,150 metres from London Bridge. Anyone typing craft beer taproom near me on the south side of Tower Bridge lands in the thick of the Bermondsey Beer Mile, and this arch is one of its oldest stops. The bar opens Wednesday from 5 pm to 9:30 pm, Friday 2 pm to 10 pm, Saturday 11 am to 10 pm and Sunday 1 pm to 7 pm, and it stays shut on Mondays and Tuesdays.

The brewery is named for its two founders, Paul Anspach and Jack Hobday, childhood friends who started home brewing at university and now sign off as co-founders on the brewery's team page. Their own site says the journey began in Bermondsey in 2013, inside an arch the pair initially shared with the Bullfinch Brewery tap room until 2015. What got the business off the ground was The Porter, a 6.7 percent dark beer that took second place in a commercial brewers' competition while the two were still amateurs, and that result helped fund the first kit.

In March 2020 most of the brewing moved south to a larger site in Croydon, which is why cans now read Bermondsey born, made in Croydon. Druid Street did not go quiet. The arch reopened in 2021 as The Arch House, a tap rather than a production floor, and the next-door arch became The Grain Store, where the team runs fermentation experiments. Standing at the bar you are still under the same brick vault where the porter recipes were first worked out.

Twelve beers run on tap, and CAMRA's listing for the pub counts up to two cask lines next to the keg fonts, which matters if you came for the bitter rather than a hazy pale. Start with London Black, a 4.4 percent nitro porter that pours with a creamy head and has been brewed gluten-free since batch 218, packaged on 10 November 2025. It is the beer the brewery now treats as its flagship, and it drinks lighter than its colour suggests.

The IPA deserves a place in the round because it is the beer that won Champion IPA of Britain and a silver in the Supreme Champion Beer of Britain contest at CAMRA's 2024 awards. If The Porter is pouring, order it for history's sake, since it is the beer that started everything. The Ordinary Bitter is the low-strength choice for anyone pacing a long afternoon. CAMRA members get 10 percent off cask ale here, so bring the membership card if you have one.

The room is long and narrow, with benches pushed against the brewery wall, a handful of tables and a small upstairs balcony that seats fifteen to twenty people. On a fine evening most drinkers end up on the Druid Street pavement with a glass in hand, watching trains rumble overhead. Capacity tops out at around 100, which is why the whole venue can be hired for birthdays and leaving dos through the events team.

There is no kitchen, and the brewery says so plainly: it suggests picking up food from the Maltby Street and Druid Street market traders before you settle in. Something hot from the stalls a few minutes away sits better with a nitro porter than a bag of crisps. The bar also runs an off-licence fridge, so you can leave with cans of whatever you liked best instead of buying from a supermarket later.

Saturday is the day the Beer Mile fills with groups walking arch to arch, and the brewery itself describes Saturday afternoons as exceedingly busy and tells drinkers to arrive early. The doors open at 11 am, and the first hour is the calm window, when you can still grab a spot on the mezzanine. By 3 pm the pavement is three deep and the tables have long gone.

Weekday evenings are the easy alternative. Wednesday opens at 5 pm, and Thursday is the one day the brewery's pages disagree: the Arch House page and CAMRA list 5 pm to 10 pm, while the where-to-find-us page gives 3 pm to 10 pm, so turning up after five covers both. If the arch is packed and the queue for the bar is ten people long, walk on to the next stop and loop back later rather than waiting it out.

Groups of six to twenty can book a private tasting in the arch for 25 pounds per person. The package includes a welcome pint and four half pints chosen by the team, plus 10 percent off at the bar once the tasting is over, which makes it the cheapest structured way for an office group to try the range. Table bookings for smaller parties are offered through the Arch House page, and full venue hire goes through the events contact.

This is a sensible plan for a birthday on a Saturday, when walk-in space is scarce and a booked table spares the group from standing on the pavement for two hours. One honest note: a tasting is overkill for two people, who will do better simply walking in at 2 pm on a Friday, when the bar has only just opened and the benches are still empty.

Druid Street makes a natural starting point for a crawl east along the arches. A short walk back along the same street, Fabal Beerhall at 88 Druid Street pours British craft lager under the Hiver name, and Hiver's own taproom sits about 150 metres away in Arch 56 on Stanworth Street. Further along, the route continues past Maltby Street Market and on towards Enid Street, where several more breweries and a cidery share a single block of arches.

For a gentler finish, walk ten minutes north to the river and the view of Tower Bridge from Shad Thames, where the old warehouse lanes are empty by early evening. Pace the day with halves rather than pints, because the arches are close together and the strengths creep up quickly once the barrel-aged stouts appear on the boards.

Address: The Arch House, 118 Druid Street, London SE1 2HH. Nearest stations are Bermondsey on the Jubilee line, about 700 metres away, and London Bridge, about 1,150 metres away, and buses 47, 188, 381 and C10 stop within 300 metres. Hours are Wednesday 5 pm to 9:30 pm, Thursday from late afternoon to 10 pm, Friday 2 pm to 10 pm, Saturday 11 am to 10 pm and Sunday 1 pm to 7 pm, and the bar is closed Monday and Tuesday. Private tastings cost 25 pounds per person for six to twenty guests.