A Beer in the Loire

by Tommy Barnes

  ‘Your final day will be 27 February. I must say, I’m really excited for you and Rose. There’s no way I’d be brave enough to give up the security of my job and a regular salary and move to France unless I had a rock-solid plan to make a living over there like you do. What’s the plan again?’

  ‘Well, it’s really very simple, Emma. Rose is going to be a famous artist and I’m going to write a comedy/crime thriller bestseller and brew internationally renowned beer and sell it to the French.’

  Emma broke into a fit of coughing. I thought I was going to have to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. Luckily, she recovered before I could. I’d only performed the Heimlich manoeuvre once before, and that was on a vicar choking on a sausage roll at a village fête. I say Heimlich manoeuvre – I don’t actually know how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre, so I punched him in the stomach repeatedly until he threw up into the tombola.

  ‘Oh. Good luck with that,’ said Emma. ‘Send us a postcard.’

  Charlus stared at me. A large, rugged man in his early twenties with the presence of a storm cloud. He stood square on, no more than a metre away. I didn’t know where to look. A couple of the other lads giggled in the corner. One of them said in French, ‘Look at him stare!’

  I glanced at my football boots and round the modern changing room, which was much better than the ones in England, doing my best to avoid eye contact, wondering when Charlus was going to hit me in the face. After several seconds I plucked up the courage to look back at him. It was then I saw it wasn’t an aggressive stare. It was an inquisitive stare.

  The French like to stare. I had forgotten that. And why not? There’s nothing wrong with looking at each other. It was common in Richelieu, the local town, for someone to stare at you as you walked all the way from one end of the street to the other. It wasn’t aggressive; they just wanted you to say hello to them. In England if you stare at someone it is inexplicably viewed as an act of war – one must immediately find a car park in which to thump each other – but in France it’s perfectly OK to stare while you work out what on earth a tubby, 38-year-old Englishman with a large, unkempt beard is doing in the changing rooms of your local football club, ASJ Braslou.

  The reason, as it happened, was that on my trip back to the UK for my brother’s fortieth birthday, people had generally met me with the phrase, ‘You look well.’ They meant, ‘Jesus, you are one fat, fat fuck.’ The constant boozing and all the delicious French cheeses I had consumed over winter had combined to have a profound effect on my waistline and I had resolved to do something about it when I got back to France by joining the village football team. Not only that, one of the downsides to moving to a new country is you leave all your friends and family behind. Now, I have always been quite an independent person, and by that I mean not very popular, but no matter how comfortable you are with your own company, one soon realises one needs to socialise. One needs to be part of a group.

  ‘You live here now?’ said Charlus. I could barely understand his French. It was thick, fast and heavily accented.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You have a woman?’

  ‘Um. Yes.’

  ‘She is French?’

  ‘No, English.’

  Charlus seemed relieved that I hadn’t come over to steal his women. He stared at me for a moment longer and then turned around and began getting changed.

  As I walked out to the pitch I felt someone put their arm around me.

  ‘Welcome to the countryside!’ said Charlus, with a big grin, in the same way that St Peter might welcome you through the Pearly Gates. I liked Charlus.

  I hadn’t played football for six years. Before the training session I remembered myself as a player with skill and class but who lacked aggression and a winning instinct. As it turned out, my memories were 50 per cent correct.

  I chugged around artlessly for an hour and a half, swinging my limbs vainly in the direction of footballs that I could just about make out through sheets of sweat. Everything was exhausted. My teammates enjoyed the spectacle a great deal. I was twenty years older than most of them. To an unknowing onlooker it must have looked like a group of young men were baiting Pavarotti.

  They realised quite early on that I wasn’t the star player who was going to transform their season. In fact they realised that almost immediately I arrived, when I revealed my cheese-crafted body in the changing rooms before we’d got anywhere near the football pitch, so rather than focusing on improving me as a footballer, they took it upon themselves to teach me to swear properly in French. They were just like English footballers really. They were loud, crude, and most of all they were very funny. The humour revolved almost entirely around bodily functions, but they were funny.

  The big difference between ASJ Braslou and English teams I had played for was that after the training (which finished at 10 p.m.) everyone went into the Braslou clubhouse, where they handed out beers and crisps – so far so normal. However, much to my astonishment, after about twenty minutes they all sat down either side of long trestle tables and had a cooked meal with a glass of red wine. It was actually civilised. Most conversations were still punctuated by musical farts, but still, it was civilised. It was like eating with a family. I couldn’t understand what most of them said – they were farmers and tradesmen who had thick accents and talked in slang – but they were kind to me, the atmosphere was warm and jovial and they went out of their way to make me feel welcome. We were starting to be accepted into the village.

  I talk about the people of Braslou as if they are some kind of lost Amazonian tribe. They’re not, as far as I know. I should check that. But you can get from our house in Braslou to London in two and a half hours, door to door. It’s not exactly the other side of the world. Braslousians are good, generous, normal people. However, there are cultural differences and language barriers and so it was a relief that I was feeling like I was starting to belong.

  When I heard the hiss as the cap came off, I was overcome with pride. Pride that I had managed to do something that I never thought would be possible. It reminded me of the first time I had sex, both the feeling and the duration. I tasted it. It wasn’t bad! It was fizzy, it was alcoholic, and it tasted of beer. The Citra hops were coming through. I was a genius!

  ‘It’s too bitter,’ said Damien. ‘And it has a funny smell.’

  For a moment I was deeply hurt. I wanted to tell Damien that the French knew nothing about beer and they should stick to topless sunbathing and building shit cars, but I gathered myself and tasted it again. He was right. I knew he was right. Dammit.

  ‘It’s not bad, though. It’s very good for a first go,’ added Damien, standing by the door of the kitchen. Damien very rarely sat down in our kitchen. I don’t know if he just didn’t like sitting down or if it was the etiquette in France to ask someone to sit down in your kitchen, otherwise they would loiter. I was constantly worried about French etiquette.

  He was right again. It wasn’t perfect, but it was drinkable and it wasn’t realistic to aim for much more than that with one’s first brew. Pride and elation returned. For a moment the whole brewery idea didn’t seem entirely ludicrous. It was mostly ludicrous, yes, but not impossible.

  ‘Have you thought about brewing blonde beer. People round here like blonde beer,’ said Damien.

  ‘Yeah. I will brew a blonde beer one day. No probs.’ I said. I had no intention of brewing blonde beer. The craft beer revolution was built on IPAs, not blonde beer. People round here may not realise they liked IPAs, but they would get it eventually.

  By now, Damien and Celia had become our heroes. Whenever we walked past their home (a lovely old farm house situated on the edge of the forest with horses in paddocks and a tower that Damien had built himself – he was a stonemason – he’d built a tower!), their daughter Colleen, a sort of a West End musical combined with the mischief of Groucho Marx and squashed into the body of a six-year-old, would stick her head out of the window and shout, ‘Coo coo!’ and they would invite us in
for a drink. They invited us to dinner parties and introduced us to their friends despite our appalling French, they translated voicemail messages that we couldn’t understand because of our appalling French and they told us we didn’t have appalling French. At least that’s what I think they said. They may have said we do have appalling French. What the French actually say to us is so often a grey area. They made sure we didn’t get ripped off by the local tradesmen – Damien had lived in the area all his life and knew them all – and so, while to them we were just an awkward English couple who had inexplicably moved to their village and were incompetent in all the ways of the countryside, unbeknownst to them they were our new best friends. We had to play it cool and not tell them they were our best friends, but they were. I’m not even sure they liked us. I mean, we had nothing to offer them, but they were the kind of people who would help you out, regardless of whether they thought you were a couple of fools from England who didn’t know their own arses. They were good people. Our secret best friends. It was only natural that I should invite them over for the first tasting. Celia couldn’t drink of course. By now, rather marvellously, she was pregnant too. She was due three months after us. It was great for Rose to have someone else with whom to express mild disapproval of Damien and me. We were tasting my beer on a Saturday morning after all.

  I held my bottle of beer up to the light and marvelled at it. The first evidence of people making beer was 8,000 years ago. Come to think of it, I think they were still selling it in my old student union. But I was a beer maker now. I was part of an 8,000-year-old tradition. I was a mystic. A village elder. I had arrived.

  ‘To control nature is to control one’s destiny, says I,’ I said.

  ‘Says I?’ said Rose.

  ‘Yes. Says I.’

  ‘Why are you talking like a pirate?’

  ‘Here, Damien, take some bottles and give them to your friends. It would be interesting to know if the people round here will like this style of beer. It’s nothing like the beer they brew round here.’

  ‘Says he.’

  ‘Quiet.’

  BEER NO. 3:

  Chicken-Flasher IPA

  RECIPE

  6 kg Maris Otter malt

  500 g German Wheat malt

  20 g Nugget hops at start of boil

  20 g Citra hops after 75 minutes

  20 g Citra hops after 85 minutes

  20 g Citra hops post-boil for 10 minutes

  15 g lager yeast

  MISTAKES

  Not oxygenating the wort

  Incorrect amount of sugar for carbonation

  Impersonating a mobster

  Trying to pay tax

  It was late March. Winter’s frosty grip was loosening and the people of France began to emerge from their houses. In the fields all around us asparagus grew in long strips covered by plastic.

  Burt had taken to eating the solar lamps in our garden. One morning I found the stems of several lights piled up on the lawn like chewed ribs. He was not a fan of renewable energy, proof of what I already suspected: he was here to destroy the world.

  I brewed my second batch of beer in much the same way as the first, but without the unnecessary discomfort of wearing only Y-fronts. I made sure to dispose of the used malt straight in the bin so Louis couldn’t use it as some sort of full-body irrigation therapy. There’s a stage of the brew process called the boil, after you’ve got all the sugars out of the malt and discarded it, where you boil the remaining liquid for normally an hour or so to get rid of any unwanted bacteria that might ruin it. This is also the stage where you add hops to flavour the beer. Depending on when you add the hops during the boil, they do different things. Adding hops at the start of the boil gives the beer its bitterness. The more you add, the more bitter it becomes. Adding hops later in the boil, with ten or five minutes to go, imparts the other hop flavours. Depending on what type of hop you use, these could be anything from tropical fruit to floral to grassy and herbal. After Damien’s criticism that it was too bitter, this time I added fewer bittering hops at the start of the boil and more hops at the end of the boil to reduce the bitterness and give it more of the exotic fruit flavours that the Citra hop can impart.

  A plan was starting to form. It wasn’t a plan I would ever really carry out, because it required dedication and a degree of skill; it was more of a fantasy, really. I would invest in another fermenter or two, which meant I could now have several beers fermenting at the same time. I could focus one fermenter on perfecting a staple beer, the beer that I would sell regularly – a strong, American-style IPA, like my favourite beer, Big Job, and I would use the other fermenter to experiment with other styles of beer. Once I had perfected my staple beer I would somehow invest in a professional microbrewery and start selling it at the local markets and farm shops. Nobody in the area was making beer like mine. In England now there was a microbrewery in every town, making IPAs with hops from around the world, but this trend hadn’t reached rural France. This, I decided, meant one of two things. Either the market was primed for a brewery like mine and I would clean up, or, equally as likely, the French, who are notoriously picky in their tastes, had no interest in this style of beer and I would fail. I resolved to find out. To establish a brewery and actually start bringing in some money would take time, though, and, as the image of my nan’s wood-panelled alarm clock – which since the day I’d found out we were having a baby appeared every time I closed my eyes, counting down to some terribe unknown – reminded me, this was time I did not have. The GrainFather was fine for home brewing, but, due to economies of scale, to brew enough beer to sell at a profit I would need bigger, more professional equipment. Expensive equipment. No. Rose was right. I would need to get some kind of part-time job to bring in more money. Not office work, though.

  Nick and Claire were barbecuing chicken. We had been introduced to them by our friends Ali and David, who lived in Richelieu and knew everyone. Both couples were expats. The good sort, though.

  Some expats move to France and make a great effort to learn the language and immerse themselves in French culture. Others don’t learn any more French than they need to order a beer. They’re the ones who only mix with other British people. They organise fish-and-chip nights, they are outraged when shop staff don’t speak English and, without a hint of irony, they sit outside the PMU café in Richelieu bemoaning families from Bangladesh that move to England and don’t integrate. Damien doesn’t like expats who don’t try to learn French. He says it shows a lack of respect to move to France and not learn French. I think he’s right. I remember going to a dinner party when we had first arrived and listening to some absolute bore banging on about how integration wasn’t important. His mum was an Italian immigrant in America or somewhere and she hadn’t integrated at all and they were all fine. I wanted to say, ‘You’re not fine, you’re a gargantuan douche box,’ but I’m terrified of confrontation, so I left it. But I mean, if no one integrates, if everyone stays in their little groups, then everyone is poorer for it. You learn a lot from other cultures, you make new friends, and cultures are ingrained in the earth that you stand on. They develop from their environment. If you want to live in that environment, of course you should join in. It’s not like people are asking you to disown your own culture. You add to it.

  There’s a reasonable-sized expat community in our area. Not as big as the ones in Brittany and the Dordogne, where there are so many Brits that some villages have British mayors, but there are a significant number of Brits. Most of them are retired. All of them live in old houses that they have renovated. The French have mixed feelings about them. Damien was weary of expats buying houses and not living there all the year round, meaning that villages were half empty when it wasn’t high season, but the way I see it, half these houses would have fallen into ruin if they hadn’t been bought by the Barrys and Deborahs from the Home Counties and restored.

  Nick and Claire weren’t your typical expats. They weren’t retired, they were in their early fort
ies and used to work in finance in the City, but they had packed it in, like us, and now lived all year round in a beautiful old village on top of a hill called Faye-la-Vineuse, about fifteen minutes from Braslou. They made their money gardening for people with second homes in France. They spent their days in the sun and their nights barbecuing and drinking local wine. It seemed like a great way to make a living. While Nick prepared the barbecue, I bored him with my financial predicament.

  ‘I’ve got so much work that I could pass you some of my clients if gardening is something you’re interested in. There are lots of elderly expats and people with holiday homes who need their lawns mowing and their hedges trimming when they are back in England,’ said Nick as he shoved a beer can up the chicken’s arse and placed it upright on the barbecue. For a moment it looked like it was flashing me until he closed the lid on the barbecue to let it cook.

  ‘You know what, Nick? I think I might be interested in that.’ I mean, how hard could gardening be? Only that morning I had watched one of our neighbours, Monsieur Richard, driving an enormous sit-on lawnmower replete with beer holder round his garden in the sunshine. Never had I seen anyone so satisfied. He rode around like he was Henry VIII , so I thought to myself, Yes! Gardening! It’s basically just suntanning on the move.