Less than five months after opening its own Tap Room in Myddleton Road, Bowes Park's Bohem Brewery has had to install new brewing equipment to cope with demand for its authentic Czech lagers.
The brewery is located in a former shop in Whittington Road. The opening of the Tap Room in April and the resultant increase in sales meant that brewer Petr Skoček was able to give up his other job as a dustcart driver to concentrate on his real vocation.
Bohem beers are available not just at the Tap Room, but also at the Prince in Trinity Road, Wood Green, and at the Blue House Yard Night Markets. And they've proved so popular that a change of plan was needed. Bohem's Zdeněk Kudr explains:
"A situation occurred that we did not count on. Or at least not nearly as soon as expected. Due to increasing demand for our beers, we reached our production capacity very quickly, and, what is worse, were no longer able to offer you our beers in bottle. Simply you were consuming so much draught Bohem lagers that we had no beer left to bottle!
"So, we had to make a hard, but inevitable decision. A decision we expected to make next year but not this. A substantial production capacity increase. Therefore, we stopped brewing for three weeks from the end of June. Three weeks during which we have had to re-build our brewery from scratch. We have built a huge new cold-room, necessary for even better fermentation of our Lagers. We have bought brand new fermenting vessels from the Czech Republic and significantly increased our production capacity."
The Bohem Tap Room is open until 11pm daily (last orders 10.30pm). It opens at 5pm on Mondays to Thursdays, 4pm on Fridays and 2pm at weekends and on public holidays. There's live music on Wednesdays from the aptly named Swing Bohème.
If you're under the impression that "lager" is by nature bland and boring, a visit to the Tap Room could well change your mind. As Zdeněk Kudr says, "We fundamentally believe that lager can be an incredibly interesting and varied beer style and promise that we will not slacken in trying to prove that to others...."
