A Beer in the Loire

by Tommy Barnes

  Xavier wrote down places where I could buy local malt, websites where I could buy equipment and gave me free beer. He also invited me to come and see his brewery In Orléans. In return I gave him two bottles of my third brew – a black IPA. It’s a sort of a cross between a stout and an IPA. Pedants will tell you that there’s no such thing as a black IPA, as the ‘P’ stands for ‘pale’. But I mean, I really can’t even— I mean, who even has the energy to give a shit about that? One of my favourite beers is a black IPA called Conqueror, made by Windsor and Eton Brewery. It has liquorice and coffee flavours but then a wonderful, perfectly balanced hit of citrusy hops to finish. My black IPA didn’t have much of a hop finish. I hadn’t used enough flavouring hops. In fact, I realised I hadn’t been using enough flavouring hops in any of my beers up till now. My black IPA was OK. Interestingly, It didn’t have that slightly astringent taste that my normal IPAs seemed to have. It was inoffensive, but it wasn’t much of a beer, really. I prayed that Xavier wouldn’t try it until I had left.

  After chatting and drinking with Xavier for half an hour or so, we went to the rest of the stalls. All the brewers were very kind and generous. I bought lots of beer. The beer was excellent, but, on the whole, it was traditional French beer. Nobody at the fête was making American IPAs. I saw this as a positive. American-style IPAs would still be new to my customers. We chatted with brewers for a little while, then, as the ragga music grew louder, we got out of there as fast as we could.

  The countryside in May and June was like a slow-motion fireworks display. Dazzling fields of rape exploded out of the springtime from nowhere, and overnight, everywhere you looked was a startling yellow stretching to the horizon. After several weeks it began to fade back to green until suddenly there was another explosion, this time sunflowers saturating almost every field in a warm yellowy orange. Summer had arrived.

  By the start of May Rose was eight months pregnant. I often hear men talk about how pregnancy hormones (technical term) sent their partner homicidal for nine months. Hormonicidal. I don’t know. But I didn’t notice that with Rose. She was really happy. I’ve never seen anyone so happy. And it made me feel terribly guilty. I was pretending that I had everything covered, that I was earning lots of money gardening and by the end of the year I would have a flourishing brewery and the family would live happily ever after. I couldn’t tell her that I hated gardening, I was spending most of the money I earned on croissants and so far, I hadn’t made a beer that was close to something someone would pay for.

  It was time to make some tough decisions. I realised that my biggest outgoings were on croissants and booze. I was spending between twenty and thirty euros a week on croissants alone. I had lots of beer at home; the problem was a lot of it wasn’t that drinkable/possibly a deadly nerve agent, but if I only drank the beer I made, that would save money, and also hopefully drive me to make better beer. I was spending quite a lot on wine, so I decided to cut out wine altogether. After thirty seconds of imagining life without wine I changed my mind and decided to only drink the cheap stuff. I got in touch with Fred, the local vigneron. He lives on a hill outside the village, on the way to Marigny-Marmande, and he looks a bit like Han Solo. He makes fizz that is absolutely shit hot for €4.50 a bottle, and he sells boxes of wine at €15 for ten litres. That would work out at just under €2 a bottle and it is better than any bottle you will get in the supermarket for under a tenner. I met Fred through the football team. I can’t remember when, actually, so I presume it was after one of the veterans’ matches when I was drunk. €15 ten litres of wine. It was perfect.

  ‘It’s still too bitter,’ said Damien, tasting my latest attempt at my staple IPA.

  ‘You make shit cars,’ I muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said it’s supposed to be somewhat bitter, Damien.’ It tasted all right to me.

  ‘It’s too bitter for the French. All my friends say the same. You should try making a blonde beer.’ We leant on his mini bar in his open-plan living room/kitchen, which was divided by a great stone arch that he had built (he had built a great stone arch!). Colleen was being told off by Celia for forging her signature on a school report card, which I thought was very impressive for a six-year-old. Unfortunately, she had spelt her mum’s name incorrectly, otherwise she would have got away scot free and moved on to more sophisticated frauds.

  ‘It’s not bad though. It’s better than the last time. I have a friend who wants to buy some,’ continued Damien.

  ‘Ah, well, I’m not signed up with my tax status yet, Damien, so I can’t sell beer.’

  ‘Yes, you can. Just don’t tell anyone. He wants ten litres.’

  ‘OK. Right. I’ll sell them at three euros a litre.’ I plucked a figure out of the air.

  ‘No problem. I’ll pick them up tonight when I drop off the fence posts,’ he said. ‘Have you thought about making a blonde?’

  I didn’t answer that. I was chuffed, though. I pretended the whole thing was a normal transaction and I was completely OK with it, but I was secretly delighted. Someone wanted to buy my beer! I was going to be rich! Thirty euros! That’s about what it cost me to make ten litres of beer! Oh. Still, the beer was just about paying for itself, which was a start. What was particularly interesting was that Damien was still complaining that it was too bitter but people wanted to buy it. He liked it, I think. Indian pale ales or IPAs, the style of beer I was making, are bitter. They have loads of hops in them and that makes them bitter. Nowadays one uses techniques like whirlpooling and dry hopping (by now I had been reading books) to try get more flavour out of the hops without getting the bitterness, but IPAs will always be relatively bitter and that is a good thing as long as it’s controlled. It gives a lovely crisp finish to the beer and balances it against the higher than usual alcoholic content and the maltiness. Normal French blonde beers use a very small amount of hops and are much smoother, a completely different style, so it is natural that if you tried an IPA like mine you would find it bitter. What I was hoping was that it was a question of the people round here getting used this new style. And the fact that they wanted to buy it suggested to me that this might be happening.

  This was the first time I had sold beer, but I had already begun using it as currency. With the help of Damien I’d bought some fence posts from a local farmer because Rose wanted some sheep. Damien was delivering them for me in exchange for beer. I had also exchanged beer for the use of a battery charger, a pressure washer and, in one of my darker moments, I had tried desperately to exchange it for croissants at the local bakery when I ran out of cash.

  I began to get a trickle of black-market beer customers. Pascal, the builder from down the road, was my best customer. One or two others, friends of Damien mostly. I started a smuggling route, hiding beers in the bottom of a pram my friend had given us for the impending birth of our child and pushing them over to Damien’s house, where they would be distributed. I didn’t make any money from it when I worked out how much it cost to make the beer, but it got my name out there.

  As May rolled into June and the sun returned, we began to venture out again. Friends and relatives came to visit. We would take them to Amboise, an old town on the Loire an hour to the east of us, where we’d get takeaway pizza and peruse the great market along the river, then head to the wine fair in the tunnels under the château to taste a thousand wines. Or we’d go to Blois, or Chenonceau or any of the incredible châteaux and towns on the Loire. As the evenings lightened, we would eat out on the veranda, me glugging Fred’s red and Rose dreaming of a time after the baby was born when she too could glug Fred’s red. The evenings made all the gardening worthwhile. Because there was little light pollution, the night sky was so much fuller than I remembered. Have you any idea how many stars there are? Somebody should do a count or something, because I am dying to know.

  As far as I could tell, Rose didn’t know why she wanted sheep. She didn’t want to slaughter them, she didn’t want to shear them and she certainly didn’t wa
nt to milk them. She made it very clear she wanted sheep, though. I put it down to pregnancy cravings. Some people want to eat charcoal, some people want sheep. I wasn’t entirely against the idea either; it would mean I wouldn’t have to mow the orchard at the back of the house. What it did mean was I had to build a fence. This was my first big DIY project. It was the sort of task the farmers round here would send their children out to complete before going to school in the morning, but to me it was a test of manhood. A test of my virility. In preparation for the fence I had spent a lot of March and April in a life-or-death struggle with the swathes of brambles that covered the perimeter of the orchard.

  I built the worst fence in Braslou. It took me two days and countless exotic swear words, but I built it out of wonky wooden poles and rolls of the cheapest wire fencing I could find, and I felt virile. It was so bad that farmers would stop in their tractors to marvel at it and take pictures, but still I felt virile. When the wind blew the fence rippled and swayed from one end of the garden to the other. But it was definitely a fence. A year before I wouldn’t have been able to build a fence. I was starting to realise something important. Something that I could apply to my beer. And life I suppose, if you’re going to be a hippy about it. If you just go out and try and do something and really persevere, the chances are you will get it done. It might be a shit version of whatever you are trying to do, but you can get it done. And the next time you will know what to do to make it better. Even if you’ve no idea where to begin, you’ve just got to get off your arse and start doing it and things will happen.

  I’d never challenged myself before we moved over here. When you live in a big city and have a meaningless job it’s hard to challenge yourself. It’s easier to tick along. I bet millions and millions of people with beige jobs and beige lives don’t ever challenge themselves, because when life ticks along like that you don’t need to. But the thing is, to feel really, really virile, you do need to challenge yourself.

  Virile. That is a creepy word.

  The more I got to know Damien and Celia, the more interesting I realised they were. Damien was a stonemason, a man who worked with his hands. He was brutally honest. I think the French are more honest than the English in general because they worry less about hurting each other’s feelings, but even for a Frenchman he was very straightforward. But he also carved sculptures. He was an artist. While there is a significant amount of support for the far right in parts of rural France, Damien would rail against the racism and homophobia that existed in some provincial areas. He could be moody (I may be mistaking this for just being French), but then he would do anything for you, whether it meant putting himself out or not, and whether you asked him to or not. One day I found out he was learning the violin, for God’s sake. Nobody plays the violin, do they? Well, do they?

  Celia was an elegant, sophisticated woman who had previously lived in La Rochelle, a fashionable city on the west coast. She was a former showjumper but had somehow ended up in Braslou, like us. Braslou sucks you in. She was practical and hard-nosed and you got the feeling she would be the first to stick up for you in a fight. I don’t know where they met, but here they were.

  Everyone liked Damien and Celia. When you were at Damien and Celia’s house there would be a constant stream of visitors calling in, friends, family, young and old, people from every part of society, having a beer and a cigarette and joking with Colleen. I have always been desperate to be liked, but I found the more you tried to be liked, the less people liked you. Damien didn’t try. That’s the secret, I think.

  At the start of June, I visited Xavier’s brewery, the Octopus Brewery on the edge of Orléans, situated in a large industrial building. I was immediately impressed with his set-up. He had professional signage outside and a well-stocked shop from which he sold all his beer. He stood behind a counter while a constant stream of customers came in and left with armfuls of booze. I’d like to stand behind a counter. I bet I’d feel like ten thousand men, I thought to myself.

  Xavier gave me a tasting of his beers. They were excellent. An award-winning brown Belgian Tripel and a crisp lager. I remarked on how big and professional his brewery was.

  ‘You want to see the big professional brewery? Come this way …’ he said.

  We walked out of the back of the shop into a vast warehouse. I was expecting to see great towering vats bubbling with beer. I expected lots of people to be running around in white coats carrying hi-tech equipment, I had basically imagined it as some kind of laser-satellite laboratory owned and run by a Bond villain, but it was empty save for some bottles stacked in one corner and three metal pots on small stands, each about two feet in diameter, in the other corner.

  ‘This is the big professional brewery!’ he grinned, pointing at the pots.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That is it.’

  I couldn’t believe it. It was like finding out the Large Hadron Collider was powered by a monkey riding a bicycle.

  ‘I could do this.’ I said.

  ‘It’s such a simple system any idiot can make beer from it,’ laughed Xavier.

  ‘I could actually do this!’ I said.

  ‘The trick is making the beer taste good.’

  ‘There’s a very slim chance I could actually do this!’ I said.

  BEER NO. 5:

  Sinister Turquoise Black IPA

  RECIPE

  5.3 kg Maris Otter malt

  250 g Chocolate malt

  250 g Carafa special malt

  100 g smoked wheat

  10 g Nugget hops at start of boil

  1 kg Nugget hops 50 minutes into boil

  MISTAKES

  Use of bittering hops for flavouring

  Overcooling wort

  Not fermenting at correct temperature

  Becoming 75 per cent coffee

  Creating a chemical weapon so terrible it is capable of altering balance of world power

  Naming children is trouble. It’s enough to put you off the whole venture. We’d spent months barking names at each other over the coffee table and only succeeded in realising every name in the world was in some way fundamentally flawed. The problem was, how did you name someone when you didn’t know what they looked like? So we resolved to wait until the birth. Then, we thought, once we saw our baby’s face for the first time, a name would become obvious.

  Finally, here we were in the delivery room in the aftermath of the most extraordinary event one could ever witness, staring at our newborn baby and deciding what to call him. Rose had powered through childbirth with the determination of an Essex smash-and-grab gang liberating a cash machine with the aid of a stolen bulldozer, while at the same time dealing with the whole experience with extraordinary dignity. I had cried like a lost child at a clown convention. It wasn’t for me that I cried. It was when they handed her the baby. The joy in her expression, unfiltered by anything human. Actual pure joy. It kills me now thinking about it.

  ‘Well, do you know his name?’ I blubbed.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ replied Rose. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Um. Wait. It’s coming to me.’ I stared at our baby intently. I examined every detail of his tiny, exquisitely formed face. What was his name? What really suited him? I closed my eyes and went into a deep trance. Rather than my nan’s alarm clock, a fruit machine with names instead of symbols appeared in my head and began spinning furiously, until finally it stopped. And there, as I knew it would, a name manifested in my frontal lobe. A name that had been placed in my head by a greater power. It was so obvious now. It was the perfect name for him. I stopped blubbering and, staring at Rose, who had never looked more wonderful, I took a deep breath and placed her hand in mine, savouring the enormity of the announcement.

  ‘Podgington Squeaker.’

  ‘Podgington Squeaker?’ said Rose.

  ‘Yes Rose, he will be called Podgington Squeaker.’

  ‘I was thinking more along the lines of Albert.’

  ‘Oh, right. Albert. That’s nice too. L
et’s call him Albert.’ I paused for a moment and shut my eyes. ‘Squeaker McGookin.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Albert. Albert is a good name.’

  The care in the hospital in Chinon was sensational. We had an en-suite room with a TV and a bed that you could raise up and down as you pleased. The food was excellent. They kept us in for five days – the norm over here for a first baby (we tried to stay longer, but they threatened to call the gendarmes). A constant stream of friendly midwives came in to coo over Albert. I’d heard terrible things about people giving birth in the hospitals in London: one midwife for ten patients, being left in a cupboard while they tried to find space, but in Chinon it was quite the opposite. It was like being at a spa. I expected to bump into Richard Branson walking down the corridor in a white flannel dressing gown with a face pack made of seahorse poo.

  There were two sheep in our orchard when we arrived home from the hospital with Albert. I’d forgotten about them. On the morning Rose’s waters broke, before we left for hospital, a farmer from down the road turned up with his daughter, a slight teenage girl who wrestled the sheep out of the van with a grip of iron and chucked them unceremoniously into our orchard while he tutted at the fence I’d constructed badly and the gate I’d constructed badly and my general appearance. Initially, I had thought the arrival of sheep must be some kind of sign that Rose was giving birth to the second coming of the Messiah, but then I remembered we had ordered them some time before as part of Rose’s pregnancy cravings. We named them Barbara and Winifred. Barbara was confident and outgoing, but Winifred was bad tempered and would stamp her feet if you went too near her. I didn’t hold it against her. I suspected it was due to deep-seated self-esteem issues.