A Beer in the Loire

by Tommy Barnes

  And suddenly I understood exactly what he meant. Like everything I had done previously in my life, I had been doing the minimum possible when brewing – taking shortcuts, cheating wherever I could – and now, as always happened, I was paying the price. It may have been bacteria specifically that was ruining my beer, but the overall reason for the beer being bad was the simple fact that I was cutting corners. The same reason why I didn’t really prosper as a graphic designer in London. The same reason why I didn’t become the lead guitarist for a rock band that brought 1980s hair metal back to the masses. I just couldn’t be bothered to do things properly. The brewery equipment had become contaminated because I was trying to cheat. I wasn’t cleaning down with enough effort. I was leaving jobs half finished. Monsieur Richard’s gardening equipment was more sanitary than my beer-making equipment.

  As I watched Monsieur Richard work, I realised he never does the minimum. He does as much as he possibly can. He doesn’t buy cheap equipment that will just do. He gets the best quality equipment. He doesn’t chuck his vegetables in the ground and hope that some will grow out of the mess. He takes the extra time. He plants them at the right depth, with the right spacing. He doesn’t just spray a bit of water at them from a hosepipe. He has created an entire watering system that runs through his vegetable patch to make sure all the vegetables are watered properly. He doesn’t leave his equipment out on the floor in the rain. He cleans everything down and stores it away properly.

  And I began to understand as I watched him that the problem with only doing the bare minimum is that you might get away with it for a time, but sooner or later you’ll get behind. There’ll be a time when you can’t do the minimum, maybe you haven’t the time that day, or your idiot hound has broken into the back field and has got his head stuck in the neighbour’s chicken wire again, so you have to go and deal with that scenario, and because of this you find that you can’t do what you needed to do. That’s when you start getting behind, and that’s when you start running into trouble. Because Monsieur Richard always does the maximum he possibly can, if he gets caught out then he’s still ahead. He’s got plenty in the bank. He can cover any mishaps or mistakes.

  I had to be more like Monsieur Richard if I wanted my beer to succeed. I think I had known that for a while, but seeing him in action really brought it home. If I was selling beer to the public, I had to make sure it was propre, not just for me, but for them. Even if they were pricks. I had to start making everything propre. No more shortcuts. I would start doing everything properly, I would do more than I needed to, and whenever I was tempted to do a half-arsed job I would say to myself, What would Monsieur Richard do? And a picture of him flying off into the sunset on his gleaming ride-on lawnmower would appear in my mind.

  Mincing around our barn, one finger to my mouth like I was Hercule Poirot about to give it the big reveal, I scrutinised all my pieces of equipment. After not more than four minutes of mincing, I decided the most likely source of contamination was the big plastic fermenter, because the beer was being spoilt each time, and plastic fermenters can be tricky. The problem is, unlike steel fermenters, it’s easy to accidentally scratch the surface of plastic fermenters, and if you do this it gives a potential hiding place for bacteria, so that no matter how many times you clean it, you never get rid of the bacteria and your beer is spoilt each time.

  I gave everything a thorough clean for the first time in about a year and I binned my old fermenters and ordered three new ones, vowing to no one in particular that I would brew three more beers. If these final efforts came out as badly as the last few, I told myself, I would give up on brewing beer altogether and concentrate on doing more gardening work, and, make no mistake, I knew what this really meant: one day as the misery became too much to bear, I would throw myself under a ride-on lawnmower, which would immediately cut out, as they have sensors on their seats so if you fall off, they stop, so I would have to pick myself up, hope no one saw, and carry on gardening, miserable for the rest of my life, my only company being an apparition of an old alarm clock that basically only appeared when I was about to fuck everything up.

  The thing about my nan’s alarm clock is that I purposely introduced it into my psyche so, really, I only have myself to blame that it haunts me now. I’ve always been the type of person who is unwilling to face their problems. If there is a credit-card bill that I can’t afford, I won’t try and find some solution, I’ll just ignore it. I’ll stop opening the letters from the credit-card company. My nan, a tough little woman from the East End of London who was a firefighter during the war and smoked cigarettes with such regularity that it seemed she used them as a necessary protection against the damaging effects of clean air, saw this trait in me early on and took it upon herself to try and turn me round. When we travelled over to her flat at the top of a ’60s tower block in Bethnal Green on a Sunday for roast dinner and cigarette fumes, she would lecture me on the need to face one’s problems at all costs.

  ‘You’ve got to face up to life,’ she’d say.

  ‘OK, Nan. I’ll definitely do that,’ I’d lie.

  I ignored her advice for a long time, but when she died I began to think more seriously about what she had been trying to tell me and I realised that ignoring my problems was not producing the results I hoped it would. So, whenever I got in this sort of situation where I was hiding from the truth, I began imagining my nan’s alarm clock counting down and at the end of the countdown, normally ten seconds, I would force myself to face whatever the problem was. It didn’t always help. The older you get the harder it is to break habits, but that was how it originally started. It was a mechanism to help me face up to life. But then the clock went rogue.

  BEER NO. 7:

  Enslaved Elf Munich Ale

  RECIPE

  4.2 kg Pale malt

  2 kg Munich malt

  10 g Nugget hops at 90 minutes

  20 g Citra at 10 minutes

  50 g Citra dry hops in the fermenter

  MISTAKES

  Too much Munich malt

  Attempting to imitate an articulated lorry

  We British are much closer to the French than we think we are, but there are some subtle but nonetheless fundamental philosophical ways in which we differ. Namely, traffic roundabouts. A Briton approaches a roundabout expecting another car to be coming and therefore slows down. A French person approaches a roundabout in the same way that Evel Knievel approached a jump – any loss of speed is seen as potentially catastrophic. The French view is that if everybody arrives at the roundabout at the same speed and as long as there’s no one directly in front of you, then everyone can pass round the roundabout successfully and at a thrilling speed. And when it works, it’s a much more efficient system than the British one. There’s virtually no loss of time and you save on brake pads. Of course, if there is someone in front of you when you hit the roundabout, then you crash into them. But you just give a simple Gallic shrug as you pull them out of the wreckage and everyone is on their way, happy as can be.

  Road markings are taken as a polite suggestion in France. A suggestion that is widely ignored in favour of driving the perfect racing line. I believe this is a major part of the syllabus of their driving lessons and has been for many years, for it is not just the boy racers who pursue the perfect racing line, it is drivers of all ages and sexes. I have several times been forced to swerve onto the grass verge to avoid elderly French farmers’ wives in tiny little cars coming round the bend in the opposite lane, their faces set in grim concentration, intent on hitting the apex of the bend even if that means having all four wheels on my side of the white lines. At least, they would have all four wheels on my side of the white lines if two of them weren’t off the ground.

  And while we’re on the subject of grass verges, in France they are as much a part of the road as, well, the road. On a narrow road, you don’t slow down to let someone else through, you simply both drive up the grass verges on either side without ever taking your foot off the acce
lerator. In fact, losing speed in most situations is a big no-no.

  I try to drive like the French now. It’s a lot more fun. Every approach to a roundabout is death or glory. What a way to live each day! You might think that the French are terrible drivers, but on the contrary, they are much better than the British, and that is why they can get away with driving like Red Bull-soaked ferrets. On motorways, British drivers will quite often plod along in the middle lane even when there’s plenty of room in the slow lane, too scared to pull in, and too scared to overtake in the fast lane. The French don’t do this. They always pull into the slow lane if there’s space, but equally they are more than happy to hurtle down the fast lane like thunderbolts. Because of this, their motorways run much more efficiently. When they are overtaking in the fast lane they leave their indicators on. It’s wonderfully liberating: you really should try it. I do it all the time now. I hammer the accelerator down on the 1999 Renault Mégane estate, an action that has almost no noticeable effect, and then I cruise down the fast lane with my indicator on, thinking of champagne and scantily clad women. That, my friends, is how to fucking drive.

  It helps that there are fewer people on the roads over here. The UK is the tenth most gridlocked country in the world. Last time I drove in England I got off the ferry in Portsmouth and sat in a traffic jam all the way to London. It horrifies me that people do that every day. They must be completely insane.

  Driving is far more aggressive in England. All that repressed sexual tension manifests itself as angry driving. Every white-van driver who cuts you up is essentially shouting to the world, ‘I HAVE A MICRO-​PENIS AND I WANT TO FEEL THE DELICIOUS CRACK OF A WHIP WIELDED BY AN OBESE WOMAN NAMED JANET AGAINST MY LATEX-​COVERED BUTTOCKS WHILST HANGING FROM MY ANKLES OVER THE SIDE OF A FISHING BOAT, MY HEAD DRAGGING THROUGH A SWARM OF HORNY JELLYFISH!’ In France, driving is a relaxing experience. In Britain it’s like getting caught in an English Defence League rally. Men who commit road-rage offences in England should be sentenced to a month in the fishnet stockings that they have secretly wanted to wear since an eye-opening school trip to see Cabaret the musical as a thirteen-year-old. I believe it would help them relax.

  The only really stressful thing about driving in France is that, if you are driving in the countryside, even if there is no one around for miles, within seconds you will find a white Peugeot hatchback right up your arse, metaphorically speaking. It’s an unexplainable phenomenon, so it’s best just to get on with things and not think about it too much.

  I was planning a road trip. A short one, admittedly – two hours to be exact – but it still counted. It was time for a trip to the malt house in the mythical town of Issoudun.

  Up until now I had been buying English and Belgian malts from the internet. It wasn’t a cost-effective way of buying malt, especially the quantities I needed for the market. Xavier had told me about the malt house in Issoudun, a town a couple of hours’ drive away, where I could get French malts at a much cheaper price. You had to buy in bulk, though. Issoudun sounded like a town from Lord of the Rings. A great Elfen civilisation. A mystical, beautiful citadel of delicate towers and temples.

  I hopped into the 1999 Renault Mégane estate, admired for a moment the passionate roar of the 1.8-litre engine and blasted out of our great iron gates. Immediately I knew something was wrong. It felt like one of the wheels was dragging along the tarmac. I stuck my head out of my window to see what was happening. One of the wheels was dragging along the tarmac. This didn’t stop me from bravely ploughing on for a hundred metres until the squealing sound became too much and I pulled onto the grass verge and sat for a while in silence.

  After ten minutes or so, Damien pulled up in his giant white truck. Colleen was in the passenger seat. She waved excitedly.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Damien.

  ‘Oh, you know. I reckon it’s the brake cords. The brake pulleys, maybe.’ It’s important to try and pretend to know about man things when talking to other men.

  ‘The wheel is locked. It may be the brake disc,’ said Damien.

  ‘Yeah, the brake disc. I thought the same. That or the brake socks.’

  ‘I’ll tow you round the corner so you’re off the road and you can get a breakdown recovery truck to pick it up from there.’

  ‘Thanks, Damien. Ruddy brake lanterns, eh? I hear they are a common problem in the old Renault Méganes.’

  After Damien had gone, I ran back to our house, leaving the 1999 Renault Mégane beached on the verge, and hopped into the 2007 Renault Grand Scénic, our other car. We’d bought it several months after moving to Braslou from a local butcher. I try and avoid talking about it because I’m ashamed of it. It’s a sort of tall, rounded box of a toy car made for all the family. This wasn’t ideal. At least the 1999 Renault Mégane estate was vaguely utilitarian. The Scénic was the least masculine of all cars. It was not designed for carrying large sacks of malt. It was designed for pushchairs and dribbling children. It had compartments in the floor to hide used nappies and trays to wipe bogies on. It did not have suspension designed to take a quarter of a tonne of malt. Nevertheless, off I drove to Issoudun in the 2007 Renault Scénic, my trusty hound Burt at my side glaring at me, as ever, like I’d just pushed his grandmother down a lift shaft.

  From Braslou you drive almost directly east for two hours, going through elegant, tuffeau-built, château-studded towns and villages woven together with rivers and streams. But then, as you approach Issoudun, rather than towers chiselled from some magical sparkling marble stone by slender Elfen hands to create architecture so detailed, wondrous and beautiful that it was almost beyond the comprehension of human kind, as I’d anticipated, a monstrous brown fortress lumbers onto the horizon. A concrete fortress so dour that even in the bright sunshine it sucks in all the light and happiness in the world and takes a great big shit on it. This brown fortress that polluted the landscape for miles around was the malt house. For some reason I felt guilty about this, like I was complicit.

  We pulled up to the malt house: me, nervous and excited, and Burt desperate for a crap. It was a vast 1970s complex of concrete buildings that must have covered four or five acres and, as we followed the signs to the pick-up area, we were cast into shadow by huge articulated lorries that rumbled around us, threatening to squash us flat. They had arrived to collect hundreds and thousands of tonnes of malt for the mega-breweries that pump out litres of Kronenbourg and Heineken by the million. The staff at the warehouse were surprised then when I backed into the loading bay in the stupid family-friendly Renault Scénic. How they laughed, the men in lorries and the men working in the warehouse, as I made my own beeping noises while I reversed, in an attempt to be accepted as one of them. Oh, how they laughed as I arranged sacks of malt like passengers across the back seat and strapped them in with seat belts to balance the weight. Yes, they laughed, but I could sense a tangible feeling of admiration. Extremely well-disguised admiration, almost undetectable to the untrained eye. The most uplifting sort of admiration – admiration masked by loud, mocking laughter. Throughout this ordeal I could only think of one thing: what had they done with the elves?

  I got the malt home, though. The rear bumper of the Scénic was practically dragging along the road, but I got it home. No more buying ingredients here and there from the internet. That was for home brewers. This was malt on a commercial scale. What I really needed was a brewery big enough to match it.

  ‘It’s too bitter,’ said Damien.

  ‘Goddammit. Rusted fucking sardine cans full of sawdust on thin little wheels made by drunken, stripey-jumpered, garlic-necklaced, arrogant twats.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said it’s supposed to be a little bitter, Damien.’

  ‘Well, it’s too bitter, but it’s nice. The best yet. Have you thought about making a blonde beer?’

  We were sitting in Damien’s yard, looking past the field inhabited by their horses, Fanny and Applejack, towards the Richelieu Forest and we were trying m
y latest IPA. The beer had been healed. I had known that when I tasted it before bottling, a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t want to jinx it. It had come out well and I was overjoyed. Relieved and overjoyed. The clean-down had worked. I was more like Monsieur Richard and I felt like a king. This must be how he felt all the time. This was a beer that could be sold at the market.

  The IPA was my best beer so far. It was a little bit darker than I wanted (I was hoping for a red beer, but this was brown), but using darker malts had, I think, lowered the pH of the mash, which meant that the hop flavours were smoother and less acrid. I’d also added marbles to the bag of hops when dry hopping it, to make the hops sink into the beer, because otherwise they tend to just float on the top of the liquid. Sinking them meant that they had had more contact with the beer and imparted more flavour.

  I was dry hopping with Cascade and Mandarina Bavaria hops. Cascade is the classic American IPA hop: piney and citrusy. But my beer was moving away from the classic American IPA. The Cascade hops I used were grown in Alscace in eastern France and, just like wine grapes, hops grown in different regions, in different soils, have different characters, so in the same way that a New Zealand Pinot Noir isn’t the same as a Burgundian Pinot Noir, my Cascade wasn’t quite the same as American Cascade. It was greener, more lemony. Mandarina Bavaria hops, a relatively new variety from Germany, gave it orangey notes. They worked well with the Cascade. Not only this, the beer wasn’t pale any more. I had started out using only pale ale malt, but over time, as I’d tried to get the pH baIance right, I’d introduced darker malts like Munich malt and Crystal malt, and even roasted barley, which is traditionally used in stout, and so my beer had a richer, more complex malt quality. I wasn’t sure if it was an IPA any more; it certainly wasn’t just a pale imitation of Big Job, and I was pleased about this. I had made a beer that was its own thing, and that thing wasn’t revolting. I don’t know how this beer would have stood up to other commercial beers, but it was honest, drinkable beer. Beer I could sell.