As announced on twitter the other day, the wife and I are opening a small sourdough bakery in South East London frighteningly soon, and I’m very proud and excited to reveal both the name and logo, right here, right now.

We had such a lovely response from lots of people wanting to know more and offering words of encouragement, and whilst there’s still a HUGE mountain to climb and lots of questions we don’t have all the answers to, there’s a bunch of stuff that we do know.

Brick House is going to be a small artisan sourdough bakery based on an industrial estate just off Peckham Rye Common in SE22. We’ll be specialising in slow fermentation sourdoughs combing old school methods, with new school techniques that I picked up whilst studying out in San Francisco. All our bread will be shaped, scored and baked by hand, and where possible will use organic ingredients.

Our dream initially was to have some kind of retail location, but despite all the government’s talk of re-generating high streets and backing small businesses, actually getting a loan seems to be about as easy as getting laid in a nunnery, if you’ll pardon the analogy. So to start with Brick House will be a wholesale and delivery business, supplying local cafes, restaurants, shops and pubs.

But we’re also looking at other options of getting our bread into your hands including weekly farmers markets, having a pitch at a train station selling to people on their way home, milkman style door to door to door deliveries, and so on. If any of the above tickle your fancy, or you’ve got any other suggestions, or if you’re a business owner who’s potentially interested in using or stocking Brick House bread, drop us a line.

We’ll hopefully be picking up the keys to our unit on Monday the 16th of April, and at the moment it’s a blank space. There’s lots of work to in terms of buying equipment, plumbing, electrics and getting the space compliant from a health and safety point of view, but we’re hoping to be open for business some time from around mid to late May. Time permitting, I’ll be documenting the process in a diary of sorts here on Hand To Mouth.

So it’s with a bit of a heavy heart that I’ll be saying goodbye to the guys at E5 Bakehouse when I finish work there at the end of this week. I’ve really enjoyed the 5 or 6 months that I’ve spent with the crew down on Mentmore Terrace, but the plan has always been to open up something up ourselves, so it has to be done.

Last but not least, I need to say a BIG thank you to my good friend Tom H of Nation for doing such a sterling job on The Brick House branding and identity. Yet again he’s done me proud.