A Beer in the Loire

by Tommy Barnes

  ‘For the thousandth time, yes, Father.’ This was the relationship I had with my father. He was never convinced I was doing things properly. Well, maybe all those other times in my entire life he was right, but not this time. I was thirty-nine years old. I had a son of my own now. I was a man.

  ‘Switch the pump on, Father.’ I said in a deep voice.

  The two of us stood in the brewery, staring each other down. This was the moment. In every father and son relationship there’s a point when the balance of power shifts. When the son finally becomes a man and the father has to cede to him. The son becomes the head of the family because he is the stronger. The moment.

  Dad switched on the water. Immediately an unsecured hose burst from its connection and flailed like a strand of Medusa’s hair, spraying water – which I had carefully heated to 76°C – all over the brewery. I ran for cover behind a big plastic fermenter. My father didn’t run. I can still see it now, the image of my father in the centre of the brewery as scalding rain poured down his face like tears of disappointment and I told you so.

  We dried ourselves off.

  ‘OK. Switch on pump two,’ I said.

  ‘Are you su—’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. Switch on the damned pump,’ I said. This was definitely the moment. In every father-son relationship … Pop! A pipe exploded off its mounting and doused an electric heater in water, causing the whole brewery to short out.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tommy.’

  Predictably, everything went wrong that first day. There was liquid everywhere: hot wort, cleaning products, blood. A saturated carpet of hops, yeast and wet malt had woven itself across the concrete floor. Whenever I plugged one leak, another, more powerful leak sprung elsewhere. Once the wort reached boiling point, the steam-extraction pipe that I’d run around the walls of the brewery, my finest feat of engineering to date, began dripping at every join of the pipe, giving the effect of being in some cave deep underground, because rather than sealing the pipe properly at each joint, I’d simply sellotaped it. It will probably be all right, I had thought. I know. Clearly, I hadn’t completely learnt the lesson of Monsieur Richard. But with my father’s help we eventually managed to pump the wort into the fermenter and pitch the yeast. I didn’t have that father-son moment where I became the head of the family that day. If anything, that moment became further away, but we did make beer. If I’d had my way I’d have boarded up the brewery door and started over with a new brewery in a new location, such was the state of the place by the time we finished. It seemed to me impossible to clean it all up, but with the gentle cajoling of my father, we did clean it up.

  The brewery was in good shape overall. The only issue was the fermenters. The brewery came with large, plastic 400-litre fermenters that were old and scratched. Antoni had told me that was his only concern about the brewery when I bought it. He suggested I should get new ones, but I decided to persist with the old scratched ones because I didn’t want to spend any more money. At that point I didn’t have any more money.

  If you remember, I had had problems with plastic fermenters in the past. Repeating the same mistakes is a speciality of mine. I knew there was a chance that the fermenters wouldn’t be completely clean because of the scratches, and there was therefore a chance that the beer would get spoilt in the fermenter. It will probably be all right, I thought. When I die in some brewery-related catastrophe of my own making, that will be my epitaph.

  One of the most interesting things about refuse is it has a universal smell. That may be the only interesting thing about refuse. Obviously, there’ll be different smells depending on what’s in the refuse, but alongside those smells there’s a general smell of refuse that is the same the world over. Normally I find it a reassuring smell, something stable to anchor you in an ever-changing world, but when I detected that smell in my first batch of beer from the new brewery I felt so low. The beer had fermented out fully and it smelt a little bit of bin.

  It was those bloody fermenters. I knew I shouldn’t have used them. I had made the same fucking mistake again with plastic fermenters. It was insanity. I mean, it actually was insanity, repeating the same thing again and expecting different results. That’s insanity, isn’t it? I felt like such a plum.

  This was the beer I’d made with my dad. My signature Braslou Bière, the red IPA with German hops. It actually smelt only very faintly of bin, but there was definitely a smell of bin.

  That wasn’t the only problem. It was also way too bitter. I’d made a mistake when adding the flavouring hops at the end of the boil. I had tried to cool the wort down below 78°C because below that temperature the hops no longer add bitterness, just flavour, but my thermometer had given me a false reading. When you have a large amount of liquid – 200 litres in my case – then you have to make sure you stir it well before you take a temperature reading, as some parts of the water can cool down much more than other parts. This is what happened, so when I added the hops it was actually much too hot and the hotter the wort when you add the hops, the more bitterness is extracted. In this case, much too much.

  At this time, I was still testing the beer from the fermenter – I hadn’t bottled it, so not all was lost. Sometimes when you bottle beer and it re-ferments in the bottle, it improves because all sorts of new chemical reactions take place (stop laughing at the back), so I decided to bottle it anyway and see how it turned out in a couple of weeks.

  Champigny-sur-Veude is a village in between Richelieu and Chinon that has a hairdresser’s, a couple of bars and, oh yes, a mind-blowing sixteenth-century chapel built in tuffeau with twin-domed towers. There are so many villages like it round here. Everyday villages with these spectacular historical buildings, monasteries, châteaux, etc. sitting in the middle of them and everyone driving past them as if they are a Sainsbury’s Local. But the best thing about Champigny-sur-Veude is that it has wild hops growing along the banks of the River Veude. Madame Maciet alerted me to them.

  The thing with my beer was that although it was made in Braslou, most of the ingredients weren’t local, as some fat, bald, drunk prick took great delight in telling me at the Braslou marché de l’asperge back in April. This had annoyed me a great deal because he was mostly right. The malt was from France in general, but not necessarily my region of France, the yeast was from Germany and the hops were from all over the place – Alsace, Germany and in some cases America. What I should have said to him – and indeed what I do often say to him in my infantile imaginary recreations of the event,where I emerge triumphant and ride off doing a wheelie on a Harley-Davidson – was that 95 per cent of beer is made up of water and the water is definitely from Braslou.

  Hops from the local area, though, that was a start. The thing with wild hops is you have no idea really what they are going to bring to the beer. You don’t know how bitter they are or what sort of flavour they are going to give. But that’s OK. That’s part of the fun of it.

  Hops are normally ready to harvest around October. You can tell they are ready because they feel dry to the touch and when you squeeze them a little of this yellow resinous ooze comes out. I went to the river in Champigny with baby Albert in the pushchair one Wednesday in October when I was on childcare duties. It made a nice change from the usual McDonald’s and illegal cockfights. I’d been once or twice before, but the hops were still moist; this time the hops were dry and ready to pick. By the time Albert was crying with boredom, I had amassed a carrier-bag full. Probably enough to make twenty litres of beer in the GrainFather.

  I made a straightforward pale ale, low on maltiness, clean, to let the hops come through. I chucked it in a fermenter and hoped for the best.

  A couple of days later I was drinking a morning rosé with Nathalie, the woman who owns the property to the left of our house. Nathalie is extraordinary. She’s done so much work on her house. She works on it with any time off she has: weekends, evenings, bank holidays. She does all sorts of jobs. Nathalie is a strong woman who rarely smiles, at least when she�
�s talking to me, and she often seems perplexed when I remark on how incredible it is that she’s almost single-handedly transformed the house. She’s typical of the people round here. They have no idea how utterly remarkable they seem to sofa dwellers like me. It’s an old longère building – a long building on one level with hay storage above that would have housed the farm workers and possibly some animals. Nathalie was in the process of converting it into a well-appointed four-bedroomed house that she intended to rent out. She’d just given me the guided tour. She’d done a very professional job. The real selling point of the house though, parked in the middle room, was a great bread oven built of bricks, which must have been the size of Mini Cooper, would have provided bread for the local area and was still in working order.

  Despite this interesting feature, before long I had skilfully turned the conversation to me by banging on about me. I told Nathalie about the Champigny beer.

  ‘You know there’s a farmers’ market in Chaveignes coming up. A local beer would sell really well there,’ Nathalie said. ‘Pierre helps organise it. Hold on, here he comes now.’ Pierre was Nathalie’s husband.

  A large red tractor rattled into the courtyard. I remembered for a moment back in London when people arriving on tractors would have been a big thing. Pierre was atop it, wearing nothing but an old pair of dungaree overalls. Pierre is a middle-aged guy, slightly balding, with round features, deep, warm eyes and a beard, and he often wears overalls unzipped to his navel and nothing else. He speaks with a country accent that even Damien says he finds difficult to understand, and he has all sorts of intriguing gestures. One of his favourites is a wiggle of the nose like the woman in Bewitched, often combined with a sort of pulling away of his head while he stares at you. I think it means somebody isn’t telling the truth or something along those lines, but I don’t really have a clue. He pats me on the shoulder and calls me jeune homme. He has a way with you that makes you feel good about yourself. Pierre is a great man and if he wants to only wear overalls unzipped to the navel, who the fuck are you to stop him? What have you ever done?

  As it turned out, Pierre was delighted to see me. Over another glass or two of morning rosé he explained, with the help of Nathalie, who translated his French into French, that he was part of the comité des fêtes that organises the marché fermier de Chaveignes, an annual farmers’ market at the village of Chaveignes on the outskirts of Richelieu. He had mentioned to the Mayor of Chaveignes that there was a brewery in Braslou and the Mayor of Chaveignes was very keen on me having a stand there. He wanted more local producers involved.

  Now, the farmers’ market in Chaveignes is big news. It has a footfall of 8,000 people. I did some maths in my head that involved a lot of rubbing out of imaginary numbers scrawled in the writing of an eight-year-old who’d spent too much time watching YouTube and eventually I came to the realisation that I could sell a lot of beer there. If it went well I could make enough money to buy new fermenters. Not only that, it would announce my arrival to the wider area in plenty of time for Christmas. In truth, it had come about six months too early. I had my IPA that smelt a little bit of bin – there was no way I could sell that – and any other brews I did would have to be in the old fermenters, and there was a great deal of risk involved in that. It will probably be all right, I thought. The market wasn’t till the end of the month so I could brew at least once more. So then and there I asked Pierre to sign me up for a stand. We drank more rosé to celebrate.

  ‘Watch out. What is that? A bee? Shall we kill it?’ said Rose. She’d just got back from another weekend in England and she was curious to see how I was getting on in the brewery. I was getting on just fine, thank you very much, Rose.

  ‘Yes, Rose, that is a bee and bees are our friends. Without bees the planet wouldn’t be able to pollinate itself. Basically, they help the planet have sex with itself. They are God’s planet-sex lubricant. Or something equally as important. So next time you think about killing bees, picture a children’s nursery burning to the ground because of global warming and think again.’

  ‘It looks suspicious to me. They don’t normally behave like that. It’s like it’s waiting for something. Are you sure you don’t want me to kill it?’

  ‘Look, Rose, I haven’t got time for this. I’m creating a beer masterpiece. My new, improved Biscuit Ale. This bee is tired and lonely. It’s the end of the summer. It should be in its hive doing whatever it is bees do, but it’s out here trying to make friends and I respect that. And besides, if you kill one bee, all the other bees sting you to death. This bee is my friend,’ I said, as I poured honey into the wort that was boiling away and tried to stroke the bee.

  ‘OK.’ Rose shrugged and wandered back to the house.

  Twenty minutes later.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Rose! They’re fanatics! They’re like miniature suicide bombers. Bloody Isis with wings!’ I whispered.

  ‘I told you I should have killed it,’ she hissed.

  We were in the kitchen now, with all the doors and windows shut. We probably didn’t need to whisper. Bees pinged against the window. The bee in the brewery wasn’t my friend at all. He was an absolute shithead. He’d told all his stupid, furry little bee friends that I was making a great vat of sugary liquid and before I knew it I had been invaded.

  At first it was just a couple of other bees.

  ‘Aha, more friends! I’ll call you Dinkle and Donkle. Or Faggsie and Banana guy.’

  But then millions of bees burst in, too many to name, flowing through the door in one long dark ribbon, buzzing around and threatening me in my own home. I read once that instinctively we are more scared of spiders than other bugs because, historically, spiders have been the most dangerous bugs for humans. Well, scientists, time to change your science list written on graph paper – I tell you now that there is nothing more terrifying than the sound of a swarm of bees. There’s something about this noise, the same emotionless hum emanating from more and more points dotted around you in the air that induces a fundamental terror. Before I knew it, I had fled the brewery, ducking through the door as they poured in above me.

  ‘Why are you screaming?’ asked Rose, poking her head out of the kitchen across the garden.

  ‘I’m not screaming, it’s a battle cry developed by human beings over millions of centuries when they have been invaded by bees,’ I shouted as I ran.

  ‘It sounds like you are screaming like a child. Is it supposed to sound like that? You’d better come into the house. They look like they are following you,’ she said calmly.

  ‘It’s actually only men who are most comfortable with their masculinity who can scream like that, Rose. It takes supreme confidence and a hell of a lot of testosterone,’ I whispered breathlessly, as Rose urgently shut the kitchen door behind me.

  ‘Did you finish your brew?’

  ‘Oh, bollocks. No. I had just pitched the yeast, but I was still pumping the wort into the fermenter. I can’t leave the pumps on. I can’t leave the fermenter open. Jesus, Rose … I’m going to have to go back in.’ I gave a Rose the same look Bruce Willis gave when he decided to crash into that meteor.

  ‘OK. Do you want shepherd’s pie for dinner?’

  ‘Yes, please … If I make it back.’ I said, giving Rose the same look, but with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘OK. Can you feed the dogs when you’re out there?’

  ‘Yes, sure. IF I’M STI LL ALIVE,’ I said.

  Rose started doing the washing up. I put on my thickest coat, a parka jacket, put the hood up and zipped the coat up to my nose and marched out towards the brewery across the garden. It was a horror scene out there. Bees buzzed all around the garden. As I approached the brewery door a deep hum from within grew louder and louder. I counted to three and ran in. I ducked and bobbed. It was dark from the swarm. Bees dived at me, bouncing off the coat only to return for a second pass. I ran to the control panel in the corner and turned off the pumps. I hadn’t managed to get all the wort into the fermenter, but most of it was ther
e. It would do. I put the lid on the fermenter as quickly as I could, shut down the brewery and I was out. It must have only been a few seconds, but those seconds played out in super slow motion. Most importantly, the beer was saved and I was a hero. It was my second brew using the big brewery and I was making Biscuit ale for the market in Chaveignes. I needed this beer.

  I re-entered the kitchen.

  ‘Is that really a battle cry?’ said Rose. ‘It’s just it really, really sounds like a child’s scream.’

  Sometimes I just go and stand close to my brewery. Big steel vats clad in strips of wood. By general brewery standards it is a small, basic brewery – no bells and whistles, a static mash, a control panel from a 1960s sci-fi film – but it feels strong, permanent and plucky, and when I am around it I am relaxed. I didn’t like the scratched-up plastic fermenters so much.

  It was mid-O ctober now, two weeks before the market. I had to try my Biscuit Ale. I prayed for it to come out well. I poured a glass from the tap of the fermenter. It was a murky brown. It smelt unmistakably of bin. I knew straight away, that as much as I loathed the idea, I had to ditch this beer. Two hundred litres of beer is a lot to throw away. You could bathe in two hundred litres of beer. I contemplated that thought for some time. But I had no choice. It was much worse than the red IPA. This beer had a real depth of bin. It was completely undrinkable. It’s a hard business making shit beer. You wait for weeks; the waiting is a killer. One has to be patient when it comes to making beer. I can’t tell you how irritating I find this. And then you taste it, knowing that so much rides on it coming out well, and instead you find you’ve somehow managed to mimic the exact taste of refuse and you feel crushed.

  It’s interesting, if you Google ‘off flavours in beer’ you find great long lists of off flavours and the reasons why they taste like they do – bacteria, oxygen etc., but I couldn’t find a single list that contained the off flavour ‘bin’, so at least I was forging my own path.