A Beer in the Loire

by Tommy Barnes

  I snorted with contempt. ‘Have you any idea what a bunch of bell-ends freelance graphic designers are? The cost of hair gel alone would be insurmountable.’

  ‘At least think about it.’

  We spent the next couple of days not speaking to each other. There was no way I was going back to what I had been doing before. I had escaped all that. That was the whole point.

  I dropped Rose off at Tours airport on the Friday evening and went back to bed for the weekend. Partly because I had the sort of hangover that only three months of solid drinking can provide and partly because I felt really, really disappointed. I thought I was disappointed with Rose because she hadn’t stuck with my plan for us to be artists and brewers and swan around in the sun, eating French cheese and never again having to deal with all the tedious shit that comes with an office job, but I gradually realised that I wasn’t disappointed with her. I was disappointed because she was right and I was wrong. I was disappointed because for the first time I was starting to realise what a stupid idea moving to France was. I was about to start a family and I was still arsing about like a teenager. What am I doing messing around at my age? I should try and get a proper job. There must be businesses round here that need an incompetent graphic designer. I need to be an adult. I need to provide for Rose. I need to provide for our baby …

  A fear of risk, responsibility, and a future that was careering out of control overwhelmed me. Rose was right. I needed to get a job. I opened my laptop with the intention of finding the steadiest office job possible when suddenly that feeling of fear triggered a memory. It reminded me of the last time I felt like that, almost exactly a year before. The day I found out I was being made redundant.

  I had been fantasising about being made redundant from my job in a corporate London office for quite some time, but when it actually happened, all of a sudden I felt like I was in a dinghy without oars that had been cut loose from the shore and was floating past a sign saying ‘Niagara Falls – Now With Added Crocodiles and U-boats’. I’d spent my last fifteen years going to an office, arsing around for the day before heading home, and in exchange a faceless organisation paid a lump sum into my bank account at the end of the month. That was how life worked. As I sat there at my desk with the letter of redundancy in my hand, it didn’t feel like such a bad system. Indeed, why would anyone want to give it up? It occurred to me that I had no idea how life worked without a giant faceless organisation keeping me alive.

  That was the last time I had experienced a fear of the future, of having to take direct responsibility for my life – and I remember sitting at my desk feeling terrified. But then I looked around at the alternative. I looked around the office at people sitting in meeting rooms pinching their legs to stay awake, and people making small talk through the fug of microwaved M&S soup in the office kitchen, and the sound of their fake laughter, disguised yawns and stories of tragic work nights out made me want to lie on the floor and weep; I looked at the brown, Brillo-pad-textured carpet tiles and the strip lighting and notices telling us to make sure we’d cleaned our plates before putting them in the dishwasher and trite company slogans peeling off the walls, at the sachets of instant coffee and flip charts torn and defaced with meaningless Venn diagrams badly drawn in green marker pen, and hole punches and staple removers and people I really couldn’t stand but had to be nice to, and I thought about the same conversations I’d had every day for fifteen years – and I looked back at my redundancy letter and the fear dissipated.

  I knew then that getting out of the office was the only way for me to survive. And now, one year later, I knew that going back to an office wasn’t an option. I shut my laptop. If I couldn’t go back to an office and no one would publish my novel I only had one alternative: to brew. To feed my family I would brew. Beer would save me. Of course it would! It always had!

  I strode into the barn with a new sense of determination and, for the first time in my life, I felt like a glorious, hairy, hunter-gathering, body-odoured, fart-noise-appreciating, bison-wrestling, emotion-hating man.

  There’s something primal about wearing Y-fronts. Something Neanderthal. They provide an intense connection with nature. Historians to this day argue over whether man preceded the Y-front or vice versa. It seemed natural then, in this fervour of testosterone, to strip down to my Y-fronts. I instantly regretted it. It was February after all and I was in our freezing cold barn. I could feel an Arctic wind blowing through the front flap, and my balls shot up so quickly they bounced off my lungs, but at that crucial moment I knew any sort of backward step could be terminal, so I resolved to continue and make my first brew in nothing but my Y-fronts. I reread the GrainFather instructions, put my head in my hands, took my head out of my hands, read the most basic parts from Jon Palmer’s book How to Brew and I began to plan my brew. As I did so, I realised that if I ignored all the complicated bits about enzymes, the basic procedure for brewing beer was actually fairly straightforward: turn starch from malt into sugar + add hops + ferment sugar with yeast = beer. Granted, if you actually want to make good beer there are an infinite number of variables you have to take into account, from different techniques to ingredients, to timings to equipment to temperatures, but simply making an alcoholic, mud-coloured liquid was, I realised, just about within the outer ranges of my intellectual capabilities, and an alcoholic, mud-coloured liquid sounded absolutely delicious to me.

  I had a rough idea of the sort of beer I wanted to make. Something close to my favourite beer, Big Job IPA, made by St Austell Brewery in Cornwall. It was 7.4 per cent proof, an American-style IPA made with American hops, which gave the most unusual, exotic flavours.

  In the previous few years, the craft brewery phenomenon had erupted. The craft beer movement, if you’re not familiar with it, started in the USA in the late 1980s. Previously, the USA had been famous for mass-producing the most appalling, flavourless beer. Their philosophy was the less it tasted of anything, the broader the appeal. Think of mass-produced US beer as the Simply Red of the booze world. A few intrepid Americans led a rebellion against this, setting up small breweries and using hops grown and developed in North America (hops are the ingredients that impart the bitter taste to beer, among other things), hops that hadn’t been used to make beer before. I’d say they were the punk rockers of the beer world, except punk music was dire, whereas the beer they were making was spectacular. Perhaps they were the 1980s hair-metal bands of the beer world. This analogy isn’t working. The hops that they used proved to be much more powerful than the traditional European hops and the beer they produced was like nothing else. It was the absolute antithesis of the old mass-produced stuff, strong both in alcoholic content and flavour. A revolution was born and swept across the Western world. As momentum gathered, thousands upon thousands of microbreweries sprang up all across North America and Europe. As far as I could tell, the revolution hadn’t reached rural France yet.

  St Austell Brewery had a list of ingredients for Big Job IPA on their website, so I copied what they had used. They didn’t mention quantities, so that was largely guesswork. I began to grind my malted barley. (Note: if you have that sort of mind, there will be a lot of potential for double entendres in brewing terminology – I won’t make those jokes because they are beneath me, but if you feel that terms like ‘sparging my grain’ are funny, then there’s nothing I can do about that. Actually, ‘sparging my grain’ is definitely funny.) The smell of toasted caramel filled the barn, holding the malted grains in my hand felt wholesome (Aha, I thought, so this is what it feels like to be a Quaker) and I had the feeling that I was initiating an ancient, magical process. A form of alchemy. When I had ground 6.5 kg of malt, I added it to the heated water in the GrainFather.

  This is called the mashing stage – the intention is to release the starches from the malt and turn them to sugar. Then I boiled the wort, which is the sugar-rich liquid you are left with once you take away the malt, and added hops, which look and smell suspiciously like skunk weed, to give the be
er its bitter flavour. So far everything was going well. There is a crucial point in the boiling process called the hot break. This is where, as the wort reaches boiling point, a foam made of various proteins in the wort suddenly rises up and if you don’t do something about it, by patting it down with a paddle or spraying it with water, it will boil over and the floor, the walls and your naked, Y-front-topped legs will be awash with burning, sticky sugar water. Basically napalm. Jon Palmer warns about this extensively in his book. I was prepared for this. I was on my guard for the hot break. What I was not prepared for was a noise like a punctured bagpipe that came from the garden just as the wort was coming to the boil. I opened the barn doors to see Louis, our other puppy and brother of Burt, vomiting mounds of malt across the lawn with the speed of a Gatling gun, which he was then merrily re-eating, thus continuing his cycle of vomiting. He’d found the pile of hot, wet malt that I’d discarded on the compost heap and promptly eaten his own body weight in it. Without a thought for my own safety, I charged into the garden in my underpants. It was wet and muddy and I slipped into a sort of sliding tackle position, straight through his most recent pile of malt vomit. He ran to a few feet away and once again began his process of vomiting and reconsuming. I got up and charged after him again. Burt, who had been lurking nefariously behind a dustbin, spotted his opportunity, circled round behind me and started eating Louis’ previous vomit. I picked Louis up and held his head over the side of my arms as he threw up another powerful jet of grain. I wheeled round on Burt.

  ‘BURT! DESIST!’ I screamed, charging at him with Louis under my arm and slipping again, releasing a vomiting puppy into the air. Burt avoided my slide and, delighted, ran off to eat more of Louis’ vomit. I ran after him. Louis landed on his back, vomited and promptly ate it. Burt ran behind a tree. Damien strolled past the front gate.

  ‘Salut, Tommy!’

  ‘Salut, Damien!’

  I managed to collar Louis once more and threw him over the gate into the locked front garden before he could eat any more of his own sick. Then I chased Burt round the tree until the fat little bugger ran out of puff and I could carry him into the front garden as well. Finally, with both of them safely locked up, I returned to the barn in my underpants, caked in mud and grain that had been through several digestive cycles to see the last of the foam from the hot break pouring down the side of the GrainFather. My feet stuck to the floor. Everything was covered in a yellow, sticky goo. For a second I thought about giving up on brewing beer and instead earning a living by travelling the local villages and putting on displays where I fired my dogs out of a cannon into a molten volcano, but, using all my willpower, I refocused and by the evening I had cooled what was left of the wort and transferred it to a plastic fermenting barrel. I pitched the yeast (in other words chucked the packet of dry yeast, which would turn the sugar to alcohol, on top of the wort in the fermenter) and as Rose walked through the door I stood proudly in the living room in nothing but my underpants, covered in dried mud and malted vomit grain.

  ‘What the hell happened to you?’ she said.

  Instinctively I put one foot on the fermenter full of wort as if I was Napoleon Bonaparte.

  ‘Oh, you know. I just brewed some beer. Don’t worry about it. How was England?’

  BEER NO. 2:

  Fat Boy IPA

  RECIPE

  6 kg Maris Otter malt

  500 g German pale malt

  30 g Nugget hops at start of boil

  20 g Citra hops after 75 minutes

  20 g Citra hops after 85 minutes

  20 g Citra hops post-boil for 10 minutes

  15 g American West Coast Ale yeast

  MISTAKES

  Failure to take a gravity reading post-boil (again)

  Fermentation at wrong temperature for the yeast (again)

  Too many bittering hops

  Eating so much cheese that I turned into cheese

  Not putting Burt in a box and posting him to Bangkok

  Our house is called La Ruche – the Beehive. It’s in the Indre-et-Loire, a region on the south side of the Loire Valley in the centre of France – a countryside of gentle hills quilted in forests and striped with vineyards. Wide, shallow rivers flit between medieval towns while glorious châteaux sit so comfortably on the riverbanks that they look like the scenery has been built around them. I had never heard of the area until we arrived in March 2015 for a two-month stay in a house I had found on the internet. This house, La Ruche, as it turned out. We rented it solely because of the beauty of the decor. It had four-poster beds, an en suite bathroom and two vast fireplaces. Huge oil paintings hung from the walls, there were statues in the loos and a bewildering amount of old trinkets on the mantelpieces, shelves and the two metre by two metre oak coffee table in the living room. We could pretend we were millionaires for a little while. It was fantasy. We didn’t for a moment think we’d ever be able to buy it. We thought that even if the area turned out to be a let-down, living in a house like this would be fun. As it turned out, the area wasn’t a let-down either.

  La Ruche is situated between Richelieu – a walled, moated town built on a grid pattern around two great squares by Cardinal Richelieu in the 1630s – and Braslou, a little village famed for holding a yearly asparagus festival.

  It’s a Maison de Maître: a tall, symmetrical, dignified old house built with great rectangular blocks of white tuffeau sandstone. Three elegantly carved mansard windows are spaced equally across the black slate roof, with three windows across the first floor and two large windows either side of an imposing front door on the ground floor, flanked by great bushes of rosemary and mint. It has a large front garden separated from the road by an ancient, wisteria-covered, wrought-iron fence. Laurel bushes twenty feet high form an arch over the gate to the road. To the right is another garden – wilder, with a tall pine and some smaller bushes forming an intimate dell and in the corner a thickset, tuffeau-built barn. Another large barn with giant wooden doors is attached to the back of the house. It would have been built to shelter the master’s carriage. Behind the house is a drowsy-looking orchard of apple trees and wild cherry trees, some old grape vines running down the right-hand side, half overgrown with brambles, and another great pine in the far left corner. It is bordered on two sides by sunflower fields and at the back by a brambly copse. Over the road is Richelieu Forest, a huge forest full of oaks and pine trees with a sandy floor that runs all the way from the park in Richelieu out into the countryside.

  La Ruche sits at the bottom of a ridge that runs like a collar across the back of Richelieu along the road to Braslou. In all, there is nearly 3,500 square metres or just under an acre of land. Not particularly large for rural France, but coming from a one-bed flat in London with the total floor space of a Ford Mondeo, it now felt like we had the planet to ourselves.

  The kitchen is enormous – white-and-blue patterned tiling around the walls and even on the dining table. I’d never seen a tiled table before. What next – a wallpapered toilet bowl? A grand fireplace is installed in the left-hand wall, mirroring the fireplace in the living room. Two large dressers sit comfortably against the walls – one white and one sea green to match the rest of the cupboards. Copper pots hang from an iron circle a foot in diameter, which in turn hangs from the ceiling. It’s a high ceiling. All the ceilings are high. You could easily have fitted another floor into the house if there weren’t such high ceilings. But that is one of the things I love most about it. Despite its size, there are only three bedrooms and that includes the converted attic, but all the rooms are huge. There is space everywhere. When you walk into the house the space fills your lungs and you relax. If the architect who designed my old flat in London had got his hands on this house he would have partitioned it off, both horizontally and vertically, into studio flats so small that you could only open the oven door if any visitors stood in the garden.

  In late February, I went back to England for my brother’s fortieth birthday party. Rose stayed at home with the dog
s. I hadn’t really noticed much difference between the two countries until I went to the toilet in an English service station and I saw an old friend. A friend I hadn’t seen in a place like this for a long time. A loo seat.

  Long-running feuds can be hard to understand. Families have been known to feud for generations over matters that to the outsider seem barely trivial. Sometimes there are feuds that have gone on for such long time that the participants no longer know why they are feuding and yet they continue, despite neither side benefiting from it. And so I wonder what trivial slight could have started the feud between the French and toilet seats. Bars, restaurants, public toilets, campsites, motorway service stations. You won’t find a single toilet seat in any of them and, like the bitterest feuds, it causes both sides to lose out and yet neither will relent.

  You’re going to reel out the old line about the French only having toilets that are a hole in the floor, but you’re wrong. Yes, the French have traditionally lagged behind the British in toilet technology – it was common even ten years ago to find a hole in the floor where the toilet should be, but here’s the bit I don’t understand: in recent years they’ve made such advances. They’ve really made the effort to catch up. Nowadays, almost everywhere you go the hole-in-the-floor toilets have been replaced by proper toilet bowls (consequently the French have noticeably thinner thighs).

  Admittedly they still put urinals in the same places as the British would put public telephones. In two of my favourite restaurants in France it’s possible to wave to the people working behind the bar whilst taking a pee. Turns out they find that unsettling. Anyway, generally they’ve gone to the trouble of installing proper loos in cubicles with doors and locks. But this is the thing. They have gone to all the trouble of installing the loos and they have come so close to joining the rest of civilisation and then they haven’t bothered putting the loo seats on. There’s not a public loo seat in France.