Belonging #Fullers

You start going to a pub, which you call your local, even though you might have to get a bus or a taxi or cycle to it, or just walk around the corner, but you start to belong. You start to get to know people, you start to get to know which ones are the bores, the ones you say hello to quickly and move on, straining to avoid talking about the news or whatever sport they like or even the weather; you get to know the ones who are drunks but quite funny until you get bored (and worried you’ll become like them and sometimes think you have become like them); you get to know the belligerent ones who dislike the fact that you might have the wrong kind of voice and haven’t lived around here long enough and that their hard-earned friends are pally with you and sometimes, much against your better judgment, you try to make friends with the belligerents and eventually do; you get to know the beer experts (and keep your mouth shut); you get to know the drinkers who like dogs, who comment on the book you are reading, who ask you what football or rugby team you support or whether you like cricket (‘sorry mate, bores the pants off me’); you get to know the wastrels, the wasted, the strait-laced, the frayed and the afraid whose eyes widen when you tell them that once upon a time on your travels you drank a 25% (or thereabouts) beer — ‘not in pints mind, gold-flecked thimbles’; you get to know the dead ones, whose photos (or sometimes boots) hang on the walls or in alcoves; you get to know who is in at which time of the day and doubtless if someone else is keeping count you are time-checked and put on the rota. 

You belong, beer and pubs make us belong, maybe not make as that sounds like a three-line whip, but beer does help us belong, in the way you tip the glass and say cheers to a complete stranger who you will never see again; or the conversation in between swigs of Gold with the man in the paint-stained overalls who hears you mention a town you (and they) used to live in; then there are the brewer’s parents who are keen on what you think of their proud prodigy’s pints; beer helps us belong, engage in confidences about sport, business, the weather, the street you live in and also agree that religion and politics have no place in the bar (unlike that loudmouth over there); you become a fixture, as immovable as that stuffed owl under a bell jar that old Cyril (remember him?) claimed to have found by the side of a road when he came back from the Korean War (or was it a stint with ENSA?). 

You belong. Beer helps us belong. 

Which is why I felt sad about Fuller Smith & Turner’s demise as an independent brewery. I’ll get over it, we get over things us adults, and after all as long as ESB, London Porter (in keg for me), Vintage Ale, the wisteria, the brewery yard across which hundreds of workers have ambled and gambled on a life in beer and that tumble-down dusty room of bound brewery archives exists I will feel I belong. But if it changes and the seas of corporate ways take the brewery into a dark sunken valley of a different landscape and a memory of what once was, I won’t belong. Until then…

Degradation at Fuller’s

Degrade. What a fascinating word. The enemy’s forces are degraded, in other words blown up and slaughtered. We degrade ourselves or we degrade others. Degradation. But then when I’m underground at Fuller’s, in the Hock Cellar, air raid shelter chic with brick ceiling and a sense of subterranean safeness, the word is used much more positively. Beer degrades and becomes something higher in its sensibility.

The purpose of going to Fuller’s is to join in with head brewer John Keeling on a tasting of all the Vintages produced since Reg Drury kicked off the series in 1997 (Keeling’s first one designed solely by him was in 1999). This will be the last one that features them all as stocks of some (especially 1998) are being degraded.

‘When the Vintage was first produced we never expect that people would be as interested in it as they are,’ says Keeling to the assembled, ‘we certainly never thought that interest in the beer would last this long.’ But it has — time being the common theme that all the Vintages share. Time is also an ingredient in Vintage, the passing of which sees the beer degrade from the moment it goes into the bottle. Yet this is a good thing. The degradation adds something to the character of the beer — fresh is good, but degradation is also good.

The starting line was Fuller’s latest release, 2011, featuring a boozy orange nose and almost Cointreau-like in its citrusy brightness; hints of petrol (as in Riesling) also rocked up and decided to take a bow. On the palate it was flighty and then creamy and fat, showing off some pepperiness and then a dry finish. I rather enjoyed it. 2010 had a nose that reminded me of orange glaze for roast duck, while in comparison to 2011 it was much sweeter while the oranginess was more pronounced. On the palate Bakewell tart notes chattered away alongside hints of white pepper, perhaps it might work with Chicken Korma.

The tasting continued: here a hint of Drambuie and there a cherry brandy fieriness and sweetness and over in the corner some calvados — the 2007 made me think of saison with its spicy notes. 2005 was all orange marmalade on toast with raisins and Muscat as a starter. Oh look here’s dandelion and burdock on the nose of 2004, Marmite and marmalade when 2002 came along and the millennium’s expression was honey glazed almonds, ripe apricots, a creamy, peppery, fruity, zesty beer with a strict corrective finish (‘I’d pair this with woodcock,’ said former White Horse doyen Mark Dorber to my right; I thought Lancashire cheese). The final one — 1997 — had a beefy, marmalade character though the orange notes had become muted and the alcohol not as expressive. Last year I tasted the same beer and this is what I wrote: ‘Nose: malty (butter toffee), aromatic, spicy, slight hint of chocolate. Taste: delicate, spicy. Finish: silky smooth, seductive bitterness.’ I reckon this beer has a few more years in it.

And as a coda to this fascinating tasting, Keeling then went and admitted: ‘Brewers still don’t thoroughly understand the aging of beer.’ Which means that having tasting all these Vintages and found them fabulous, ringing endorsements of the desirability of aging beer, I can only surmise that brewers like Keeling are magicians and magnificent intellects, alchemists, bridging the gap between art and science. Specialists in the art of degradation.