Ambience

What is the sound and vision of the brewery? The humming round-and-round-we-go nnnnnnnn of the python coolers, a spinning top of ambient Eno-esque sound in perpetual motion — the sharp clink of bottles as a silent woman lures the beer in and traps it with a deft appliance of a crown cork — over there look, the ragged, tattered banner of steam escapes from a vent in the stainless steel container that we call the HLT — two plastic bags (once they held grain from Tuckers Maltings) of used hops slouch teenage-style on the concrete and add a welcome bright banana and pineapple disturbance to the air about them. I only see it briefly when adding a pestle of partly ground black peppercorns, grains of paradise and dried Curacao orange peel into the copper, but the rhythmic Jacob’s Ladder of the boil, the repetitive climb and decline of the hot liquid that one day will be cool and fermented, strong and spicy, dark and downsized into a glass and eager to create an impression on the palate of a drinker whom I shall never meet.

A few minutes I had on my hands whilst assisting with another brew of Otley’s Saison Obscura and a scrap of paper on which to allow a few words to meander on the nature of what constitutes a brewery. Every impression of a brewery that I visit is different.