Ask anyone who works near Waterloo Station about "the BrewDog" and they won't picture a cosy taproom — they'll picture the sheer size of the place. Built into a stretch of the old Eurostar terminal, BrewDog Waterloo has bowling lanes, a podcast studio, an on-site microbrewery and enough floor space to swallow several ordinary pubs whole. We get asked about it fairly often, usually by people comparing it to our own guided tours a few miles south in Bermondsey, so here's an honest look at what it actually is, what's there, and where it fits (or doesn't) if what you're really after is good independent beer. We've been running tasting tours in London's railway arches since 2014, so we're not neutral about small taprooms — but we'll try to be fair.
What is BrewDog Waterloo?
BrewDog Waterloo opened in August 2022 inside Waterloo Station itself, in a commercial development called The Sidings, tucked underneath platforms 20-24 in space that used to handle Eurostar passengers before international trains moved to St Pancras. BrewDog has billed it as the biggest bar the company has ever built — reported at around 29,000 sq ft with capacity for well over a thousand people across multiple areas. Numbers like that shift as venues open, close or get remodelled, so treat any specific capacity or size claim as a snapshot and check BrewDog's own site if it matters to your planning.
What's actually inside
The scale is the whole point, and BrewDog has filled it with attractions well beyond a normal bar layout:
- Duckpin bowling lanes. A small bank of bowling lanes sits within the main space, bookable alongside your drinks — useful for a group that wants an activity built in rather than just standing around a table.
- A podcast studio. A proper recording room kitted out with microphones and equipment, available to book — an unusual amenity for a pub by any measure.
- An on-site microbrewery. Small-batch and venue-exclusive beers are brewed on the premises alongside the standard BrewDog core range on tap, so there's genuinely fresh beer to find if you look past the famous names.
- Dozens of taps. Multiple bars pour a wide rotating selection, from Punk IPA and Hazy Jane through to guest kegs and cask lines — easily the widest single-venue tap list most visitors will have seen.
- Extras that come and go. Ping pong, private dining rooms, big screens for live sport and, at various points, novelty additions like a slide or an ice cream counter have all featured. What's live on any given visit varies, so check the official site before you build a trip around a specific feature.
What it's actually like to visit
It's loud, big and unmistakably designed for volume rather than intimacy. On a Friday evening you're sharing the space with commuters heading home, station drinkers grabbing a quick pint, and groups who've booked bowling lanes or a private room — it can feel more like a very good airport bar than a neighbourhood pub, in a way that's either exactly what you want for a big group night or not remotely what you're after if you'd rather talk to your friends without shouting. Prices sit above your average high-street pub, as you'd expect from a station-adjacent venue with this much overhead — check the official site or the venue itself for current pricing rather than relying on anything you read online, ours included.
Booking, opening times and getting there
BrewDog Waterloo sits directly inside Waterloo Station, so it's about as easy to reach as a London venue gets — literally under the platforms, a few minutes from the main concourse via the Underground, National Rail or the Jubilee/Northern/Bakerloo lines. Walk-ins are generally fine for a casual drink, but bowling lanes, the podcast studio and any private dining space are typically bookable in advance and can get busy around commuter hours and weekends. As with everything else in this guide, check BrewDog's official site for current opening hours, activity pricing and booking links before you head over, since these things shift more often than a pub's chalkboard menu.
BrewDog Waterloo vs a Bermondsey taproom crawl
This is the comparison we actually get asked about, so let's be straight about it. BrewDog is a global-scale brewery — genuinely important to how British craft beer grew up, and its Waterloo bar is an impressive piece of hospitality engineering. But it's one enormous room from one big company, built for spectacle and throughput. A short way south, the Bermondsey Beer Mile is the opposite shape entirely: a strip of small, independent breweries in railway arches, each brewing its own beer on-site, each with its own taproom, its own regulars and its own story. Neither format is "better" in the abstract — they're just different nights out. If you want scale, activities and a party atmosphere in one room, BrewDog Waterloo delivers that well. If you'd rather taste beer brewed a few feet from where you're standing, hear the stories behind it from someone who actually makes it, and move between several small taprooms in an afternoon, that's the gap our tours are built to fill.
Why we still back the small railway-arch taproom
We're obviously not neutral here, so take this with the pinch of salt it deserves: the reason we started running tours in 2014 is that Bermondsey's arches were doing something London's bigger venues weren't — small-batch beer, brewed on-site, poured by the people who made it, in spaces with no interest in being the biggest anything. Our own roundup of London's best breweries, area by area covers plenty of ground beyond Bermondsey too, from Walthamstow to Hackney Wick, if scale isn't what you're after and you'd rather find the small independents doing their own thing.
Planning a group visit
A big station bar like BrewDog Waterloo can genuinely suit a large, loose group who mostly want somewhere with space, screens and an activity to book. But if you're organising something for six people or sixty and want more structure — tasting notes, a guide, a route between several independent breweries rather than one room — our private tours are built exactly for that, and we cover the wider case for it in our guide to team building ideas in London people actually enjoy. Gift vouchers work well here too: ours are bought directly on our gift vouchers page, delivered instantly by email and never expire, so there's no pressure to use them before a specific date.
Make a day of it
If you're in the area for BrewDog Waterloo anyway, it's an easy add-on to a longer London beer day. Our perfect craft beer day out in London itinerary strings together a free heritage walk, a Maltby Street lunch and an afternoon tasting tour through the Bermondsey arches — worth a look if you fancy pairing the biggest bar in the BrewDog estate with a very different, much smaller kind of beer discovery on the same trip.
The bottom line
BrewDog Waterloo is worth seeing at least once if you're near the station and curious — it really is a striking piece of hospitality design, and the on-site brewing means there's genuinely fresh beer among the famous names. Just go in expecting a big, loud, activity-packed bar rather than a quiet pint with atmosphere, and check the official site for current opening times, prices and what's actually bookable on the day you're going. And if what draws you to beer in the first place is the small, independent, brewed-right-here version of the story, our Bermondsey Beer Tasting Tour is 2-3.5 hours, £49 per person, beer included, across four independent taprooms in the Bermondsey railway arches, meeting at Southwark Brewing Co, 46 Druid St — a very different afternoon to a station bowling lane, in the best way.