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- Herausgeber: Muswell Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Burt, the hound of Beelzebub, has risen from the dead, Gadget the miniature horse has moved into the kitchen and Tommy has decided to expand his beer business, and on the advice of his wife Rose, is thinking about distilling gin, what can possibly go wrong? With Brexit looming, a second baby on the way, and sales of IPA beer plummeting, trouble is brewing in the Loire. Shortlisted for the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards 2019, Tommy Barnes' first book, A Beer in the Loire, told the tale of a year lurching from disaster to disaster as attempted to escape the rat race by starting a brewery in one of the finest wine-producing regions on the planet. Trouble Brewing in the Loire is the second book in the hilarious and best selling Braslou Biere Chronicles. With recipes from The Chatsworth Bakehouse
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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TROUBLE BREWING IN THE LOIRE
Tommy Barnes
To Rose
Contents
RECIPES
Asparagus with Beurre Bière Blanche
Roasted Hake with IPA, Bacon and Spring Cabbage
Lamb Shoulder in Rose Beer with Chickpeas and Harissa
IPA-Battered Aubergine, Honey and Tahini Sauce
Beer-Can Chicken and BBQ IPA Onions
Stout Float
Mouclade and Richard Pils
Beery Bò Kho
Beer Onion Soup with Stout Rarebit Toast
Loaded Confit Duck Fries with Blonde Ale Pickles
Ricotta Doughnuts and Hot Chocolate Stout Sauce
IPA Focaccia with Potatoes and Raclette
CHAPTER 1
‘Hi, guys. Firstly, thanks for coming to our first ever Braslou Bière marketing meeting. Actually, let’s call it a thought tinkle. An ideas slurry. I appreciate some of you had to reschedule other meetings.
‘Albert, you’ll take the minutes, seeing as you’ve got a crayon. Shall we go around the table and introduce ourselves?’
Albert, strapped into his baby seat at the end of the tiled table in front of the grand fireplace in our large, high-ceilinged French country kitchen, regarded me curiously as he chewed a piece of banana.
‘Errr, Daddy. You a potato man,’ said Albert, aged two and a bit.
‘I’m a potato man? Good. Rose, would you like to kick off?’
‘We’re just having breakfast, Tommy. This isn’t a marketing meeting.’
‘Good. OK, in that case I’d like to bounce a few slogans off you. Likewise, if you have any of your own, feel free to shout them out.’
Albert put his yoghurt bowl on his head. ‘Erm. You’re sausages, Daddy,’ he said.
‘Good. OK, how about this one – Think. Drink Braslou Bière.’
‘You’ve just stolen the Think. Don’t Drink and Drive slogan, except you’re trying to encourage people to drink. That’s awful. The more I think about it, the more awful it is. You can’t use that,’ said Rose, taking a decisive slurp of cappuccino.
‘Good. OK. We’ll scrap that one. But that’s what these meetings are all about though, isn’t it? Fleshing out ideas.’
‘It’s breakfast, Tommy. It’s not a marketing meeting.’
‘OK. How about this one? Braslou Bière – Yeah, It Cocking Did.’
‘What does cogging mean, Daddy?’ said Albert.
‘Never mind, Albert. It’s a positive message. The kids will think we’re cool. It’s daring and a little bit mysterious, which is one of our brand values.’
‘Some points – A: you’re not trying to sell beer to the kids. B: you mustn’t sell beer to the kids. C: what does it even mean? And D: we have brand values?’ said Rose.
‘All valid. We’ll put that down as a possibility.’
‘Oh, and E: can we not say “cocking” in front of Albert?’
‘Valid. Good. Note that down, Albert.’
‘Cogging, cogging, cogging,’ said Albert.
‘Good. OK, how about Braslou Bière – Born in a Barn.’ – I glanced at Rose, who looked confused but not disappointed – ‘Like Jesus.’
Rose sighed. ‘Offensive to literally billions of Christians worldwide. And this is still a traditional Catholic country. The French will have you deported.’
‘Good. Albert, let the minutes state that Mummy thinks it needs work.’
‘I what? You can’t use it, Tommy. It’s a massive no,’ said Rose.
‘Err, Daddy, you’re an ice cream,’ said Albert.
‘Good. Fine. OK, final one.’ I checked my notes. ‘Braslou Bière – Shits on Other Beers.’
‘Shid cogging shid cogging shid cogging,’ said Albert.
‘Tommy, don’t swear in front of Albert. You can’t have a swear word in your slogan.’
‘Yes, but this is the genius of it. It’s punchy, which is one of our brand values, and it’s mildly offensive, which is also one of our brand values. But best of all, it’s basically the old Carlsberg slogan – Probably the Best Lager in the World – but with a twenty-first-century twist, and by that, I mean it has swearing. That slogan worked wonders for Carlsberg and they didn’t even have swearing. Imagine what it could do for us.’
‘Firstly, it’s not mildly offensive. It’s downright offensive. You couldn’t have that on posters or business cards. Your clients would be furious. Secondly, it’s against the law. You can’t swear all over your marketing materials. You’ll get arrested. It’s an absolute no.’
‘Ah. Good. Right. You sure it’s illegal?’
‘Yes. They’ll prosecute you. You’ll get fined.’
‘Good. How big a fine hypothetically speaking?’
‘I don’t know. Ask Fred the policeman.’ (One of the nice things about rural France is you still have a local policeman.) ‘Why are you looking so worried?’
‘Hey, this apricot jam is less orange than I remember previous jams to have been,’ I said.
‘Tommy, you’re changing the subject.’
‘Albert, have you noticed the jam?’
‘Cogging jam. Errm, you’re a cogging shid, Daddy,’ said Albert.
‘Tommy, you haven’t had anything printed with Shits on Other Beers have you?’ said Rose.
‘God no.’ Of course I hadn’t. Jesus, Rose. Have some confidence in me, for Christ’s sake. I mean, yes, OK, I’d had it printed across the back of the van – guilty as charged, your honour – but I hadn’t used it on any of my promotional materials yet so there was no real problem. Come to think of it, I had given Bruno a poster for his restaurant in Braslou with the slogan on but, you know, it was quite hard to read. It was certainly not on my business cards, so there was really nothing to worry about. I would just have to make sure I reversed the van against the brewery for the rest of my life so the police and, more importantly, Rose wouldn’t ever see it.
‘Oh, by the way Tommy, Scott and Elena called. Can you put some beers aside for them at Richelieu market tomorrow? They want to give them to the guests at their gîte.’
‘Ah. Ordinarily yes, Rose. But I’m not going to Richelieu market tomorrow, so I can’t.’
Richelieu is the nearest town to our village of Braslou in the Indre-et-Loire, central France. We’d moved here four years previously to escape the perpetual crush of London and to start a new life making artisanal beer and sculptures and generally being insufferable.
‘Why not? You’ve got loads of beer in stock and August is peak season.’
‘Why am I not going to the market? Oh yes. Excellent question, Rose. Why on earth would I not go to the market? Well, let me enlighten you, Rose. I’m not doing the market, Rose,’ – I started saying her name as if I wasn’t convinced it was her real name, even though I had been in a relationship with her for seven years and we were married and therefore I was pretty certain it was – ‘for the simple reason, Rose, seeing as you seem to be the expert, Rose, for the simple reason that I’ve surrounded my brewery in two metres of wet concrete and I can’t get into it to get my stock.’
‘You’ve what? You’ve done what? You have got to be kidding me, Tommy. You didn’t take the stock out before they started the concreting? But surely that’s just common—’
‘I’m going to stop you right there, Rose. You wouldn’t know this because you are not a brewer, Rose,’ – now I emphasised ‘brewer’ like it was an occupation ever so slightly more important than a brain surgeon – ‘but surrounding one’s brewery with two metres of wet concrete is one of the most common challenges us brewers face.’
‘No other brewer has ever done that. I guarantee they haven’t.’
‘Look, Rose, let’s not start accusing people of being wrong or right. It’s the modern world, Rose. There is no wrong or right. It’s called existentialism or Trumponomics or something, and I, for one, am all for it.’
‘This is the most stupid bullshit I’ve ever heard.’
Rose was right. It was the most stupid bullshit she’d ever heard. And yet it was true. The brewery, situated in the old sandstone barn the other side of our garden, was surrounded by wet concrete. It was like St Michael’s Mount when the tide was in. I was in the process of having a concrete area laid down in front of the brewery so that I could move pallets and things like that around. I mean, it wasn’t a big deal. I could do next week’s market, for God’s sake, Rose. All it really showed was that the Braslou brewery was modernising. And modernising is a good thing, isn’t it, Rose? I’m talking to myself now. Anyway, more of that later. We need to talk about French pop music.
There are several genres of French pop: There’s Vanessa Paradis, of course, she’s about 30 per cent of it. There’s Johnny Hallyday – even though he’s dead, he still accounts for about 30 per cent as well. And then there is my favourite genre – what I like to call disappointabeat – an endless turnstile of middle-aged men with just-longer-than-mid-length ‘statement’ hair swept backwards to draw attention away from their drooping jowls. Men dressed like a C&A window display from 1989 – jackets with the sleeves rolled up, God help you all. A club of forty-something groaners in ironed jeans trying to demonstrate to their daughters’ friends that they’ve still got it. Guys with egos made of balloon reassuring each other it’s OK that they’re still lamenting teenage heartbreak when they should be singing about bad knees and erectile dysfunction. Songs surely all written by the same person, because each tune has the same distinctive fingerprint – hungover, whimpering, joyless, melancholy, flaccid, half-written sub-ballads called ‘You’re Here, I’m There’ or ‘You’re Up, I’m Down’ or ‘You’re Still a Teenager, I’m Forty-six’ that leave you with nothing but a lingering sense of irritation akin to a stone in your shoe. There’s a naivety in it, but not of the endearing kind. Instead it’s annoying, like an adult who talks like a child. In fairness, nowadays they seem to have all but rid themselves of these guys. They’re still around somewhere, I’m sure – stuck aboard a semi-deserted cruise ship in the Atlantic blurting out creepy propositions into a microphone decayed by Gitanes and teeth-whitening products. Today’s French pop music is Europop and imitations of British and American pop artists. Still awful, though. I mean, the French lead the way in many arts, but French pop music is the pits. But that’s France for you – tolerant.
It was August 2018 and, miraculously, the brewery was going well. it was finally starting to earn us a crust. That’s not to say I hadn’t had some issues. I’m generally regarded as the first brewer to make a beer that tasted of bin juice, for example. The concrete debacle was yet another feather in my dunce’s hat, but you know, generally things were good.
All the pressures of the last year (as masterfully documented in the seminal book A Beer in the Loire by a truly sensational writer and close personal friend of mine – ladies and gentlemen, I give you the fabulous Tommy Barnes!), starting a microbrewery in my barn in the middle of deepest wine country in France – despite not knowing how to brew beer – and at the same time having a baby and taking guardianship of Burt, the dog of Satan, among other lunatic animals, and trying to hack our way through peerless French bureaucracy using GCSE French from the mid-1990s. All that insane pressure was starting to ease. Yep, I was far, far too pleased with myself. As long as there were no more major life-changing events and the beer kept selling like this, we would be on easy street. I mean, Rose was seven months pregnant with our second child, but as I delighted in telling anyone who was foolish enough to enter my bore-off radius, ‘The second child is much easier than the first.’ I’d heard people say this before, and so I said it to other people as if I knew it to be true. No, we were finally starting to win at life, and it was all down to me. Well, mostly good fortune, an extraordinarily forgiving French public, a resourceful wife and a lot more good fortune, but also partly me. Now we were set up in the most beautiful old house in the little village of Braslou in Pays de Richelieu – Cardinal Richelieu’s country – half an hour from the River Loire, brewing away to our hearts’ content.
The house was built by a stone mason for himself in the late 1800s. It’s a maison de maître, made from the white stone that is prevalent round here and which gives all the towns and villages a convivial glow. Being a maison de maître means even though it’s not a huge house, it’s grand in its way. A series of symmetrical, elongated rectangles, each space – the walls, the doors, the windows – so harmonious that it looks like it arrived on this piece of land, where the chalk of the escarpment runs into the sand of the Richelieu Forest, completely intact. It’s a spacious house: each room has lofty ceilings latticed with perfectly regular beams, and no matter how long you live in it, it always feels airy. You can flounce into rooms and throw your arms in the air. You can swoon. It’s that sort of house. You couldn’t swoon in a two-bed semi in Maidenhead, you know what I mean? Here you can swoon. Outside, the front door is flanked by little bushes of bay and rosemary. The original wrought-iron fence and gateway knotted in wisteria run across the front, through which you can see to the left the modern, immaculate house and gardens of Monsieur and Madame Richard and, over the way, Damien and Celia’s horse paddocks, behind which looms the dark of the Richelieu Forest. When we first left London for France, we rented the house for a month and fell in love with it, so when it came up for sale, we bought it immediately. That’s how we ended up here. Before that we’d never heard of this area, the Pays de Richelieu.
It’s not breathtaking, the Pays de Richelieu. It’s not the volcanoes of the Auvergne or the valleys of the Dordogne or the jagged Brittany coast, but, BUT! – in July, when the sunflowers beam for miles across the gentle swells around Richelieu, when you pass alongside the noble wall of the erstwhile Château de Richelieu and across the way the angled sun of early summer’s evening lights a mosaic of small fields pressed into the hills in 200 shades of green, occasionally separated by shocks of yellow from the last of the sunflowers, and then brilliant white where the chalk has been ploughed up, not a hedgerow to be seen save for shrub-lined waterways that pick their way along ancient boundaries. Those fields from a distance are marked out so cleanly, but as you get closer you see the rough edges that life brings: dusty, off-white smallholdings that have been there for ever, built in on themselves like miniature sandstone fortresses surrounded by well-kept potagers – neat vegetable patches comprised of lines of fat tomatoes, lettuces, cucumbers, courgettes, cornichons, aubergines, peppers. Or, alternatively, immaculate maisons de maître like our house – grand old mansions designed by architects who had mastered space and proportion. When you see the smallholdings and hamlets stuck like limpets on the hillsides, connected by ancient tracks patterned with spidery shadows from the branches of oak and fir trees, lined with orange sands, which criss-cross up and then back down the hill towards the village of Luzé, which is hidden in a hollow beside a tree-lined lake; or along the fir-tree forest, through Braslou to Marigny-Marmande, which twirls down towards the River Vienne; or to Faye-La-Vineuse (once the grand capital of the region, until it was usurped by the new town of Richelieu), which sits proudly on its summit on the hill above the Pays de Richelieu; or the road down to Châtellerault, which billows up and down like a shaken blanket. When every third or fourth field you pass has horses and ponies, sheep, little pig farms, cows, piled wood, parcels of forests – pine and oak, meadows of wildflowers. And when you stumble across the châteaux. The exquisite château at Corcoué, snuggled into the rise up towards La Tour-Saint-Gelin, which is so beautiful I thought it was a mirage when I first glimpsed it through the hills from the top of the escarpment behind Braslou. The château down by the turning to the Île-Bouchard is almost its equal. Dozens of other châteaux. No one mentions these châteaux. They’re not famous. They’re just a part of the landscape. When you let yourself sink into the Pays de Richelieu on a July evening, then it is breathtaking.
We’d been in France for three years. In that time we had gathered an array of disparate creatures. There was Gadget the miserable miniature horse, Bella the mindless Cameroonian sheep, Nemo the little fighting fish, Louis the dog and, of course, his brother Burt, the hound of Satan. My nemesis. Almost certainly the bringer of my eventual downfall.
Gadget and Bella lived in the orchard behind our house on the edge of Braslou. There are cherry trees – some that give small, dark sour cherries and some that give fat, round, sweet red cherries. There is a plum tree and at the back, next to the old vines, are two apple trees that in summer are encircled by large, angry hornets.
Nemo lived in a bowl in the living room. Animals were constantly coming and going in our household. At one point we’d had two big woolly sheep. For a while we’d had little bantam chickens. Before Gadget we had a Shetland pony. I attributed all these acquisitions to Rose’s pregnancy cravings, regardless of whether she was pregnant or not, because Rose first starting demanding animals when she was pregnant with Albert. I assumed a nurturing instinct had been awakened in Rose, but the thing was, even after she was pregnant, they continued to arrive. Some would get eaten, some would escape, some would be moved on for disciplinary reasons and yet more animals would take their place.
Now listen. People think I’m exaggerating about Burt the dog, but if you really want an insight into his character, if you want a forensic examination of the crimes he has committed that day, you just have to study one of his poos. It’s a timeline of depravity – a crescent-shaped record of sin, dotted with chewed pieces of children’s toys, rinds of expensive cheeses stolen from tables, tax documents, radioactive waste, priceless artworks, fragments of Shergar’s bones. You can plot his exact movements through his poo, and it’s an insight into the dark world of a master criminal.
We’d had Burt for two years and for most of that time he’d been hell-bent on ruining my life in any way he could. He’s a cross between a basset des Alpes and an Australian shepherd, a medium-sized, black, white and tan hound with the shape of an overinflated beagle. People look at him and think he’s an adorable little overweight hound but actually, I’m pretty sure – and I don’t say this lightly – I’m actually pretty sure he’s a serial killer. In fact, I’m pretty sure all serial killers are connected to him. He is the puppet master. I can’t prove it yet. But Tommy, I hear you say, you’re examining an animal’s poo. Are you OK? Well, maybe not.
At one point I’d managed to placate Burt for a few months by feeding him croissants and I thought maybe I’d turned things around. Recently, though, he’d started acting up even more than before. He had mutated like a virus. No matter how many croissants I gave him, he would still chew through chair legs and watch barely satisfied as I collapsed through the seat and onto the floor, or dig out the foam from the seats in the van so that I would eventually get piles, or break into the brewery and eat twenty kilograms of malt and leave vast, elaborate patterns of grainy dog shit all over the garden. I took him everywhere I could with me; it was a sort of masochism, I suppose – perhaps I wanted to be punished for previous sins. I don’t know. Mostly I just wanted Burt to like me.
Damien, early thirties, dark curly hair cut short, was in my outbuilding, staring at a black pipe sticking out of the concrete floor with his hawkish, large, round, convincing eyes. Today his eyes were even larger and rounder than usual.
‘Do you know what that is?’ He said to me. His tone of voice expressed total disbelief. There was shock in his voice. There was a hint of something else. Anger maybe. Outrage. His world view had been exploded.
‘No. I don’t know what that is.’ I lied. I did know what that was. As soon as I saw him staring at it I remembered it was there. This was not going to reflect well on the English.
‘That is a water pipe.’ Damien said it although it was almost as if he didn’t believe his own words.
‘Oh right. Well that’s useful isn’t it?’
‘But, but Tommy—’ Damien turned round and looked back across the garden. I looked too, although I really didn’t want to. Stretching from one end of the once beautiful garden fifty metres over to where we were standing was a trench, three feet wide and four feet deep, banked on either side by big mounds of freshly dug earth. It was a bomb site. Walls had been obliterated to get the trench to where it was. Patios dug up. A mechanical digger sat, exhausted to one side. Mud tracks suffocated the once luscious grass. Damien had spent half the day in that digger digging a trench for me so I could lay down a water pipe all the way to the outbuilding. Now it appeared to Damien’s astonishment, and to my shame because at one point I knew this but somehow I’d forgotten, that there was already a water pipe in the outbuilding.
Damien turned his glare from the garden onto me. He was disappointed with me. I thought for a moment he would turn violent.
‘Oh, well.’ He said. ‘Let’s go and have a beer.’
‘Good idea.’ I said. Damien knows me you see. He knows Braslou Bière, and he knows that this sort of total shit show, this theatre of the absurd is the very essence of what Braslou Bière is all about.
Damien and Celia are our neighbours. They live across the road with their daughters Colleen and Zoë. They’ve helped us in every aspect of our lives from the moment we moved in. Damien is tall. He is forthright in his talk and his actions. He’s endlessly forgiving. He’s the kind of man who if I didn’t see him for twenty years, we’d still have the same relationship. We’d still be warm. Celia is slight and strong in the way people who ride horses are. She’s tough and has an air of the aristocracy about her. She’d bend over backwards to help us out. They both would.
Over the course of three years I had developed four beers.
My blonde beer, Berger Blonde, named after our neighbours Damien and Celia Berger.
Then there was an amber beer called Biscuit Ale, made with honey.
Then Cardinal IPA – a take on a New England IPA but using all-European hops.
And finally a stout, confusingly called Clifton Porter, because it started out as a porter but then I started adding roasted barley to it, which for some people in the brewing world means the porter has become a stout. This is disputed, however, as, historically, stouts were just porters that were stronger or fuller bodied. Personally speaking, and this could blow the brewing world right open, I like to think the moment a porter really becomes a stout is when it has wrestled its first bear in the wild. Anyway, by the time my porter may or may not have become a stout I already had 8,000 labels that said Clifton Porter on them, so until the labels are used up, it’s a porter and everyone else can fart off.
I bought my brewery from a guy in North Wales and installed it in the dépendance – the outbuilding on the other side of the garden to the house. It’s not ideal – the floor doesn’t drain, which makes it much harder to clean. The walls are crumbling. The mortar between the stones is falling out and I rather get the impression that that means creatures are moving in. The ceiling is low. Warped beams run across it. The summer before I’d started putting foil insulation up between the beams, but for reasons I can’t fully explain, I’ve only managed half of the ceiling.
It’s a 400-litre British brewery consisting of three large stainless-steel vats wrapped in insulation and wooden panelling, with heavy wooden lids, lined up along the wall opposite the door. It’s powered with electricity. The three vats are called the kettle, the mash tun and the copper. The kettle is basically a boiler. It heats the water up to around 77–80° C. The strike temperature. The mash tun has a false bottom in it. I add my malt to the mash tun and then soak it in the hot water (known as brewing liquor) from the kettle so that it has a porridge-like consistency. I’ve already crushed the malt with my malt mill, which is powered by a drill I bought from Lidl. I normally mash the grain for an hour and a quarter. The idea is to convert the starch in the grains to sugar and pass as much of them as you can into the liquid. Then the liquid, now called the wort, passes through the false bottom and is pumped into the copper – the final vat. The copper is also a water heater. It has two giant elements at the bottom of it. I’ll boil the wort for an hour or an hour and a half – the lighter the beer, the longer I’ll boil it, because it’s more susceptible to dimethyl sulfide, which can cause ‘off’ flavours. I add the hops at this stage. I tend to add hops at the start and end of the boil. At the start for bittering – hops contain alpha and beta acids that give the beer bitterness. I add hops at the end for flavour and aroma. The longer the hops boil, the more their aromatic oils evaporate and they lose desirable flavours.
The brewery is a spaghetti of metal pipes, pumps and plastic hoses, and at any moment some kind of liquid will burst out of the wrong pipe at the wrong time. Watching me brew is like watching a Homer Simpson montage.
Brew day is the best bit of brewing. A lot of running a brewery is a pain in the arse – especially when you’re at my level, with a very basic brewery where everything is by hand. But brew day, with the smell of ground malt and a mystical aroma from boiling hops that all leads to the creation of a new beer, is fantastic.
Brew day: Berger Blonde
Malts
Pale maltWheatBiscuit maltAromatic maltMelanoidin lightHops
Styrian GoldingsTriskelOther additionsCoriander seeds (crushed) in the boilThe best brew days start the day before. By that I mean if you can get the malt ground and the brewery all cleaned down and set up the day before, brew day itself is a relatively leisurely affair. You can get in early and if everything is already prepared, there’s actually lots of down time in brewing. This particular day I hadn’t done any of that, of course. This morning I had not ground my malt, and I had not cleaned the brewery and fermenter properly; I had not prepared in the slightest.
Firstly, I wrestled Albert into the car and drove him down the road to Annie and Claude’s house. Annie and Claude are Damien’s mum and dad, and Annie was Albert’s nanny.
‘Salut, Tommy,’ said Claude.
‘Salut, Claude. How are you?’
‘I’m fine. Come and look at this.’ Claude was stirring a big pot in the kitchen. I looked in. At first all I could see was liquid. Then something floated up from beneath the surface.
‘Argh!’ I leapt backwards.
Claude fished out a large, pink, gelatinous pig’s ear.
‘Pig’s-ear stew. Delicious,’ said Claude. ‘I have some more pigs’ ears if you want to take them back.’ He pulled another couple of pigs’ ears out of a bag and flapped them at me.
‘No thanks, Claude.’
‘Go on. Take them.’ There was no way I was going to take them.
‘Right. OK, thanks Claude.’ Dammit.
Going to Annie and Claude’s was an enriching experience for Albert. Annie looked after Damien and Celia’s daughter Zoë, who was the same age as Albert. Annie didn’t stand for any nonsense. She would get the kids outside to see the world. She’d take the kids to feed their chicks or the ducks. Claude would show them how to pacify a rowdy cockerel by locking its wings together or how to construct an exterior stone wall or hunt wild boar.
Once home with a bag of pigs’ ears, I started grinding the malt. I hadn’t had time the night before. I balanced my grinder on top of a black plastic bin and attached the Lidl drill to it. I set the drill to automatic and by that I mean I wedged a rock in between the handle and the trigger of the drill so that the trigger was permanently on, and as the fearsome teethed rollers began to turn, I shovelled malted barley into the hopper and watched as it slid down and was crushed to smithereens, as I would like all my enemies to have been. I stood next to the drill bathing in its thunderous machinations and imagining I was a futuristic Roman centurion riding it into battle.
Berger Blonde at this stage consisted mostly of pale ale malt – a standard light base malt and some wheat to give it more mouthfeel and head retention. Head retention is the amount of time the froth at the top of the beer stays before all the bubbles pop. The Berger Blonde is based loosely on a Leffe blonde beer. That was the starting point. It’s a constantly evolving beer. All my beers are evolving.
I get my malts from a large maltings in Issoudun, a couple of hours east of us. The hops come mostly from the Alsace in eastern France and Germany.
Once the malt was ground, I chucked it into the mash tun and soaked it with water until it got to a porridge-like consistency and was at a temperature of around 65° C, a fairly standard temperature to mash at. The lower the temperature you rest your mash (within a range of 63–70° C), the more efficiency you’ll get from your malt, but the thinner the beer will be. The higher you mash, the more mouthfeel you’ll get with your beer, but you won’t get as much alcohol from the grains. I had wheat in it, so I didn’t need a really rich mash.
An hour in the mash tun, and then it was time to sparge out. This is where you pass the wort through the false bottom of the mash tun into the copper and rinse the grains with more liquor, until you have a wort in the copper with the right amount of sugar to give you the strength you want.
As I was sparging, the bell at the gate rang. It was my neighbour, Monsieur Richard. He’d brought over an enormous box of vegetables from his vegetable patch – the greatest vegetable patch in the Western world. An abundance of healthy-looking courgettes, cucumbers, tomatoes and bunches of parsley.
‘Salut, Tommy. We’d like to invite you over for lunch on Sunday. I hear Rose is taking the children back to Britain for a few days. We don’t want you to be all alone.’ He knew that by day three I’d be sucking bits of old pizza crust up from down the side of the cushions with a straw. Whereas I avoided going back to the UK, Rose still went back whenever she could.
‘Salut, Christian. Yes, I’d love to.’
‘Brilliant. I think I’ve found somewhere for you to leave your malt as well. There’s a methaniser at a farm over in Champigny-sur-Veude. The farmer there, Willy, says you can leave your spent malt there and he’ll add it to the methaniser and turn it into reusable energy.’ This was good news. After a brew I’m left with between fifty and a hundred kilograms of used malt. Often breweries will give the used malt to pig farms, but in my case the local pig farm was completely organic and my malt wasn’t, so understandably they wouldn’t take it. It meant I had to take it down to the dump, which seemed like a waste.
‘You’re a great man Christian. I–’ I stopped talking because I saw a flicker of alarm in Monsieur Richard’s eyes. He was looking behind me. Then a blur: something shot past in my peripheral vision and out onto the road. I could feel the air rush against me as it created a vacuum. Something with weight. Something capable of deadly force. It was a miniature horse.
‘Ooh la la! GADGET!’ I called after the horse as it bolted down the road, heading towards Richelieu.
A moment later a Cameroonian sheep followed. ‘Ooh la la! Bella! Stop!’ I screamed and headed after them.
I think it’s a good measure of where I stand in the neighbourhood that, as I chased the miniature horse and a Cameroonian sheep down the road towards Richelieu in what must have seemed like a slow motion, absurdist remake of Thelma and Louise, a few of the local villagers driving by the other way didn’t seem the least bit shocked. In fact, they just waved and grinned at me as if I was out for a Sunday stroll. It wasn’t the first time Gadget had escaped, you see. In fact, all our animals were constantly absconding.
I cornered Gadget chatting up our neighbour Celia’s horses down a little trail. Bella was hanging around cramping his style. Gadget thinks he’s some kind of tall, muscled heart throb from the musical Grease. He doesn’t realise that Celia’s horses are three times the size of him. Or maybe he does and that’s why he’s so grumpy. Along with Monsieur Richard, I corralled him back into the garden and I reflected on a landmark occasion, my first genuine, spontaneous ‘ooh la la’. You see, contrary to what we are led to believe in Britain, an ‘ooh la la’ doesn’t have to be in response to something impressive. You can have angry ‘ooh la la’s – a car going too fast on your road, for instance; or you can have shocked ‘ooh la la’s – a miniature horse and a Cameroonian sheep making a break for freedom. I’m not sure how Gadget had escaped his enclosure in the orchard at the back. Someone or something had opened Gadget’s gate. I mean, I knew it was Burt, but I couldn’t prove it.
I got back into the brewery. The beer had over-sparged. That is to say, I’d passed too much water through the grains. There was a danger it would have stripped too much tannin from the husks of the grains, which would affect the quality of the beer. It was too late now. I’d have to hope for the best. I boiled the wort, adding my bittering hops – Styrian Goldings – at the start of the boil and adding some aroma hops – more Styrian Goldings, a French hop called Triskel, which is a floral hop, and some ground coriander seeds ten minutes before the end.
The next phase, once it’s boiled, is to try and cool it down as quickly as possible and transfer it to the fermenter. I was aiming to chill the wort to about 17° C. The yeast I was using, a Belgian Abbaye yeast, worked best a little higher than this – 20–25° C – but I didn’t really have any means of controlling the temperature in the fermenter, so my plan was to start off low and let the temperature rise naturally. The process of fermentation can raise the temperature of the wort by 10° C in some cases, so I hoped that by starting off under the optimal temperature range, it wouldn’t end up too far over.
I have a plate chiller in my brewery. It works by passing cold water from the tap through it one way and the hot wort the other way. The heat transfers from the hot wort to the cold water, thus chilling it. If you think all this plate-chiller talk is boring, then to hell with you. There are whole swathes of society that get off on this stuff. There are middle-aged, bearded men climaxing at the very mention of a plate chiller all over the country. The problem with this sort of chiller is it can only chill the wort to a temperature relative to the temperature of the cold water coming in. The best my chiller could do was get the wort down to a few degrees above the temperature of the tap water. This was the height of summer, and the water from the tap – the water that I needed to cool my wort – was coming out of the tap at 18° C. I didn’t have much choice. I chilled the wort to as low as I could – around 24° C – and pitched the yeast. Then I went out to curse at Gadget from a safe distance.
And that is how you brew Berger Blonde.
