PINtPRESSDispatch14 November 2026 · Beer & brewing

London Pride @home

Pinter and Fuller’s have put Pride in a pouch you brew on the kitchen counter, with a different yeast in the sachet. So what has to stay the same for it still to be Pride?

At the end of October, Pinter launched London Pride Home Edition, a kit that turns a pouch of concentrate into ten pints of Pride in your own fridge. It is billed as a collaboration with Fuller’s. The product page lists the ingredients. One entry raised the question anyone who knows Chiswick will ask first. Which yeast?

Ten pints and a dial

A Pinter is a pressurised keg you ferment in. You add water and the concentrate, which comes in a pouch Pinter calls a Fresh Press, pitch a sachet of yeast, leave it a week, then move it to the fridge to condition and pour it from the tap on the front. Pinter’s page for the Pride pack recommends seven days brewing and five conditioning, with three as the minimum for the second, and sets the carbonation dial to 5. On 5 November 2026 the pack was £24.99 and in stock.

Pinter’s launch post on 29 October talks about working “alongside a British brewing institution like Fuller’s” and about getting “that signature balance right”. The tasting note on the product page is “Malty. Amber. British.”, with “a rich, sweet backbone of toasted malt” and “a subtle whisper of fresh, piney herbs from the hops”, and it signs off “Clean, complex, and supremely well-rounded.”

The format is older than the collaboration. The Beer Machine was already on sale when Popular Mechanics compared it with three other home brewing kits in March 1995, and it reached Britain in time for Christmas 2005. Its own site called it “a pressure vessel and a fermenter and a dispenser all in one”, sized to sit in the fridge, fed by a mix of malt, hop extract and water with the yeast supplied alongside it, and pouring beer in seven to ten days with no bottling.

It is a cousin rather than a twin. It made seventeen pints rather than ten, and it needed small CO2 cartridges, against a gauge, for conditioning and for keeping the pressure up as the beer went down, where a Pinter runs on the fermentation and a dial. But the refill is the part that should stop you. The Beer Mix came as a stand-up foil pouch marked “Just Add Water”, still sold in Australia. Hold it next to a Fresh Press and the thirty years do not show. The hop extract is the part of the Pride pouch we have the most questions about.

The yeast question

Fuller’s has a famous yeast, and we have written about it at length, so we will keep this short. When we covered the strain Firestone Walker built Double Barrel Ale on, John Keeling wrote to us to say Fuller’s never had a separate ESB yeast. “All pitching yeast came from London Pride fermentations because it was the best and easiest yeast to use.” The house yeast is the Pride yeast. Every Fuller’s drinker knows what it brings to the glass, even the ones who could not tell you it was the yeast doing it. Fuller’s wrote in March 2015 that both its house strains were kept off site under liquid nitrogen and “cannot be shared with any other brewer”.

Fuller’s made the point itself in 2022. In the brewery’s own video for Cask Ale Week that September, its brewers described ESB as having the same ingredients as London Pride and being brewed alongside it on a parti-gyle, the same English malt and the same hops, but to a higher gravity. The gravity is what brings the yeast’s fruitiness forward, and they said the orange is less noticeable in Pride. Asked what the Fuller’s yeast gives a beer, the answer was to go and taste ESB. So, on their account, Pride has a fainter version of ESB’s yeast character.

Fuller’s reseeds its cask beer. Des de Moor, in Cask: The Real Story of Britain’s Unique Beer, describes the brewery removing practically all the primary-fermentation yeast by centrifuge, then adding a measured dose of fresh yeast. That is what the trade means by reseeding. A different strain could go in at that point, and de Moor says the brewers he asked saw no reason to, because the main fermentation culture performed well enough in cask.

Yeast is not only the thing that turns sugar into alcohol. It decides which sugars are left behind, makes flavours of its own, and sets how the malt and the hops arrive in the glass. The same wort fermented with two strains gives two beers. In a beer people know as well as they know Pride, that is not a detail.

The Home Edition’s ingredient list ends with “Yeast: Spark”. Spark is one of Pinter’s own strains. Pinter introduced it for Sunlit, its lager, in a post headed “the lowdown on our latest lager yeast”, as “a strain designed especially for lagers that produces very clean and crisp flavour characteristics over a wide range of fermentation temperatures”. The same post says it attenuates further than Balance, Pinter’s lager and ale hybrid strain, and copes “from cooler conditions to warmer ale fermentation temperatures”.

Pinter’s yeast line-up describes Spark more simply, as “a strain that produces very clean and crisp flavour characteristics over a wide range of fermentation temperatures”, with no mention of lager. The same list runs to five strains, and the first is an English ale yeast, Loyalty, “a mild english ale strain designed to accentuate malt or hop forward beers”. The Home Edition lists Spark rather than Loyalty.

Pinter’s help centre has moved past both descriptions. It calls Spark “a highly versatile strain suitable for both ales and lagers, delivering clean, well-balanced flavours”, and says the company is “currently transitioning from Loyalty to Spark yeast, with some of our Pinter Packs”. It adds that some Fresh Presses “may still include Loyalty, despite saying Spark on the website”.

So the first question is not why Spark was chosen but whether the pack on the kitchen counter holds Spark at all. Pinter confirmed the transition to us in writing when we asked. The website listing does not necessarily identify the yeast supplied in an individual pack.

Which leaves what Pinter intended for this collaboration. Loyalty is the strain Pinter built for malt-forward ales, and Pinter’s own tasting note for the Home Edition opens with “Malty”. Was Spark the intended choice for the Home Edition, or is its listing part of the wider transition?

Every Pride clone recipe we found that names a yeast reaches for an English ale strain. Brew Your Own offers Wyeast 1968, White Labs WLP002 or Lallemand London ESB, fermented at 20°C. The community recipe on The Malt Miller comes with a pack of Wyeast 1968. Both 1968 and WLP002 are commonly taken by homebrewers to be the Fuller’s strain, though neither supplier says where its strain came from. A yeast family tree built from sequence data in 2018 puts 1968 in the Whitbread B group, named for a different London brewer, That relationship does not establish the commercial culture’s brewery of origin. Dark Rock, selling a Tribute to London Pride kit, admits the limits plainly: every commercial brewery has “its own water profile, brewing equipment, fermentation techniques and house yeast”.

One plausible answer for Spark, though Pinter has not given its own, is that a concentrate is not a mash. The kit is malt extract and glucose-fructose syrup, and fermenting that out cleanly is a different job from brewing Pride at Chiswick. A clean strain with high attenuation is a defensible choice for it.

The starting material is the part that changes most. At Chiswick a brewer settles in the mash how much of the sugar will ferment out and how much will stay behind as body, long before the yeast sees any of it. A Pinter owner opens a pouch where that has already been decided. The concentrate and the yeast have to be designed as a pair, and the strain that suits the brewery is not automatically the one that gives ten reliable pints in a kitchen.

There are two ways to build a beer like this. One is to reproduce the ingredients and the process as closely as the equipment allows. The other is to start from the finished glass and change whatever needs changing to arrive somewhere recognisable. A concentrate fermented at home may well need the second. What we do not know is which parts of Pride the two of them decided were the ones worth keeping.

Four hops, or none named

Two smaller questions sit behind the yeast. Fuller’s launch blog for Unfiltered names four hops for Pride: Northdown, Challenger, Target and Goldings. Fuller’s brewers named the same four again in that 2022 video, the shared hop bill being the point of it, with extra Goldings going into ESB’s fermenter to lift the hop notes and an extra week in the maturation tank before that beer goes to cask. The homebrew clones use the same hops, give or take the Goldings, and so does the recipe French & Jupps publishes. The Hertfordshire maltster dates its earliest records of supplying Fuller’s roasted malt to 1870, and gives the London Pride recipe from the brewery’s head brewer Guy Stewart, tailored “to produce 520hl at 1041SG”. The Home Edition lists “hop extracts” and names no variety. Extracts are a perfectly respectable way to get bitterness and aroma into a concentrate. We would just like to know whether these come from the Pride hops.

The other is the body. The same recipe puts it at 6,700kg of pale malt, 550kg of crystal light and twenty kilos of chocolate malt, which is about a quarter of one per cent of the grist. The maltster puts it carefully: the amber colour lies “in part” with their chocolate malt. “French & Jupps Chocolate Malt is an essential ingredient for us,” the head brewer, Guy Stewart, tells them; it “reliably provides the rich colour and distinct flavour we demand in all our beers”. The Home Edition’s tasting note promises “a rich, sweet backbone”, and we would like to know how Pinter got there from extract and syrup.

Fuller’s own shop lists the malt for the 500ml bottle as Pale Ale, Crystal and Chocolate, and the malt for the 440ml can as Pale, Crystal, Chocolate and Amber. It lists the same four hops for the bottle; the 440ml can’s page does not show its hops. So the shop describes the malt differently for the can and the bottle. Which Pride the Home Edition was copying is a question with more than two answers.

Which Pride was the reference?

Pinter gives the Home Edition as “4.7% approx”. Cask Pride is 4.1%. Asahi’s 2021 notes to editors give Pride as “4.1% ABV (cask & keg), 4.7% (bottled)”. The Home Edition’s figure matches the bottle listing, which is a clue and only a clue: it does not establish that the bottle was the reference.

But Pride is not two strengths any more. Asahi’s own wholesaler, Nectar, lists London Pride three ways: fifty litres at 3.4%, a nine-gallon cask at 4.1%, and 50cl bottles at 4.7%. Fuller’s Pride Lager is a separate listing at 4.5%. Asahi Direct and the LWC catalogue have the keg at 3.4% too. We have found no announcement of the keg coming down from the 4.1% that Asahi’s own 2021 notes to editors gave it. What Asahi has said, through its UK sales director Dhati Holohan in December 2025, is that 3.4% is an emerging “sweet spot”, for drinkers moderating without going alcohol-free and for the duty it saves. She was talking about the category, not about Pride.

And the cans are a fourth entry rather than a repeat of the bottle. Fuller’s own shop gives both the 440ml can and the 500ml can at 4.1%, the cask number, while the bottle beside them stays at 4.7%. Asahi Direct, the brewer’s own trade arm, lists that same 24 by 500ml can case at 4.70%. Two parts of the same company give one pack two strengths.

Pride without the fish

One small word on Pinter’s page caught our eye. It says Vegan.

Cask Pride is not. Barnivore keeps a separate record for Fuller’s Cask Beers, marked Not Vegan, and in May 2026 Fuller’s told it the cask “uses isinglass making the beer not suitable for vegans”. Back in 2013, in a reply filed under London Pride, it explained why: “All of our cask beer use isinglass finings to speed up the process of dropping bright in the cellar.” Isinglass is collagen from the swim bladders of fish. Cask beer leaves the brewery with live yeast still in it, finishes conditioning in the pub cellar, and has to drop bright on the stillage before anyone pulls a pint. The finings carry a positive charge, the yeast a negative one, and the yeast clumps and falls to the bottom of the cask. A good cellar does the rest.

Bottled Pride gets bright another way. In the same May 2026 email, Fuller’s said the bottles are cleared with a Stabifix product rather than isinglass, which is why the bottle is vegan and the cask is not.

So a vegan beer can still be clarified, as the bottle shows. At home, Pinter says its recommended brewing and conditioning times “will increase clarity”, and cold and patience let the yeast settle. What we cannot tell from the page is what happens before the pouch is filled. Has the concentrate been clarified, and are finings or any other clarification aids used in making it? The answer decides how close the next comparison is.

Pride on a centrifuge

Fuller’s has offered a different Pride before. In 2017 it launched London Pride Unfiltered, a keg Pride poured at 4 to 6°C, colder than the cask. We have told the whole story separately, so here is only how it was made. Keeling explained it in a video posted that September. It was brewed like cask Pride, with the house yeast and a little extra hop in maturation, and parted company only at the end. Cask Pride went into the cask with finings. Unfiltered had none. It went through a centrifuge instead, which spins the suspended material out rather than settling it, and which is not a filter: it need not take everything with it. Every extra step, he said, risks stripping something out. “It will leave the beer hazy but with more flavour.”

The centrifuge is not the departure, though. On de Moor’s account Fuller’s spins its cask beer too, before the fresh yeast goes in. What separates the two is what happens after the spin. The cask gets finings and a measured dose of live yeast, and then finishes conditioning in the pub cellar. Unfiltered received no finings and went out cold in a keg.

If the Home Edition concentrate is made without finings too, Unfiltered is the earlier case of Fuller’s letting Pride go without the clarification the cask gets. The comparison stops there, though. Unfiltered kept the brewery’s yeast and the brewery’s process and changed how it was finished. The Home Edition changes the brewing process and names a different yeast. How its concentrate is clarified is one of the things we still want to know.

The name travels

So Pride has gone without finings once before, on a centrifuge in Chiswick with the house yeast and the Pride hops. Now there is a Pride brewed on a kitchen counter and finished in a fridge, with Spark listed in the ingredients and the brewery’s blessing.

PerfectDraft’s six-litre keg is another Pride for the home, and it has been on sale longer than the pouch. Their page gives it at 4.1% and, unusually for anything in this piece, says why. It is “kegged at 4.1% to ensure it replicates the same quality you’d receive in cask at your local pub”. Pride Lager is not in their catalogue at all.

Homebrewers had put the two side by side before Fuller’s was involved. An owner asking r/Homebrewing in 2021 whether anyone still built a self-contained pressure vessel like his Beer Machine was pointed straight at the Pinter, and agreed it “looks a lot like the beer machine”. What he could not do by then was buy mixes for his own. That is the quieter difference, and the louder one is that Pinter has a brewery’s name on the box.

And the pouch is not the only new Pride this year. In April, six months before the Home Edition, Asahi launched Pride Lager, 4.5%, brewed at the Griffin Brewery with Target and Opus hops and fronted by Joe Marler, in an announcement that called it an expansion of “the Pride family”.

So the name is doing a lot of travelling this year, and in two directions at once. Plenty of people would like a Pride poured fresh from their own fridge, and the cask will still be at the pub.

PINtPOINT shows where drinkers have recently logged a beer, and how long ago, from Untappd. London Pride is on it. We will see if the kitchen version turns up.