Nearly any sane person stepping up to the bar at The Old Brewery in Greenwich would spot the taps for Meantime London, lick his or her lips and think ‘great brews’. The name is already a clue this new establishment has something to do with beer.

Only a certified cafenatic would look between those taps, spot a La Marzocco espresso machine, lick his lips and also think great brews, albeit of another kind. Happily, neither master brewer Alastair Hook nor his guests – a rectangular table of fellow food bloggers eat like a girl, Food Urchin, Scandilicious, a Scot in London and with knife and fork – managed to peer inside my warped mind and so I was able to sit down, clear my head of coffee and savour the pairings of beer and food he had so generously arranged for us. This required little effort: Straight off, the matching of Meantime London Porter and Irish Carlingford rock oysters was for me a taste breakthrough – the smokey minerality of the unexpectedly elegant Porter playing up to the salinity of the oysters. I shared this observation, word-for-word, with Hook and he was no doubt pleased to be opening minds to the possibilites of beer and food matchmaking.

It’s most fortunate that Hook, for all his revered talents, is no mind reader. Otherwise he might have discovered my second blunder of the night. Upon spotting the golden-foam-capped glasses of Meantime Hospital Porter introduced in a dessert pairing to decloy sticky toffee pudding I had one sweet thought: iced coffee! Shakerato, maybe. Or frappé.

It was only when I asked Hook if I could try The Old Brewery’s burger did I see any signs of irritation. Here Hook had indulged us with a confit Middle White pork terrine followed by neck of Herdwick mutton braised in Meantime India Pale Ale and I was still hungry (and foolish?) enough to request a burger and chips. Naturally he had no way of knowing that at every opportunity I’d been seeking out truly great London burgers for the BurgerMonday meetups and eatups I’ve been organising.

Turns out I’d misread Hook’s exasperation. What troubled him about my request, which he satisfied without a second thought, was not its impertinence but rather the challenge it posed: finding just the right beer for a burger. Here was the ultimate paradox: a combo that comes so naturally to most of us – a burger and a beer – frustrating one of our greatest authorities on the arts of brewing and beer-and-food partnering.

I urged Hook to stare down his fears by agreeing to host a BurgerMonday. He’d get lots of help in his effort to finally find the perfect Meantime beer for The Old Brewery’s very good burger. Lots of help. I think he is game. Hook is a guy who loves to, as he says, “lubricate the situation”. That’s what got him into the beer trade in the first place.

While Meantime brewery revives London’s once glorious brewing heritage, its most recent forerunners are the microbreweries of the US as well as the great and still thriving breweries of Germany and Belgium. US brewpubs were likewise an inspiration for the much grander ambitions of The Old Brewery restaurant. Hook therefore has a soft spot for Americans, which perhaps works in my favour. The brewer of artisan English beers made with the finest malts of East Anglia and the prized hops of Kent nevertheless reserves his highest praise for Budweiser, a top-selling and notoriously insipid American brew.

“It’s very very hard,” says the brewmaster, “to prepare something that tastes of nothing”.

“Actually there are no good waves in Wellington,” says chef Miles Kirby (at right in photo), co-owner of Caravan, a new restaurant roastery on London’s Exmouth Market.

“Bit cold in Wellington for surfing,” adds Chris Ammermann, Kirby’s partner and fellow expat.

Who knew?

Perhaps thwarted in their search for surging breakers between the banks of the Thames, Kirby and Ammermann have caught another kind of Antipodean-ridden wave – the third wave of coffee in London. They’ve installed a 10-kilo coffee roaster in the basement of Caravan, making it the first restaurant in the UK to also practice trade as a coffee roaster, shop, retailer and wholesaler.

Caravan has already made world-class coffee connections. Kirby and Ammermann source their green coffee beans from Mercanta, a leading importer of speciality coffee, and rely on a champion-calibre barista to extract their most desirable characteristics. Caravan’s coffees, once roasted and rested, are brewed in-house on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays by 2010 UK Latte Art Champion Neil Le Bihan of Exchange Coffee.

Kirby’s approach to both food and coffee is global. As chef or roaster he’d never limit his inspiration to a single continent. His favourite coffee of the moment is the Rwandan Musasa Cooperative (red bourbon varietal). Its tropical fruitiness informs Caravan’s Brazilian-anchored espresso blend (and Le Bihan’s hanging tulip latte) yet is best appreciated on its own, as filter coffee slowly cooling in its cup. The flavours evolve.

From late morning through lunch, the Caravan coffee experience is influenced by greasy, smokey fumes blowing into the restaurant from the sausage stand directly out front on Exmouth Market. Kirby and Ammermann applaud the improvised fusion. Downstairs, another unplanned mingling of cooking vapours is taking place. Air currents push the exhaust from the coffee roaster back towards the kitchen and its sizzling frying pans.

How would Kirby feel if his cooking oils absorbed the roasting fumes, imparting coffee notes to falafel and soft-shell crab as they fried?

“If it happens,” responds Kirby, philosophically, “great!”