by Tommy Barnes
The only modicum of good news was the little plastic bucket of Champigny ale I’d made in the GrainFather came out pretty well, considering using wild hops is total guesswork. Normally you buy hops dried or even compressed into pellet form. These wild hops were still fresh, which meant they had much more moisture in them, so if you normally added thirty grams of dry hops, you couldn’t add thirty grams of fresh hops and assume the results would be the same, because in real terms you’d be adding much less. After doing a lot of reading and a lot of scientific equations, I got drunk and tipped the whole bag in while listening to Bruce Springsteen. It will probably be all right, I thought. The results were an easy-drinking pale ale with a subtle hint of hops, quite green and earthy. It wasn’t much of a beer really, but it was perfectly drinkable.
Interesting fact: baguettes are that long thin shape because originally they were used as a weapon to put in the spokes of invading cyclists.
You can’t replicate French bread from a good French bakery. Even French supermarkets can’t replicate French bread from a good French bakery. In the UK, now even more than ever, with the rise of the artisan bakery we make lots of great breads – rye breads, sourdough breads, other even more pretentious breads, but I have never bought a baguette in the UK that comes close to a bread from any of our three local bakeries in Richelieu. A good baguette has a crisp exterior that isn’t burnt, is moist and elastic inside while still being light and can send an invading cyclist tumbling into brambles without significantly ruining its taste or form. British attempts are either hard and cardboardy or they are heavy like a cucumber.
If you go to the bakery in Chaveignes at precisely 9.15 a.m., they are taking the pains traditions – large rustic loaves of bread – out of the oven. Grab the loaf, give them whatever they want for it and get back in the car and drive like never before, drive like you’ve lived in France all your life. Sprint from the car to the kitchen. Cut the bread with whatever you have, an axe, a sword, it doesn’t matter, and plaster it with Brittany butter stuck with salt crystals – little saline hand grenades that explode on your tongue, the bread still warm from the boulanger’s oven. The butter will melt into its soft white flesh. Holy shit, even thinking about it now makes me salivate. It is an experience that cannot be surpassed. I can’t remember why I was telling you this. It had something to do with Brexit, I think.
The fact that we called it Brexit says it all. That we needed such a crass, reductive, clickbait name just to get anyone to look away from their mobile phones long enough to give a cocking fuck tells you everything you need to know about the state we’ve got ourselves in. I can’t see myself moving back to the UK at the moment. There are a few things I will miss, though.
Bacon. It’s a cliché I know, but every time I eat a piece of bacon, for a brief moment I love the world and everything in it. Especially big fat pigs. You can buy wafer-thin streaky bacon rashers in French supermarkets, but all it’s good for is insulating around windows.
Takeaways. Round here you can get pizza and that’s about all. If you go a bit further, to the bigger towns like Chinon and Châtellerault, you can get the sort of Chinese and Indian takeaways that you found in the UK in the 1970s, except they’re worse, because the French are absolutely certain they know best when it comes to food. Instead of celebrating the things that make these cuisines different from French cuisine, like chilli and spices, they have largely got rid of the things that make them different, so that every curry tastes like a bland stew and Chinese food is reduced to fried pieces of battered salt. I miss proper curries that make you shit fire and brimstone for a month and a half.
Pubs. Oh God, how I adore pubs. Proper ones, not the fun pubs made of blond wood where teenagers and psychopaths go to drink fluorescent drinks in a fluorescent environment and finger one another. No, proper old pubs with brass, mirrors and chandeliers. And drunkards who keep themselves to themselves. That’s always the sign of a good pub. A drunkard who‘s so happy with his surroundings he doesn’t need to insult your appearance and tell you about the time he was kidnapped by Nelson Mandela.
French cafés are magical in their own way. Sitting outside a French café on a hot day drinking a little glass of beer is fantastic, but I realised the thing with French cafés and bars: when compared to English pubs they are not specifically designed to get you pissed. That is the underlying philosophy of a pub. It might serve food, have karaoke, who knows, but it exists ultimately to get you pissed. Pubs are much more comfortable than French bars. The Scandinavians can shove hygge up their arses because British pubs have been doing comfort forever. When you think about it, there’s nothing better than a comfortable place to drink yourself unconscious.
Apart from that, France is pretty good. The UK is now so insular. I detected it when I was growing up. The seeds were there in the ’90s when you could sense that things were starting to go tits up. I mean, just look at grunge music.
People were becoming greedier, and while society can support a few parasites, if everyone becomes greedy then it all falls to shit. But no one wants to blame themselves, do they? It’s much easier to blame the foreigners, especially when you’re chivvied along by large parts of the press. And yet, let me tell you as someone who’s had a lot of experience of the French – we’re still fundamentally the same, not only as the French, but as large parts of Europe. We eat, we drink and we slag off the Germans.
The French don’t hate the English. They think we’re ridiculous, but they’re quite fond of us. Most of the French people I talked to about the UK leaving the EU were just disappointed. They felt sad for us and they couldn’t understand why we would do such a thing. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense that we did it. It’s a classically British thing to do. Essentially what we did is what Brits do in minutia every day. We let our frustrations build. We didn’t do what the French or Italians would have done, and shout and scream at each other, go on strike for all of October till something changed or let off enough steam that we weren’t so bothered any more, and equally we didn’t have rational arguments about our problems like the northern Europeans would have done. No, because we are so repressed, we just let our frustrations build and build and merge and multiply without being able to find an outlet for them until finally we exploded, we lashed out irrationally and now we regret it. I do that all the time. When you think about it like that, Brexit is no surprise to the British at all, and it is completely baffling for the rest of Europe.
I can understand people’s frustration with the European Union – it’s bureaucratic and you might not share its ideology – but I can just about guarantee the source of your problems isn’t Brussels. Being a member of the EU might make your life a little harder or a little easier, but it’s not the real reason you’ve got a shit life – and I say this as someone who knows from experience – the source of your problems, the ones that really matter, is almost certainly you being a big, stupid tit.
And so, to the latest example of me being a big, stupid tit. I had around 150 bottles of beer in stock that I’d made with my GrainFather brewery: fifty bottles of the Champigny ale and around fifty bottles of both the Biscuit ale and the Braslou IPA that I had made as test batches. They were good beers. I was pleased with them. For the market in Chaveignes I had two options:
Go with the 150 hundred or so bottles that I was pleased with and be sold out before lunch, possibly to the ire of the organisers, who could have given my stand to a market seller with proper stock.
Give up my stand at the market.
Those were my two options. Inexplicably, I decided to go for option 3: Try and sell the 400 bottles of overly bitter IPA that smelt ever so faintly of bin. I’d bring the good beers as well, of course, but I knew I’d sell them fairly quickly and then I’d have to try and sell the bin beer. Chaveignes was an all-day affair.
There was a sort of desperate logic to this decision. Selling 150 beers wouldn’t net me enough profit to buy some new fermenters. Selling 550 bottles would. And it was
clear I did really need those fermenters. It was an all-or-nothing gambit. From the moment I decided to do it, it felt like I had set off down a slide at the end of which lurked a muddy puddle.
Chaveignes is an immaculately kept village carved in tuffeau just a kilometre or two from Richelieu. You head out of Richelieu to the chocolate-orange roundabout (so named by expats because it looks like a chocolate orange, if you really needed an explanation). To the right is Braslou. To the left is Chaveignes. You drive through a brood of chickens that roams the fields and roads just past the roundabout. It’s very flat, is Chaveignes. It has a town hall and a pretty old church and not much else. The farmers’ market takes place on the fields behind the town hall.
I’d been up most of the night carrying out the confusing and depressing task of trying to label beers that I didn’t really want to sell. I went to bed at 3 a.m. In the morning I met with Damien at 7 a.m. and we headed down to the market. I was exhausted before I had even arrived. Trying to get the van onto my pitch took nearly twenty minutes of shuffling backwards and forwards as Damien looked on in despair through clouds of oily smoke. Despite being almost exactly ten years older than him, my relationship with Damien was inverted – he took on the role of the older brother who’d been forced by his mum to take his embarrassing younger brother out to the park with all his mates. I would do stupid things and he would be tarred by association. I often felt he wished he could break free and leave me on my own, but he was too good a person for that. There was some moral obligation to look after me that he couldn’t shake. The fact that I had a van full of beer probably helped as well.
After the marché de l’asperge in Braslou I had carved out a niche for shaming myself trying to drive vans at marketplaces, but this time it was particularly galling, as my audience were the men drinking wine at 8 a.m. at the booze tent opposite my stand – the men I admired most.
Once I was set up it was OK. The morning sun rose directly in front of us, reflecting off the gold lettering on the side of my van. I set the bar and table up in front of me with my Braslou Bière banner across it. I put my labelling machine on the end of the table to finish off the bottles I hadn’t labelled and this proved to be a stroke of accidental genius because it gave an artisanal look to my stand and started drawing people over immediately. With the van in the backdrop, the stand looked fantastic. Incidentally, the quest to be artisanal is what it’s all about at these places. Firstly, if you’re seen as artisanal, it gives you an authenticity that means you can charge more for what you are selling and secondly it means you can get away with all manner of errors.
‘The beer is flat.’
‘That’s because it’s artisanal.’
‘The beer isn’t clear.’
‘Well, of course it’s not. It’s supposed to be like that because it’s artisanal.’
‘The label on the bottle is upside down.’
‘Um, durrr! That just shows it’s artisanal, guys. C’mon.’
‘Your clothes are covered in stains. Wait a minute – are your trousers on back to front?’
‘Yes, because I’m being artisanal, you bloody prick-tits.’
Damien had the pitch next to me and had erected all his sculptures on plinths. He saw it as the perfect one-two punch. People would get drunk on my beer and then buy a sculpture that they would only realise they couldn’t afford when they sobered up.
I put all my 150 or so good beers out. And they were good beers. The Biscuit beer especially was very nice. I thought briefly about just selling these beers and then going home, but I knew that would mean finishing up by midmorning and trying to manoeuvre the van out of a packed market, and there was no way I’d be able to do that without innocent casualties. And the thing was, as I’ve said before, I really needed the money. I needed to sell as much beer as I could and besides, The bin beer is all right, I told myself for the thousandth time. I knew it wasn’t, though. That was the stupid thing. One of so many stupid things.
It was an unusually hot sun for late October, and as the day progressed I began to sizzle and rouge (Sizzle and Rouge – good name for a Eurovision pop duo if it ever comes to that). Damien was very helpful at first, helping man my stall when he didn’t have any clients, but around mid-morning catastrophe struck – he sold a sculpture for €500. He spent the rest of the day celebrating by alternating between pinching beers from my stand and drinking wine at the bar opposite. As he became more and more drunk, he punctuated his drinking routine with naps behind my van. And as he became even more drunk, he started sneaking into my van when I wasn’t looking and switching the siren on, scaring the absolute shite out of anybody within a 200-metre radius.
My beer sold reasonably well in the morning. The hours of 9–11 a.m. aren’t the most conducive for selling beer, but nonetheless I had a steady stream of customers. As midday approached there was a surge. Rather than smashing back the beers all day, people in the Richelais tend to drink one beer as an apéro before a meal – a sort of pre-food loosener. Just at the point where it became overwhelming, Damien’s father, Claude, appeared beside me again like a guardian angel and started helping out on the stand, and his presence alone once again calmed everything and everyone. By the time it died down, I turned to thank Claude, but he had gone. Disappeared into thin air, or possibly the wine tent opposite.
The problem was that I was fast running out of the good beers. In my van, lurking like filthy little demons, were box upon box of second-rate beer just waiting to jump out and ruin my reputation. It’s not that bad, I told myself. As my supply of good beers ran out, so I was forced to start putting the second-rate bin beer out. I tried a bottle. The aroma was good. First taste was good. It’s really not that bad! I thought to myself. But then as I drank more, it began to get bitter. And there was the sort of a flavour of bin, just an ever-so-subtle hint of kitchen bin. It got more bitter. By the end it was definitely unpleasant. I finished my bottle. It’s not that bad. So I started to sell it.
I think if it had been a truly horrible beer it would have been all right. Firstly, I wouldn’t have sold it. Secondly, if I had tried to sell it, people wouldn’t have bought it. But this was sort of OK, but not really OK. It was mediocre. It started off OK, but by the time you were halfway through the bottle it was so bitter you may as well have been sucking lemons out of David Van Day’s rectum. People tried it. They didn’t really like it, but they bought it. Some didn’t, but quite a lot did. Some people didn’t even try it; instead they bought bottles because they wanted to support a local business. They bought it out of politeness, and they bought it because they trusted that I had made a good beer, and that killed me. The more it sold, the more a great spectre of regret loomed up behind me. Suddenly I didn’t want to sell it any more, but it was too late. I’d put bottles out on the table. People wanted beer. When people asked to buy a box, I wanted to shout, ‘No! Don’t do it!’ but instead I dutifully took their money and released another six bottles of substandard beer into the environment, off to float around kitchens and dinner parties, just waiting to pop open and ruin my reputation. Because that was what I had started to grasp, far, far too late. It was my reputation in each of those bottles.
I remember after the Braslou asparagus market in April, sitting in the hairdresser’s as two pensioners talked about my beer, not realising I was the brewer.
‘Is it any good?’ asked old lady number one. There was an agonising pause.
‘Not bad,’ said the other old lady.
Not bad! I was ecstatic! I thought for some time about getting that tattooed on my neck.
But now, after the disaster in Chaveignes I saw it would work the other way round. There’d be endless conversations around the salons of Richelieu about how awful my beer was. Word would spread. That old granny from the hairdresser’s would be furious.
By the time the market finished I had sold almost everything and I felt terrible. Physically I was broken and morally, for selling that beer to those poor people, I was a turd. That it had probably
destroyed my reputation gave me some comfort. At least there would be justice.
‘You liked the beer, didn’t you?’ I asked Damien.
‘No,’ said Damien.
‘How come you drank so much of it, then?’
‘If I can piss it, I drink it. Now let’s go.’
Twenty minutes of shuffling the van backwards and forwards out of my pitch followed as the men at the bar shook their heads, before finally we trundled back to Braslou in convoy. I turned left into my house, Damien turned right into his. We didn’t even say goodbye.
That night Rose called from England.
‘How did the market go?’
‘Yeah, it was pretty good, I suppose. I sold a lot of beer.’
‘Why do you sound so sad?’
‘Because most of it tasted of bin. I think I might have really messed up this time, Rose.’
‘What do you mean this time? You always really mess up. Don’t worry, Tommy. They’ll forgive you. Anyway, we’ll be back in a couple of days. I think Albert is missing you. He keeps pointing to a yoga ball and saying “Dada”.’
A cat arrived. I assumed at first it was to do with Rose’s pregnancy cravings, which was odd, as … well, you know. We called her Miss Marple because we were watching Miss Marple at the time and thinking up new names is exhausting.
The older you get, the more aware of winter you become. The longer it feels and the more dread it inspires. It turns out this applies to the old 1982 Peugeot J9 pompier van as well. When I first got it, it would start first time without fail. Now, as the cold crept across the slate-tiled houses of the Richelais, the van became more and more temperamental, sometimes taking several minutes to get going. I felt very much the same.
I held my breath for most of November, wondering if my reputation had been ruined before I’d even really begun. Gradually I began receiving feedback about the beer from the market and generally it wasn’t good. People did not like the beer that tasted of bin, which wasn’t a great surprise, but interestingly it seemed that it wasn’t just because it tasted of bin. It was too bitter. That wasn’t a surprise either, really. I knew it was too bitter. What was a surprise was that people felt the good IPA I had made in the little GrainFather brewery was also too bitter. This was a beer I was quite proud of. The small amount of Biscuit ale I had had proved to be reasonably popular, as ever, but the most popular beer of all was the beer I made from wild hops in Champigny. To me, at least flavour-wise, it was the least interesting beer I had made. And then I finally realised what people had been trying to tell me pretty much from the beginning. Nobody round here wanted some super-hoppy, trendy, exotic IPA. They didn’t want me to blow their minds, to shatter their world views; they just wanted a nice, easy-drinking beer made locally. Damien had been saying this all along. So had Monsieur Richard. I just hadn’t listened. When I thought about it, almost every person locally had said they thought my IPA was too bitter. Some liked it, but it wasn’t really what they were after. I had been so extraordinarily arrogant that I completely missed it. I thought I knew what people wanted to drink more than they did.
