A Beer in the Loire

by Tommy Barnes

  The most stupid thing of all was that I didn’t have to stop making an IPA, I just had to make a blonde alongside it. The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t done that. So I set to work making a beer the locals wanted. A strong, blonde, Belgian-style beer. That’s what Damien liked to drink. I would name it Berger blonde. Berger was Damien’s surname. I texted Damien to tell him my plans.

  ‘D’accord,’ replied Damien. I had thought he might be a little more excited about getting a beer named after him, but after the last market he was probably worried it would turn out to be poisonous.

  I used to think that using sugar in beer was a cheap way to boost the alcohol, but as I drank more and more Belgian beer, I realised that actually, in the good beers, this wasn’t the case at all. Whereas if you use a lot of malt in your beers to get a lot of alcohol, the flavour from the malt becomes deafening to the point that after one or two bottles it can begin to get unpleasant. If you use less malt but instead add candied sugar to raise the alcohol, you get more subtle, palatable malt flavours but retain the rich, glutinous mouthfeel, a thick gloss over the malt, the upshot being you can drink loads of them without your tastebuds being scorched. This is because starch from malt is only 60-some thing percent convertible (stop laughing at the back) and so the other 40 per cent is giving you malt flavours, wheras sugar is 99 per cent convertable and adds no flavour but just increases the alcohol content. I think this is how Belgians make strong blonde beers that still taste quite light.

  With my new Berger beer I decided to do this, except I didn’t have any candied sugar, so I used local honey to boost the alcohol. I think honey gives the beer a richer, viscous mouthfeel and local honey means local flavours. Apart from the honey, the recipe was a fairly straightforward blonde beer recipe: pilsner malt, a little bit of wheat and an Abbaye yeast, which gives flavours of banana and clove. For an IPA you want to use a fairly neutral yeast so that the flavour comes from the hops, but Belgian ales tend to draw much more of their flavour from the yeast. The only other slightly interesting thing I did was use Huell Melon hops for flavouring, rather than something more traditional like Saaz or Tradition hops, just to give it a little bit of fruit. There are a million blonde beers in France. You need to stand out somehow. I did a test in the GrainFather. It came out OK. A couple of tweaks and I would have something.

  Some positives came from the market. Firstly, I did indeed make enough money to order some new fermenters. Secondly, with an all-day market like that you end up meeting hundreds, if not thousands of people, and almost everyone wants a chat. It melts your brain, particularly having to try and speak so much French, but it’s great for contacts. I met several of the local bar owners there, as well as a restaurateur from Paris. I managed in the most part to stop these people from tasting my bin beer, instead inviting them to come to the brewery before Christmas to taste the new brews.

  Jean Thomas, a guy I had met a couple of times at Braslou football club, asked me if I would like to have a stall at the truffle market just before Christmas in Marigny-Marmande, the village down the road from us, which he helped organise. It would have been a great market to do – Marigny-Marmande is the truffle capital of central France, so the market had a big footfall and the people who went had money because they wanted truffles and truffles were expensive. I told him I would think about it, but I couldn’t bear the thought of another market at that point.

  I was also approached by Agnès the saffron lady, so called because she sells saffron. She explained to me that she was putting together a cooperative of local producers to start a farm shop in Richelieu. It was launching at the end of November and they were really interested in stocking my beer. That was an absolute stroke of luck. Because it was a cooperative of sorts, I could sell beer there and take home much more of a profit that I would have if I’d sold into a private shop. This was a definite lifeline. It was crucial that I had some good beer for the shop. As much as I wanted to give up, I went back to the brewery. My new fermenters hadn’t yet arrived, so I had no choice but to try another of the old plastic fermenters. I wasn’t yet confident in my blonde beer and I decided not to try and force another IPA on the people of the Richelais, so instead I tried brewing a batch of my Belgian Biscuit ale.

  One thing was clear: whatever happened, if I was to have any chance of rebuilding my reputation and starting to unpick the damage I’d done at Chaveignes, I had to make sure I put up an impeccable beer. Anything other than that would be marketing suicide.

  Big, meaty, sweaty ballsacks. I’m not shitting you, this was what the beer I sold to the farm shop tasted like. After everything I had done at the market, I was now doing this. I had cleaned the last old plastic fermenter like never before, but, needless to say, it hadn’t worked. The beer had fermented horribly. This wasn’t the only problem. The elements in my copper, the tank you boil the beer in before you ferment it, weren’t working properly, so I wasn’t getting a strong rolling boil. If you don’t boil your beer properly you can get high levels of dimethyl sulfide (DMS). DMS gives the flavour of corn. As well as this, if your sanitary practices aren’t up to scratch you can develop diacetyl in the fermenter. This can give a buttery flavour. What they never mention, though, in any of the beer textbooks is – and this is the thing – they never mention that DMS combined with high levels of diacetyl give beer a taste like big, meaty, sweaty ballsacks. Once more I was breaking new ground in the brewing world.

  It was a catastrophe of a beer. A real shit soup, and yet I still took this beer to the shop to sell. I drove the van full of shit soup down to Richelieu to deliver it to the shop one morning through stubbly, frost-covered fields thinking, What the fuck am I doing? But I couldn’t stop myself. It was as if my body had become detached from my brain. I am prone to self-sabotage every now and then, normally when I am having some kind of crisis of self-esteem, but this was extreme.

  Everything was out of control. After the market in Chaveignes I found I had around fifty or sixty bottles of the bin-flavoured IPA left. I hated these bottles. Every time I looked at them they reminded me of my failings and so I began to drink them. Night after night, as many as I could. There’s a phrase they use in poker: ‘on tilt’. It’s where you have lost a lot of money on a big hand and instead of cutting your losses, you begin acting irrationally to try and win it back. You can no longer think logically and you start betting more and more and making worse decisions. I was on tilt.

  And so it was that my opening beer at the shiny new shop designed to showcase the brilliance of the local producers tasted of sweaty ballsacks. I sold eighty bottles on the opening weekend. Eighty bottles of meatball. Why would people buy eighty bottles of meatball beer? Because unlike a market, you can’t taste the beer first in a shop. You have to go on trust. These were people who had come in, seen a beer from the local area, decided to try and support a local business and consequently had their taste buds ruined for weeks.

  I fell into a dangerous bout of depression. My nan’s alarm clock returned once more and became a permanent fixture on the back of my eyelids. When I slept at night, great chunks of cliff were falling into the sea. I avoided people from the village. I avoided anyone with pursed lips, anyone who looked like they might have tasted a meatball beer. I began looking for other people to blame and finally I settled on all the other brewers who had ever existed. I blamed all the other brewers because beer shouldn’t have to taste nice. That’s not the point of beer. Indeed, it doesn’t actually taste nice. If it wasn’t alcoholic, we wouldn’t drink it. If you’ve ever drunk a non-alcoholic beer you’ll know exactly what I mean. On its own it’s not a pleasant taste. It’s the same as diet cola. Advertisers plead with you to drink diet colas, but you drink them and they’re not pleasant. Our taste buds aren’t as stupid as marketeers would like to believe. Our taste buds crave the bad stuff – the booze, the sugar, the fat, the X-rated bits. Our taste buds are sleazy. Our taste buds would hang out in strip clubs licking the ankles of table dancers
if they could. It doesn’t matter how stuck up you are, your taste buds are dirt.

  I became obsessed with the idea that I shouldn’t have to make a beer that tasted ‘nice’, because if brewers had stopped refining beer after inventing the first one, people would have been perfectly happy to drink it for eternity. Because they weren’t drinking it for the taste, they were drinking it for its magic properties. They were drinking it for the alcohol, so the taste was irrelevant. But the problem was, over time some bastard decided to improve on the beer, even though it was serving its purpose, and that introduced relativity. One could compare one foul-tasting concoction to another slightly less foul-tasting concoction and, lo and behold, the taste of beer became important. And because of that, now I had to make something that tasted less foul than other beers. If some prick hadn’t decided to continually improve the flavour of something that people were perfectly happy drinking, my beer would have gone down a storm at that market in Chaveignes. People would have treated my sweaty-balls beer that went to the farm shop as exactly what they were looking for, because it contained alcohol and that was what was supposed to be important. I was going insane.

  As the pressure mounts you notice less and less around you. Your awareness becomes tunnelled, you lose peripheral vision and you notice only what is immediate.

  The month wore on and I spent more time than usual in the brewery, but I wasn’t really doing any brewing. I was just hanging around. I didn’t want to brew any more.

  It was my fortieth birthday in late November and Rose forced me to return to England to see my family. I’d often thought of celebrating my fortieth birthday in grand style, but when it came around I wasn’t in the least interested in celebrating it. I wanted to be back in the brewery, not brewing beer, where I belonged. But it was a detour, a surprise on the way home that gave me some perspective.

  I thought we were going straight back to Braslou from the UK but, unbeknownst to me, Rose had organised a weekend in a hotel on the Normandy coast, just to the west of Le Havre. When she told me, I couldn’t bring myself to explain to her that I didn’t really want to go, that I wanted to hide in my little brewery back in Braslou and wait till it was all over, so I tried to look pleased when we stopped up at this hotel by the sea in a place called Barneville.

  At first, I hated it because there was so much I had to do back in Braslou. I’d left the brewery in a terrible state. My new fermenters were due to arrive. I had mountains of beer that tasted of sweaty balls to drink. But we walked on the beach every morning past Second World War concrete bunkers submerged in sand and we tried to convince each other how lucky we were not to be stuck in offices. I watched my son run around with the freedom of the whole beach, splashing in the sea in his little wellington boots and kicking and prodding little see-through inflatable cushions that were scattered all over the beach, which we assumed were seaweed.

  It’s very moving, the Normandy coast around Barneville – little crescent beaches, cliffs and coves. It’s free of the expectations of nice weather, unlike the beaches on the west coast and in the South of France, which can seem glum and underwhelming unless it’s a beautiful day. You can appreciate the beauty of a Normandy beach whatever the weather. Indeed, I think I prefer a Normandy beach in the rain because they have a melancholy that is comforting. Melancholy calms the mind. Just walking with Rose and watching Albert play, I knew I had to keep trying. I had to pick myself up and I had to keep trying, regardless of whether it seemed hopeless. You don’t have a choice when there are people you love so much. Now I could see how far I had sunk into self-pity and I knew I had to rise out of it, whether I wanted to gently suffocate or not. I had to provide for Albert and keep him safe at all costs. That was the most important thing. I watched him kicking the little inflatable cushions up in the air and suddenly everything was in perspective. And then I remembered: there was still one more market at Marigny-Marmande. I must keep brewing beer because there was one more chance. I had to make this a success. It was about providing for my family. I needed to be a success so that I could provide for Albert. So that he could grow up in a loving, safe environment.

  On passing through the foyer of the hotel we noticed a large sign showing a picture of one of the little inflatable cushions we’d seen on the beach with the writing: PORTUGUESE MAN O’ WAR – VERY DANGEROUS. DO NOT TOUCH. I looked down at Albert. He had several of them skewered on a stick.

  I’ll always remember that weekend on the coast as a pivotal moment. A moment when I realised giving up wasn’t an option. When I realised I had to persist. When I realised, thanks to some terrible parenting, our son almost got poisoned by a Portuguese man o’ war. I emailed Jean Thomas to request a stand at the market in Marigny-Marmande. I was all in. I had to keep trying.

  Two brand new egg-shaped fermenters, each a metre and a half tall, were waiting at the gates of La Ruche when we returned to Braslou. The cavalry had arrived.

  BEER NO. 10:

  Berger Blonde

  RECIPE

  5.8 kg Pilsner malt

  300 g Wheat

  100 g Menanoidin malt

  20 g Saaz hops 20g at 60 minutes

  15 g Huell Melon at 10 minutes

  MISTAKES

  None

  December was cold. It rained relentlessly. The garden cut up and turned boggy. The fields around us were grey and barren, and the house that seemed so glamorous when the sun shone now looked glum and neglected. Gadget stumped round the field drenched through. Everything is more extreme here than it is in England. The hot weather is hotter, the cold weather is colder, the rain is heavier, the wind is … well, you get the picture. The types of insects and reptiles you get are just a little more threatening. The further south you go, the more extreme it gets. We are not that far south, but compared to the UK, in Braslou it feels like you are a little closer to death.

  Rose was back in England with Albert, seeing her family. I brewed again, this time for the market in Marigny-Marmande. My blonde beer, Berger Blonde, and my Clifton Porter. This time, more than ever, my sanitary practices were fastidious. Whenever I was about to take a shortcut I would force myself to think, What would Monsieur Richard do? And I would make sure I did it properly.

  My recipes were refined. I reduced the wheat a little in the blonde to make it smoother. I added rolled barley to my Clifton Porter to make it thicker. The brews went well and when I pitched the yeast into the egg-shaped fermenters, within a day there was life. I did my best to control the temperature of the brewery using the only thing at my disposal, a paraffin heater. The brews fermented out in a week and I transferred them into a storage tanks, dry hopped the porter and left them to settle out and clear for a couple of days before bottling them.

  We went for Sunday lunch at the Bergers in mid-December, a few days before the truffle market in Marigny-Marmande. I brought the Berger Blonde and the Clifton Porter to try. They weren’t quite ready, but they were close. I had already tasted them, of course. They were bloody excellent.

  ‘It’s too sweet,’ said Damien on tasting the Berger blonde.

  ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be a little bit sweet, Damien.’

  ‘I like it. It is a good beer. This would sell well.’

  I got the impression he meant, ‘This would have sold well if you hadn’t shredded your reputation at Chaveignes.’ But he didn’t say it. And that he didn’t ever say, ‘If you’d just listened to me from the start …’ summed him up. A lot of people wouldn’t have been able to pass up a chance to score a few points like that.

  I’d never describe myself as a fantastic brewer. The great brewers, the master brewers, spend years studying their craft. They are almost as much of a chemist as they are a brewer. They have an understanding of the processes and an attention to detail that I will never have. I knew I wasn’t the world’s greatest brewer, but when it came to making beer in your barn from some pretty rudimentary equipment, a
fter nearly two years’ practice I was finally turning out some genuinely good beer. It was beer with character. It was like Fred’s red. It had something of the barn in it. It was too oxygenated perhaps, maybe it had bits of dead spider floating in it, but that was a good thing. It was proper, farmhouse beer made with heart.

  We passed the afternoon walking in the forest with the Bergers and their horses, which followed on tethers, and all of a sudden I started to notice the little things around me again. As I pushed Albert’s buggy through the sand I noticed wild boar tracks all around me and I noticed deer far away, moving silently beneath the oaks and the pines. I noticed the floor of the forest was covered in a thousand shades of moss, from peppermint to avocado green. And I noticed I was starting to lose Rose.