by Tommy Barnes
I knew Claude would be an interesting guy. When I phoned him to arrange the meeting, he hadn’t picked up, but his answerphone message sounded like an acceptance speech for a Nobel Prize and he had a voice of 10,000 sexual conquests, so I thought I might like him. So when a man in his forties with long grey hair, perfectly coiffed like David Ginola, designer glasses with bright blue rims, smart jeans and a gilet over an immaculately pressed striped shirt, all completed by an enormous pink cravat, strode out of the bar sipping from an espresso cup and holding the saucer up to his chin, I knew he was my man. I also instinctively knew I would buy my labels from this man, regardless of whether he was the cheapest supplier or not. And it turned out he was not the cheapest. In preparation for the market I’d met several other label printers: all were perfectly nice, at least one was cheaper than Claude, but, when I explained to them that I probably wasn’t very interesting to them as I only needed a small number of labels, they didn’t stare into my soul and say in a voice that was so sexy it could probably reverse a vasectomy: ‘It doesn’t matter to me how many labels you want. I exist to meet people, to help people. I exist to help you.’
I already knew what I wanted to my labels to look like. I’d had an image in my head for many months. They would be very simple. Gold lettering printed directly onto the bottle, or onto a transparent label, so it looked like the lettering was printed directly onto the bottle. And it would say ‘Braslou Bière’. And that was it. Rose wasn’t sure about it. It certainly wasn’t in the style of most craft beers today, which are normally labelled with some insufferably self-satisfied combination of street art overlaid with technical drawings and are named Hipster Dribble or some shit like that. Unicycle Oil. Martian Surf Diesel. It’s too easy. Elizabethan Partridge Juice. There, I did it again.
When these great rolls of labels arrived a couple of weeks later, they were exactly as I had imagined. Next, I had to buy a labelling machine to apply the labels to the bottles. The automatic electric labelling machines start at about €3,000. However, I found an Italian-made manual labelling machine that worked with the turn of a handle for a few hundred euros, so I bought that and hoped for the best. It looked like something out of a Tim Burton film, but once I’d managed to fine-tune it to the dimensions of my bottles and labels, it was actually very effective.
Cantonese Owl Brine. Did it again.
On the face of it, making beer sounds like a good money-spinner. The main ingredients – malt, hops and yeast – are fairly cheap. It probably costs around fifty cents for the raw ingredients for one bottle of beer and you can sell it at the market round here for €2.50. That’s a profit of 400 per cent. By the time the market came around, if there were no mishaps I would have 300 bottles of beer to sell. That was €750-worth!
But then you add in the cost of labels. When you are buying on a small scale like I am, your labels come out at thirty cents each. Bottles also come out at thirty cents each. Then you need bottle caps. You need a labelling machine to put the labels on. You need a professional bottle capper. Then there’s all the electricity you use to brew the beer. Then there’s the time it takes to get the beer from the fermenter into the bottles. Making beer takes five hours. Bottling it and labelling it takes days.
For your market stall you need tables, a gazebo, a banner, business cards, tasting cups, carrier boxes for people to take away their beer bottles and a cool box to keep your test beers cold. Most importantly, of course, you need branded aprons. A lot of this stuff was one-off purchases, but for Braslou market, even if I sold all my beer, I would still be well into the red. The beer venture was doomed. That was certain. But that wasn’t the point now. The point was to wear branded aprons. And if the market went well, at least I might go out with a bit of glitter and a puff of smoke.
A week or so after meeting Claude Capaval I was sampling my latest beer in the barn. It wasn’t going well. It was a flavour like licking a rusty tin can. It wasn’t right, but I couldn’t afford it not to be right. I could detect some good flavours in there, so that meant it was OK, didn’t it? I could smell the citrus and the orange that came from the hops. I pretended it was OK. After all, this was the beer I had been trying to make all year. This brew had gone well. I had refined my recipe a tiny bit. This was the beer that I would sell at the market. I changed my mind. It was fine.
It wasn’t fine and I didn’t give it to Damien to try because, whether I was prepared to admit it or not, it wasn’t fine at all, and he would tell me so much. I pretended it was fine.
I had begun brewing the day after Damien’s exhibition, when we had decided to do the marché de l’asperge, but two weeks later, when I tasted the first batch at the bottling stage, it had an odd taste. Rather than risk bottling and wasting another two weeks, I ditched it and started again. I could afford to because I would still have time to make several hundred bottles of beer. But then the next batch I brewed tasted even worse. It was practically the same recipe as the beers I had taken to Damien and Celia’s, but it tasted wrong. They were all wrong.
That evening I went to Fred the vigneron’s to get some wine. I often give him my beers to try and he is very enthusiastic.
The best thing about going to Fred’s to buy wine is that it’s not primarily a financial transaction. This is the case to a greater or lesser extent when you buy wine from any of the vignerons round here. With Fred it was more about tasting wine than selling wine, and it was a social occasion. The business side of things was secondary. I always bought the same thing from Fred and I had tasted all his wines before, but still he insisted on us tasting everything he had before any money changed hands.
It works like this: you go into his cave, which is full of fifteen-foot-tall cylindrical tanks, old cobwebbed bottles and oak barrels, he rinses a couple of dusty glasses off with the hosepipe curled up on the wall outside, and the tasting begins. You start with his white wine. Then his red wine. Then his sweet fizz. Then his dry fizz. Then you taste his white wine again. Then you have more fizz. Maybe a bottle. I try and say things I imagine people who know about wine saying, things like: ‘It’s got intricate tannins.’
Fred wears a forgiving smile. Then we try his white wine again. Then I might say, ‘I like what you’ve done with the tannins.’
Then we’ll try some eau de vie from an unmarked bottle and then anything else Fred can find. At some point he’ll disappear off to the house and come back with some fresh melon that his wife Karine brought home from work. She runs a melon farm. Then we’ll try more fizz. He only has four wines to try, but I am normally still there after two hours or more, leaning heavily on dangerous-looking winemaking machinery and blathering: ‘What I like about this wine is the way its tannins are combining with its other tannins. It’s a tannic harmony.’ (Good name for a band.)
‘Thanks,’ deadpans Fred.
‘Are these tannins different from the other tannins? What tannins did you use?’
‘I don’t … That’s not how it works. They’re just tannins.’
‘TELL ME WHAT TANNINS YOU USE!’
What’s most fantastic about Fred’s wines is they taste of his cave. The old oak you can smell when you are at his cave is the same oak you can taste in his wine. I wanted my beer to be like that, to have this discernible link to it’s origins, except our barn currently smelt of dry rot and mouse craps.
Once we’ve exhausted every available drop of wine, we’ll try my beer, if I’ve brought some.
This time I gave him my latest bottle to try and immediately regretted it. As soon as he opened it, you could smell it wasn’t right. Fred poured it. It was murky. It smelt bad. We tasted it together.
‘I can’t finish it,’ said Fred. And from the look on his face he was being polite. He looked like he was on the verge of collapsing in on himself.
‘OK, but it has good flavours too,’ I said weakly. It was undrinkable. I knew it was. I had known this when I tried it as I bottled it two weeks before, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. I had known this when I t
ried it earlier in the day. Ever since I had agreed to do the market my beers had become increasingly awful.
I could feel myself flushing red. Fred was one of my champions. Up until now he had been telling everyone in the village how good my beer was. Now what was he supposed to say?
Like a twelve-year-old who’d been dumped at the school disco, I fled. But first I drank another bottle or so of Fred’s fizz before loading up the car with boxes of wine, tasting some more of Fred’s red and finally heading home in shame after two more glasses of homemade fruit liqueur.
I couldn’t sell this shit. I mean, it was a pointless exercise anyway. I told myself it didn’t matter because the truth was, without a proper brewery the game was already up, regardless of whether this beer turned out well or not. But the thing was, I needed to sell something for me, just to show I could have done it if things had worked out differently. I needed a victory, but instead I was losing in bigger increments each time.
I started seriously contemplating returning to England in disgrace. Getting back into the rat race. I could already imagine the interview at the job centre: ‘So, Mr Barnes, what skills do you have?’
‘I’m good at thinking up shit band names.’
Portly, moustachioed men in tight nylon tops faded from a million washes, their synthetic fibres straining under the pressure of a lifetime of three-course lunches and sparkling under artificial light, stood facing each other as a cool March breeze wafted the scent of stale red wine around the pitch. This, ladies and gentlemen, was how we did football, Braslou veterans style. Try not to get aroused.
You have to be over thirty-five to qualify for the veterans’ team, but there were players well into their fifties and even sixties playing. It was a Friday-night friendly match. Maybe that was why most of them had been in the bars since the early afternoon, although I suspect they’d have done the same had it been the World Cup final.
I was a relative youngster here. I thought perhaps that for the first time in my life I would be one of the faster players on the pitch, but it turned out that most of the players, even the older men, were more than a match for me.
Nevertheless, it was one of the most enjoyable matches I’d played. When you’re young there’s always a slightly threatening atmosphere on a football pitch. Now, I don’t want to start disparaging young people, but in general, they are hell-bent on mindless violence. Actually, even in veterans’ teams it’s impossible to have twenty-two men playing football without one psychopath going round kicking people: it is a medical fact that one in twenty-two men has a homicidal urge to kick people in the legs as hard as he possibly can. But luckily, in this case, he was on my side. Generally, it was played in a really good spirit. Competitive enough to make it interesting but with one eye firmly on getting comprehensively banjoed afterwards.
I had hardly played football all season, but I just needed something to lift me from the durge. Having a baby in a foreign country away from the support of your family and friends is tough enough. We’d had visits from our family that were always a welcome relief, but for the most part of the last six months it had been just me, Rose and Albert, who was now ten months old, battling through. Once the summer had died away we’d been imprisoned in the living room, huddling round the log burner to keep warm. Looking back, there was so much pressure on us. I mean, we knew a few people; we had Damien and Celia, but they had their own baby to look after. We saw less and less of them as the year wore on.
Then there was our economic situation. Our finances were desperate, the brewery plan was in tatters, but we carried on. The three of us in that room. Nothing was being solved, nothing productive was happening, and we were starting to hear horror stories about getting thrown out of France because of Brexit, an event we’d almost completely missed at the time because we had a one-week-old baby. What’s more, my nan’s alarm clock had started haunting me again, but now all it displayed were four red zeros, flashing alarmingly, and even worse, I was having dreams about living in Aunty Maggs’s house, watching the cliff erode from the kitchen window. The only positive about that time was that being so tired meant it was difficult to focus on anything other than the immediate: gardening, washing bottles, changing nappies, feeding, so that we never really got a chance to stare over the cliff.
But just when it felt like we’d reached breaking point, things changed for the better. It’s amazing how much one’s mood is affected by the seasons. Now it was March and when the sun pushed through you could actually feel the warmth of it. The log burner was only lit in the evenings. The stand at the asparagus market gave me something to aim for, as long as I could work out how to fix my beer. Best of all, at the start of March Albert started spending three days a week with a nounou. A nounou is a sort of nanny, although it sounds more like a witch doctor to me. This meant a great lifting of pressure. It was impossible to get anything done with a baby around, so all of a sudden we were free to get on with things for half the week. The nounou was Damien’s mum, Annie. Annie might be the most remarkable person I’ve ever met. She looks after several children from the ages of six months up to four or five years old. Her first children are dropped off at 6 a.m. and her last child leaves at 6 p.m. Trying to look after one baby took absolutely everything that we had, yet Annie effortlessly marshalled a gang of kids, who would normally be intent on eating superglue and sticking their fingers in plugs, with consummate ease. She had turned it into an art form.
Albert would cry when we left him at Annie’s, but by the time you picked him up he wouldn’t want to leave. He rapidly formed some kind of deep criminal bond with Zoe, who also stayed there.
This is probably not what you’re supposed to say about your children – I mean, you love them more than anything, etc., and all those other things that people say about their children – but suddenly having three days a week away from your child is absolutely bloody fantastic. I mean, it is really wonderful not to be in the company of your child all the time. It’s heaven. People don’t say that enough. It was just the fillip I needed.
At around the same time we brought in Madame Maciet to help round the house once a week. It was the time-saving equivalent of signing Lionel Messi. Madame Maciet was an absolute house-cleaning machine. In her early fifties, no nonsense, all action, she would turn up in her sans permis, a little car about half as long and two thirds as wide as a Mini, puffing out a distinct whiff of burning plastic as it squealed to a halt. Sans permis are these little cars with an engine so small you don’t need a driving licence to drive them. They’re a phenomenon in France. If you don’t have a licence you can buy one of these and buzz around the place at 45 kph per hour. More importantly perhaps, if you’ve been banned for speeding or drink driving, you can hop in a sans permis and you’re mobile again (I’d like to make it clear this was not why Madame Maciet had one). They are almost always held together with gaffer tape, to the point that I wonder if they come out of the factory like that. At the end of the production line there’s just some guy gaffer-taping any bits that look like they are flapping around.
Madame Maciet would march into the house, slam back a short black coffee, give a mesmerised Albert a big kiss on the forehead and then plough through the house, putting everything in order, before finishing every day without fail by slamming back a well-earned beer, and off she’d go in the little sans permis. Rose and I were both working as much as we could, but until now trying to keep a baby alive and a house from descending into chaos was taking up much too much of our time. Madame Maciet and Annie the nounou changed that.
It’s very easy for beer to get contaminated, as it turns out. Any sort of bacteria or wild yeast that happens to be floating by can potentially ruin your beer. Haunted once again by my nan’s alarm clock, I spent sleepless nights reading beer-related internet forums in order to understand why my latest brews weren’t working, and the more I read, the more I realised that the most likely reason was they’d been infected in some way. That was why they were so acrid. It wasn’t at all surp
rising, when I thought about it. The way I brewed was haphazard. Bits of equipment hadn’t been cleaned for weeks. Other bits lay on the floor of the barn, where at night they were probably being used as some kind of sex playground for rats. Great swathes of rats doing it all night on my bloody siphoning equipment. When I pictured it in my head, I was furious with them. All these rats dressed in leather and chains hammering away at each other on my wort cooler. But leaving equipment lying around like that – it was just how I did things. I had always done it. Why do more than the minimum? I always thought. It’s not efficient to do more than the minimum.
I was helping Monsieur Richard out in his hallowed vegetable garden when I realised how I could fix my beer: I had to change. We were digging a drainage canal to better irrigate the garden. How it could have been any better irrigated I wasn’t really sure, but that was classic Monsieur Richard – he stopped at nothing in his pursuit of excellence. I was watching him meticulously cleaning his garden tools when a conversation he’d had with Rose a few months before jumped into my mind.
‘Don’t you have problems with slugs and snails eating your vegetables?’ she’d asked.
‘No,’ replied Monsieur Richard. ‘It’s like anything in life. If it is propre – you maintain it and keep it clean from weeds – it takes care of itself.’