East London has more breweries than any other part of the city, but they don't sit in one tidy row the way ours do down here in Bermondsey. They're spread across four or five distinct neighbourhoods, each with its own character, so "just go to East London for beer" is well-meaning advice that leaves a lot of first-time visitors wandering between the wrong postcodes. We've run guided tastings south of the river since 2014, and we also run a dedicated Hackney Wick tour, so we get asked constantly how the East London scene actually breaks down. This is our honest, area-by-area map of where to go and what to expect in each.
For the full city-wide picture, including South East and West London, see our guide to London's best breweries, area by area - this post zooms in specifically on the East London clusters.
Why East London's breweries cluster where they do
Cheap industrial units, railway arches and canalside warehouses are what made East London's brewing scene possible in the first place, in much the same way that redundant arches gave us our own Bermondsey Beer Mile a decade or so ago. As those areas have gentrified, some of that cheap space has disappeared, but the clusters that established themselves early - Hackney Wick, Walthamstow's Blackhorse Lane, and the pub-and-bottle-shop scene around London Fields - have stuck around and, in most cases, grown. Knowing which cluster suits your day matters more in East London than almost anywhere else in the city, because the areas don't connect to each other quickly on foot.
Hackney Wick and Fish Island: the canalside cluster
Hackney Wick, tucked against the Hertford Union Canal and the edge of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, is probably East London's best-known brewery postcode. Crate Brewery and Howling Hops both trade around Queen's Yard, combining working breweries with proper canalside pub space - the kind of place you end up staying for three pints longer than planned because the view's too good to leave. It's a tight, walkable cluster by East London standards, closer in spirit to Bermondsey than anywhere else in this guide, and it's the area our own East London tour is built around. We've covered the full route, venue list and opening-hours caveats in our dedicated Hackney Wick breweries guide, so head there for the detail if this is your main target.
London Fields and Hackney Central: pubs, bars and bottle shops
A short bus ride or a twenty-minute walk south west of Hackney Wick, the character changes completely. London Fields and Broadway Market aren't really about brewery taprooms - they're about a dense run of independent pubs and bars with genuinely good, rotating craft beer lists, plus a few excellent bottle shops for anyone who wants to take something home. Further into Hackney Central, Five Points Brewing Co runs a well-regarded taproom around Clarence Yard that's worth the detour. It's a better fit if you want variety across many producers rather than one brewery's own range. We go into more depth on this whole borough, including the bottle shop picks, in our guide to craft beer in Hackney.
Blackhorse Lane, Walthamstow: East London's other beer mile
North east again, and a different scene entirely. Walthamstow's brewery cluster has built up over the last decade around Blackhorse Lane and Forest Road, anchored by names like Wild Card Brewery, one of the longest-standing in the area, Exale Brewing for hop-forward pales, Signature Brew (part taproom, part live-music venue) and Forest Road Brewery. Big Penny Social, a converted Victorian bath house, isn't a brewery itself but is a good anchor point, pouring from several local producers under one roof. It's more spread out than either Hackney Wick or Bermondsey, so budget proper walking time between stops rather than expecting an arch-to-arch crawl. We cover the full route and how it stacks up against our own patch in the Blackhorse Beer Mile guide.
Bow and the canal towpath
Bow sits just east of Hackney Wick along the same stretch of waterway, and while it doesn't have the density of taprooms that Hackney Wick does, it's worth knowing about if you're already walking the towpath - a handful of smaller producers and bottle shops have taken units here as Hackney Wick's own rents have risen, and the canal path makes it an easy, scenic extension to a Hackney Wick afternoon rather than a separate trip in its own right. Treat it as a bonus stretch rather than a destination on its own.
How the East London clusters compare
If you only have half a day, Hackney Wick is the easiest win - it's compact, canalside, and has the fewest gaps between good stops. London Fields suits anyone who prefers bars and variety over dedicated brewery taprooms, and works well combined with the Saturday stalls on Broadway Market. Blackhorse Lane rewards a slower, more deliberate day with more walking, and tends to feel less crowded than Hackney Wick on a warm weekend. None of the three connect quickly to each other by public transport, so our honest advice is to pick one area per visit rather than trying to string all three together - you'll enjoy whichever one you choose a lot more if you're not racing the clock to catch the next bus.
East London vs our own patch in Bermondsey
We're obviously biased, but it's a fair comparison to make since a lot of our guests ask about it directly. The Bermondsey Beer Mile's railway arches sit closer together than any East London cluster - you can walk between four independent taprooms in under fifteen minutes, which is what makes a guided tasting format work so well down here. East London's clusters are brilliant, but they're built for a slower, more exploratory day rather than a tight, tutored crawl. That's actually why we opened a dedicated East London tour rather than trying to force our Bermondsey format onto a different geography: our Hackney Wick Craft Beer Experience (£41.25pp, selected Saturdays) is a two-hour guided tasting through three Hackney Wick venues, led by a working brewer, built specifically around how that area actually works.
Practical tips for a brewery day in East London
Check opening hours before you travel - taproom hours in all three areas shift more often than a typical high street pub, especially midweek, and turning up to a closed unit is the single most common complaint we hear from guests who've tried a DIY crawl. Weekends, particularly Saturday afternoons, are by far the busiest time in every area covered here, so if you want space at the bar rather than a scrum, an early weekday visit is worth the trade-off. Wear shoes you don't mind getting a bit of canal-path mud on if you're doing Hackney Wick or Bow, and budget more travel time between areas than Google Maps suggests, since East London's transport links run more efficiently into central London than they do between its own neighbourhoods.
Bringing a group, or gifting the day
If you're planning a birthday, work social or stag or hen do around East London's breweries, a DIY crawl gets harder to organise the bigger the group gets - table space in Hackney Wick and Walthamstow taprooms fills up fast on weekends. Our Hackney Wick Craft Beer Experience runs as a private booking for groups of 6 up to 60 or more, and if you'd rather keep things south of the river instead, our Bermondsey Beer Tasting Tour (£49pp) and Cheese, Meat & Beer Tour (£65pp, Saturdays) cover the same tightly-packed format we mentioned above. See our private and group tours page for details on booking a bigger session. And if you know someone who'd enjoy a guided East London beer day more than you'd trust them to plan one themselves, our gift vouchers are bought directly on that page, delivered instantly by email, and never expire.
The honest summary: East London's brewery scene is genuinely excellent, but it isn't one place - it's three or four distinct neighbourhoods that each reward a different kind of visit. Pick Hackney Wick for a compact canalside afternoon, London Fields for variety across bars and bottle shops, or Blackhorse Lane for a slower trail further north east. Whichever you choose, we'd still argue there's nothing quite like the density of our own Bermondsey arches - but we would say that.