A Beer in the Loire

by Tommy Barnes

  I forced myself to read some of the denser chapters of How to Brew, I listened to hours and hours of beer-related podcasts, and eventually I decided the problem was the water. More specifically, the pH level of the water. Ideally, in the mash, you want the pH level to be between 5.2 and 5.5. You see, different styles of beer are suited to different water types. For instance, the pilsner style of beer (from a town called Pilsen in the Czech Republic) developed in an area where the water is extremely soft, so they could use very light-coloured malts, which don’t affect the pH balance and produce a balanced beer. Stouts, on the other hand, with their darker, roasted malts, which lower the pH level in the wort, developed in areas with water that contained a lot of bicarbonates, so that the dark malts balanced out the bicarbonates in the water. This was the case in Braslou. The water was very high in bicarbonates. That could have been what was giving my beer these ‘off’ flavours. I needed to add darker malts to balance out the bicarbonates.

  Now, the chemists among you may have spotted in this last paragraph that I don’t really have a clue what I am talking about, and that much of what I said is scientifically incorrect. But it’s not entirely my fault. Understanding the chemical composition of water is like trying to solve a crossword with the clues written by Mr Blobby. How can adding calcium sulphide to water reduce the alkalinity when calcium is alkaline? Is there calcium in calcium sulphide? If you know the answer to that, then just fuck off. And some of what I said is true, by the way, for those of you sniggering at the back. It is to do with bicarbonates. And stouts and pilsners and the like did develop because of the different levels of minerals in the waters. But that’s all I can fathom. What was clear was this: darker malts worked better where I lived. Therefore, I needed to make beers using darker malts.

  I didn’t want to only make stout, though. I like IPAs like Big Job. I wanted to make IPAs. And I like Abbaye beers like Leffe. You can artificially alter the chemical composition of the water to suit different beers using various menacing-looking white powders – indeed, most breweries do this if they are not lucky enough to be sitting on the right type of water in the first place – but this seemed like cheating to me. I wanted my beer to be sucked from the very earth I stood on. The answer, I decided without any research whatsoever, was to make a red IPA. Greenwich Meantime Brewery make a beer called Yakima red and it is one of my favourites. I was pretty sure that they were getting the red colour in their beer by using darker malts, maybe Munich malt, which is darker than a standard paleale malt, but not properly roasted like a chocolate or Carafa malt, which you might use to make stout. Hopefully, if I used the right amount of Munich malt it would be dark enough to counterbalance the bicarbonate in the water (stop sniggering at the back). I presumed this would work with Abbaye beers as well. You get darker Abbaye beers too. Leffe make a brown beer. There were loads of them. And so I started adding more dark malts.

  Initial results were positive. The acrid aftertaste disappeared in both the IPA and the Belgian Abbaye. All of a sudden I was starting to make beers that were good. As well as this, I experimented with dry hopping my stout with Mandarina Bavaria hops to give them an aroma of orange. I should explain dry hopping. Normally you add your hops on the day you brew the beer when the wort (the liquid that will become beer) is boiling, but when you dry hop you add the hops several days after the brew day, when the beer is fermenting in the fermenter or even when it has fermented and is in the keg. By adding the hops at this late stage, and letting them sit in the beer for a few days, you get a really strong hoppy flavour, but without getting the bitterness. It’s how they make the powerfully hopped American IPAs. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an IPA, though. You can dry hop anything. People often think it’s a new technique invented recently by trendy American microbreweries, but it’s not. It’s a technique that started in England a while back. I’m going to say 1892 but, between you and me, I have no fucking idea. Old English brewers would put a little plug of hops in the cask just before they sealed it so that when it was opened it would give a blast of fresh hops. That’s how dry hopping started.

  The beers weren’t perfect – the IPA was underhopped, the Belgian beer had too much Munich malt and the stout was too bitter – but these were fixable by simple adjustments. They were interesting beers. Drinkable beers.

  Michael, an English builder we’d met at a dinner party at Mishi’s house, fitted the wood burner for us. Michael is the sort of person who is a godsend when you move to France. Firstly, he is a lovely man who would go out of his way to help you. Secondly, he’s been here for fifteen years or more, he speaks excellent French, he knows all the tradesmen, he knows how much everything should cost and therefore he can tell you immediately if someone is trying to rip you off.

  The wood burner transformed the house. There’s lots of advice about how to calculate the size of wood burner you need to heat your living room, but it involved equations and, well, you’ve read enough by now to know that wasn’t going to work out, so I just bought the biggest one we could afford. I probably should have done the equations because it proved to be as hot the centre of the sun. At full power it was so strong that although it was situated in the living room, we’d be forced to stand against the far wall of the kitchen next door, as far away as was physically possible while remaining in the house to stop ourselves being incinerated. There were times in January when we would have all the windows on the ground floor open just to try and stop from overheating.

  Naming beer is difficult nowadays. The problem is, people always take things too far. I don’t like the direction the craft beer movement is going in. There’s an element in craft brewing who are obsessed with the numbers behind beer. They want to turn it into an exact science. They want to calculate everything to death. If you listen to them talk, in minutes you’d be convinced they’d worked out the equation for the perfect pint. That they could punch all their numbers into a computer and some kind of godly IPA would pour out of the USB port. Message boards on craft beer forums are full of these twats trying to outnumber-crunch each other. There are beer labels now that have so much information on them – the number of IBUs (International Bitterness Units), clarity level, the SRM (Standard Reference Method) colour value – that they look more like the results of an MRI scan. There are organisations that produce definitions of what a beer style should be. Each style should be of a certain bitterness, a certain malt balance, a certain colour, otherwise they are not correct. Well, fuck you, dorks. This happens with everything. It’s something certain types of men do to make themselves feel better about their miniature cocks. They overanalyse, they like to think they are in control of it all. They want everyone to know they have the answers and they are the bestest. I mean, just shit off. I am not interested. I hate this approach for three reasons:

  We are talking about taste. It’s subjective. You can’t create the perfect beer because no one would agree on it.

  It takes all the fun out of it. Numbers take the fun out of everything. Have you ever done a jigsaw with an accountant? Me neither. Sounds dull as fuck though, doesn’t it? Beer making should be about smelling, tasting, experimenting. Not sitting on a carousel, shitting numbers all over a giant Excel spreadsheet.

  If you follow this philosophy it means you are signing up to a world of preciseness. A digital world of 1s and 0s. You are devolving responsibility for the flavour of your beer to a calculator, and last time I checked, calculators don’t drink beer (I haven’t checked, but I’m fairly certain this is still true*).

  It was this sort of thinking that led to giant industrial breweries ruining beer for the best part of a century. I want to brew in the moment. I want my beers to taste different each time. I want beers to reflect the mood I was in when I made them. God, even writing this is making me feel alive. Death to technology! Not Nespresso machines, though. They have definitely added value to the world. But death to everything else!

  I decided that I would have no part in these current trends. If I ever came to start se
lling beer properly, I would call my principal beer Braslou Bière and nothing more. Perhaps it was an IPA, but I didn’t want to get into classifying my beers because it wasn’t a straight IPA. I decided not to list anything more than I was legally obliged to on the label. I couldn’t have given less of a fuck what IBU rating it had. Whether its SRM colour level was not sufficient for an IPA was as important to me as the colour of John Major’s undercrackers.

  *Calculators don’t have mouths, that’s my reasoning.

  BEER NO. 6:

  Electrocuted Chicken Porter

  RECIPE

  4.5 kg Pale malt

  400 g Chocolate malt

  300 g Roasted barley

  20 g Nugget hops at start of boil

  50 g Mandarina Bavaria hops in fermenter

  MISTAKES

  Not enough mouthfeel

  Allowing too much oxygen into the beer when bottling

  Not electrocuting Burt enough

  General insanitariness

  Trying to fit a quarter of a ton of malt into a toy car

  Pushing Louis to commit a terrible act

  I suppose we started electrocuting our animals around Christmas time. We began with the dogs, of course. The problem was we were going to England for three weeks over Christmas and New Year and we were planning to leave the dogs in France (with a house-sitter, before you phone the RSPCA, who wouldn’t be able to help anyway because they are not French – touché) and they’d started jumping over the fences, so we had to try and keep them in. How Burt managed to jump the fences was bewildering – he was as fat as can be, but he was managing it and we had to do something. So we bought this wire that you bury underground and collars that gave them a shock if they got too close to the wire. It scared the shit out of them. It was awful. It is wrong to electrocute animals, I know that, but we had to do it or the dogs would have escaped onto the road and been hit by a car. But it didn’t end there because, as anyone who has done this will know, electrocuting your animals is addictive. By the time February came round we were in full swing, electrocuting everything we could lay our hands on.

  In March a miniature horse arrived, something to do with Rose’s pregnancy cravings, which was odd, because Albert was now nine months old, so it seemed only right that we bought another electric fence so we could electrocute him too. Joyously, we realised if we put the sheep in with the horse then we could electrocute them as well. It was only the chickens that we didn’t electrocute. And not for the want of trying, let me tell you. When I think back to it, I wonder if I could have wired them up to a faulty toaster.

  The horse was delivered by an extraordinary woman called Valérie – a character straight out of some kind of American soap opera. She wore fur coats and drove around in a bright pink horse carrier, and she had a way of charming you while treating you with complete disdain. She charged us an outrageous price for the miniature horse, but it was very hard to say no to her. Even when she insisted on taking one of our sheep as petrol money.

  The horse was a Falabella called Gadget. Falabellas are a miniature breed. The thing was tiny, the size of a fat Alsatian dog. But, as Rose explained to me, he was still a stallion because he was an uncastrated male. In fact, once you got to know him, you realised he was a proud stallion. He held his head high, he trotted with the pomposity of an emperor and he galloped around the field as if, in his head, he was some kind of thoroughbred racehorse. I liked him and began to mimic his body language when I was around the town. He didn’t like me much though, because every time I went near him, he tried to bite me.

  ‘Try breathing up his nose. That will calm him down,’ suggested Rose as he stomped his hooves at me one day while I tried to pat him on the head.

  ‘OK, I’m doing it. Does he look calmer?’

  ‘Well, he’s certainly warming to you.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘He seems to be getting aroused. You’re arousing him.’

  ‘I’m arousing him? Is that good?’

  Before Rose could answer, I found out it wasn’t good. Gadget reared up at me (this sounds more frightening that it actually was: he only came to about my waist) and tried to mount me. I ran, of course, and Gadget chased me round the field for several minutes, determined to hump me.

  And that, my friends, was the time I was sexually molested by a miniature horse.

  At the end of February, I took samples of my new beers over to Damien and Celia’s for tasting. Damien happened to be holding an exhibition of his sculptures at his house. The whole of the open-plan ground floor was full of magnificent stone carvings of all shapes and sizes.

  Colleen was in trouble because Damien had left her in his truck while he nipped into the supermarket and when he came out an angry mob had formed. It transpired that every time someone walked past the truck, Colleen had given them a polite wave and a loud blast of the horn, which, being on a truck, was basically a slightly scaled-down version of a foghorn. Several people had apparently screamed and dropped their shopping. Colleen’s defence was that she was just being friendly.

  There were several people there, including the Mayor of Braslou, Madame Leclerc. I was desperate for them to taste my beers because I thought they were pretty good.

  We started off with the Braslou IPA.

  ‘It’s too bitter, but it’s nice,’ said Damien.

  ‘Shit cars.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said “thanks”.’

  ‘It’s brilliant,’ said Rose. ‘It smells of oranges and pine.’

  We moved onto the Belgian beer.

  ‘But it’s fantastic!’ said Celia.

  ‘It’s really good,’ said Damien. ‘You could sell this, you know.’

  ‘If I had a proper brewery I would.’

  ‘But why can’t you sell the beer you’re making now at the market?’ asked Celia.

  ‘Because I’m not making anywhere near enough. My equipment is home-brew equipment. It’s not for commercial use.’

  ‘But you have all your authorisations. You’re taxregistered; you’re registered with revenue and customs. How much can you make in one go? Forty bottles?’

  ‘Well, after racking it off, I’m normally left with twenty to twenty-one litres. At thirty-three centilitres per bottle, that’s around sixty bottles.’

  ‘And how many times a month can you brew?’

  ‘I have three fermenters and the beer sits in them for two weeks, so six times a month if I really had the time.’

  ‘So you could make three hundred and sixty bottles a month!’ said Damien.

  ‘You know it’s the marché de l’asperge in April? If you can make enough beer, you can have a stall there if you want,’ interjected Madame Leclerc.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose I could, if I had the time,’ I said.

  Damien stifled a scoff. He has a very different work ethic from me. Damien heads off to work at 7.30 a.m., gets home at 6 p.m., and then tends to his vegetables, his animals, his various building projects, his sculptures and his children. This is a man who has never wasted a minute of his life. I knew it would be futile arguing the importance of spending forty-five minutes of quality time alone every evening, centring myself, both spiritually and physically, on the loo. So I ignored him and continued, ‘I mean I could do the market, yes. If you think the beers are good enough. I doubt I would make any money because I’m producing on such a small scale.’

  ‘You could sell them at two euros a bottle,’ said Celia.

  ‘Because they are so good?’

  ‘No. You just say they’re artisan beers. if you say anything is artisan, that means you can overcharge for it.’

  ‘Oh, right. Thanks. I’d have to get labels for the beers and more bottles and stuff. But it might be worth it.’

  ‘I’ll help you,’ said Damien. ‘I know everyone in the village. I’ll get loads of people to buy your beer. You’ll have no problem selling it.’

  ‘Really? It’s going to be a morning’s work, at least.’


  ‘Yes. No problem. I’ll man the stall with you. We can use my truck. We’ll load it up with your beer the night before and drive it down in the morning. I even have a mini bar that we can use to serve from.’

  ‘Well, that’s brilliant. Let’s do it!’

  ‘OK, but we’ll need aprons with “Braslou Bière” printed on them.’

  ‘We’ll need aprons?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not doing it without an apron with “Braslou Bière” on it.’

  ‘OK, Damien. No, absolutely. We’ll get aprons.’ To this day I don’t know why Damien insisted on getting branded aprons, but I was into it. I once read that for a period during the early 1980s Blackie Lawless, lead singer of the rock band W.A.S.P., would utilise an exploding codpiece to give his stage act that certain je ne sais quoi. Ever since then I had always wanted my own exploding codpiece, but the inherent danger of hanging dynamite around one’s nuts had put me off. No, a branded apron, while still equally as rock and roll as an exploding codpiece, seemed more, I don’t know … more me.

  There isn’t a better-groomed man on the planet than Claude Capaval. Capaval isn’t his real surname, it’s the name of his business, I think, but it suits him. It gives him the air of a chivalrous knight. I met him on the terrace of the bar in Cravant. Cravant is the best winemaking village in the Chinon denomination. It’s a linear village, like so many of the villages in the area, strung out for kilometres along one road just above the flood plain of the Vienne, surrounded by vineyards. Interestingly, on the opposite side of the river is the village of Tavant. It’s nice that they made it rhyme. I once had a pen pal from the village of Tunting in the east of France. Sadly, they didn’t ever adopt the same naming policy for the village opposite Tunting. Actually, that would have made it Crunting. That’s less funny than I had hoped.