There is a certain romance

This is a glass of Christmas Ale, Harveys’ Christmas Ale, as taken in a small measure in the sampling room at the brewery. This is a glass of the powerful, spicy, smooth, sweet, vanilla-almond, nutty, fiery Christmas Ale, which I enjoyed in the company of Harveys’ Miles Jenner, one of the most elegant and urbane brewers I know. The beer is potent and its potential for making me sleep after Christmas lunch is leviathan-like. Outside, while we drink the beer, the men and the women of the brewery are at work: checking the boil, maintaining the fermentation (and look at that lovely rocky head that signals the ascent of Harveys’ Best Bitter, one of the greatest expressions of this English beer style that I know), clanging barrels together after they’ve been steam-cleaned, directing nozzles into barrels in the racking room, the quotidian work of a brewery that those who reason brewing is a romance forget about. 

But then there is a certain romance in a vision of the tower brewery, designed by William Bradford, the same guy who brought Hook Norton to life in the 19^th century; there is a certain romance in Jenner’s insistence on sticking to UK hops and the more local the better; there is a certain romance in the nature of the brewing liquor, a hard water that comes from two onsite brewery wells and there is definitely a romance in the idea of the rain falling on the South Downs within which Lewes sits and this rain taking 30 years to percolate through the ground and become the liquid that Harveys draws up for its beers; there is a certain romance about the copper-faced mash-tun from 1954 (bought at an auction after its former owners from Croydon closed); there is even a certain romance about the dome-like copper, which puts me in mind of Jules Verne and 10,000 Leagues beneath the Sea; there is also a certain romance about the story behind the yeast strain that Harveys use, a strain that arrived on the train from John Smith in the 1950s thanks to a brewing chemist on his hols who said that said variety was a good ’un and, which even though it has mutated and mutated over the decades, visitors from the north still pick up what they say is a Yorkshire character on the beers that Harveys brew; and yes there is a romance about the Russian Imperial Stout that Harveys brew, a romance in the three hour boil (as opposed to 75 minutes for their other beers) and certainly a romance in that this beer is going to be aged in wooden barrels supplied by a Portuguese and Crimean wine-makers. So for this moment or two let us remember the romance that exists in brewing as well as the day-to-day work that makes the brewing of beer possible.

Jubilee beers: Harvey’s and Windsor & Eton

Jubilee beers, Jubilee beers, of which I have had several sent to me; one of which is Harvey’s Elizabethan Ale, 7.5% in the bottle, barley wine, wine of the barley. Debutante beer in 1952 and Harvey’s for this bottle have gone back to the recipe books to recreate it as it was (with black malt, flaked barley, plus Goldings and Fuggles, some of which come from growers who supplied hops for the original brew — so it’s slightly different from the regular 8.1%). It hangs limpid in the glass, glassy eyed, a calm surface, the mirror of the nostalgic view that invisible posters on certain newspaper posting boards have for the 1950s (forgetting nuclear scares, wars throughout the world and race riots) in the same way other newspaper posters have a nostalgic view of the 1960s. Deep molasses influence on the nose, while on the palate it’s plummy, woody, port-like, boozy and warming, bitter almonds, baked apple topped with brown sugar (oh the freedom that the end of sugar rationing brought only to end in the addiction we have for it now), more molasses. It’s a ripe and roisterous barley wine whose prodding bitter notes in the finish (and then there is the spice of white pepper) are an urge to the drinker not to forget to have another swig. Yummy, as I understand was the colloquial expression of delight of those days. 

And then I was sent a bottle of Windsor & Eton’s Kohinoor, named after a massive diamond in the Coronation Crown (I have also had Treetops, of which I have yet to taste). The brewery says it is a ‘classic Indies Pale Ale’ that also uses jaggery sugar, jasmine, cardamon and coriander as well as New World hops — I don’t think, unlike Harvey’s beer, that this was a typical brew in those days. Dark gold in colour, it’s got a sweaty, ripe peach skin nose (I’m thinking peaches in a bowl on a sunny kitchen table for a couple of days). After this initial swipe of ripeness the nose calms down a bit and develops a Epsom bath salts kind of freshness that I have always found appetising (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale sometimes has this). A bit of green apple stuck in your aunt’s Jubilee hat makes a slight appearance as well, and even a hint of spearmint gum from a fresh wrapper left in the sun plus — a bit late in the day — a cut grass sweetness can be noted. The path of palate enlightenment is peppery (white) and minty (spearmint) and fruity (pineapple) and dry and bitter, all working together with the preciseness of an engine in the latest Audi. It’s an angular beer, pretty intriguing, with all those various spices and hops. The dry, chalky finish reverberates with the equal precision of a metronome keeping time. And time and the passing of is what these beers are about. 

Pub time

Sussex Pale Ale please. And that will be £2.80 says the woman with the impeccable Bermondsey accent. Sailing and sea-going reminiscences are washing over the table to the right to me (as well as memories of beers drank — ‘a boiler is a brown and bitter’ asserts one of the crew), while in the corner by the bar a chap with a face that has seen better days is on his second bottle of wine (shared with a friend) as he excites himself about a coming trip to Argentina; ‘this is the best restaurant in London,’ he says to a man at the bar, who lifts up his glass and says ‘who needs food when you have this’. I once heard something similar in the west of Ireland. All laugh. A man with a pint sits in his shirtsleeves to the left of me — he looks like he’s marking sheets of paper covered with blue ink scrawls. He’s on his second pint. While in the opposite corner another man, his lunch finished, takes his time to digest the news in his broadsheet. His pint, two-thirds gone, stands on the table before him, next to a plate with leftover salad and a crumpled napkin on top. The sun’s lunchtime rays brightens up the pub as it streams in through the big clear glass windows, warmth on the back of the neck. I see my glass is empty. Time to try the Armada with its fruity fragrant nose. The Royal Oak, Borough. Pub time, the beer is perfect, conviviality and industry co-exist — this is a pub and this is what some people are trying to do away with. Why? It makes no sense.