Kubla Can-do

Kaite and Jason Loomes

In the verdant green of Taunton Vale, here in Lydeard St Lawrence, is the home of Somerset’s newest brewery (for now, as I keep hearing rumours of more), Kubla, as in the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for whom a door on which a knock was heard from a man from Porlock interrupted the opium inspired reverie that left us with his great fragmentary poem Kubla Khan. And Coleridge lived over the hills and not too far away on the seaward side of the Quantocks in Nether Stowey, so Kubla it is.

Kaite and Jason Loomes are the brewery, she the brewer, formerly let loose in the food industry and a trained taster. I first met Jason in December 2011 after doing an event in a pub in Taunton. We’re planning a brewery, he said and handed me a couple of home brew bottles. Now it’s for real on a one-barrel kit with a couple of fermenting vessels, in a roomy space in this place where they used to make cheese.

Kaite brews twice a week, bottles most of the beer and kegs a little for use in the Plough, a pub that is close to Taunton station and has oodles of ciders on sale. You might pop in there prior to ambling down to the cricket ground and taking a chance on being Trescothicked, as nearly happened to me and my son last year.

So it’s definitely a micro and there’s a suitably sensuous boost about their beers — Rise: Pale Ale suns itself in the full glare of Nelson Sauvin with a nose of ripe white grapes and the sweatiness of a hop sack; orange and gooseberry notes harry the palate while a succulent mouth feel turns expectations turtle and lulls the senses. It is a beautiful beer and I would serve it with grilled chicken that had lain with the juice of a full lemon.

I had Rock: Saison several weeks back and in the brewery tried it again. To me it is not a saison, I don’t get the flinty, chalky note I would expect from saison and if it were entered into a competition I was judging I would be scratching my head. On the other hand, it has an appealing austerity, an appetising dryness, a lullaby of herbal notes and a fineness that makes it a rather special beer. Categories sometimes are for babies.

Try this one, it’s a new beer, I was told. It was also 5.5% (I think). IPA? Maybe. Chinook and Columbus in the boil, ripe papaya skin on the nose, a very dry finish that lasted and lasted and lasted. Cheddar for me with this I said, shame that they don’t make it here anymore. It’s a nameless beer at the moment but it won’t be for much longer.

I like Kubla, I like the fact that they are beavering away doing their own thing, but firmly getting their beers out there; they’re small, not noisy, but intrigued by how much they can do; they’re learning, they’re good; they’re curious, they’re in control and they’re brewing in a nice part of the world. Can’t ask for much more than that really can you?

Wild Beer

Andrew Cooper and Brett Ellis at Wild Beer Co,
come back in the autumn and the place will be rocking

Picked up at a small rural station, Castle Cary, where Glastonbury gloamers have their own Dunkirk every June. Down the lanes we go, the warm sandstone of the area glossed onto the houses, hedges, high, hiding, totally appropriate it seems given the name of the brewery I’ve come to see: Wild Beer. In the car sit the brewery’s founders Andrew Cooper and Brett Ellis (he’s the brewer and from California — another appropriate name given the mission of the brewery). Into a yard, where Westcombe Cheddar is made (one of Slow Food’s three designated Cheddar producers along with Keene and Montgomery) and into an empty space, formerly where pickles and chutneys were made (the smell of all-spice and vinegar seems to cling to the air, as if reluctant to leave). Three large wooden barrels stand all alone (and in them the brewery’s Modus Operandi sleeps the sleep of the just), athletes on a plinth, all at equal height; elsewhere there’s more space or to put it another way the lack of equipment is the dominant theme. There’s no brewing yet, stuff is on its way and you can expect beers to emerge sometime in the autumn (appropriately the start of the old brewing season in the past). And then we’re off again through these lush lanes to the Three Horseshoes in Batcombe (they do a mean Ploughman’s). Beer is brought out of a bag by Brett, in small bottles, some capped, some in PET containers, all brewed on a small system at home, and we’re off. A grapefruit zing in the glass, some acidity and a farmyard earthiness (think of that indefinable link with the earth, that erotic charge, that sense of connection you get when you recall the moment you smelt the aroma of the farmyard, that you get with a great Burgundy). This is a prototype I am told; ‘we are going for a way to make a lambic inspired beer’. It’s zesty, pithy, with grapefruit and orange peel and a wrap around fullness — I think of throwing ripe fruit against a dry stone wall on a hot summer’s day and deeply inhaling. Welcome to a west country lambic. Next up is Fresh, an APA, with canned mango, fresh ripe papaya and a hint of banana on the nose. Orange marmalade rushes forth on the palate and I think of a sun-warmed bowl of tropical fruit in a nice kitchen. It’s not a wild beer but ‘it’s a beer we love to drink’. We have more beers, all of them excellent, infused with Brett, others barrel aged. Ah here’s Modus Operandi, ‘the beer that says what we are all about’ beams Andrew. Brett-infused and barrel aged, it’s a 7% beauty that is a marriage of sweetness, vanilla, grapefruit, lush tropical fruit, plus a dark malt cloak thrown over the shoulder in the manner of Zorro. How romantic. I think I love it. There are saisons with Brett, an imperial vanilla espresso chocolate stout and a mellifluous DIPA — and then it’s time to go back through the lean lanes, the hidden lanes of East Somerset and take the train west. This is a brewery I am excited about and I respectfully suggest that you should be. 

When craft keg was just a babe in the eye of the beerholder there was Milk Street

Milk Street Brewery’s beers are English beers that do not hurry themselves along to the glass with the frenetic haste of desert nomads having sighted a waterhole; they are beers that are made for what drinkers in the country pubs around Frome (which is where the brewery makes its beers) and other places in the vicinity enjoy and want — and why not? It is a business and the business I had on reaching Frome the other day was to reacquaint myself with the beers of Milk Street and then write their tasting notes. It’s a paid gig but I wouldn’t have done it without having faith in their beers, a faith that I found was well rewarded with a morning in the deserted saloon bar at the Griffin Inn, at the back of which the brewery make their beers (there used to be a porn cinema at the back of the premises at one stage and when the brewery moved in they would get old boys turning up and asking when they were showing any movies). If there is a common thread that runs through the beers, it’s that of a juicy drinkability that always surprises me, given that there are so many beers in the world, but I am not here to write about them at the moment. What I am writing about is that when craft keg was just a babe in the eye of the beerholder (circa 2002, which was when I first turned up here to write a piece on East Somerset breweries for What’s Brewing), Milk Street’s founder and brewer Rik Lyall was already mucking around with different dispensations and the result on the bartop at the Griffin is Elderfizz. 

But then back in 2002 I remember him handing me a 7% wheat beer that didn’t come via the godly highway usually lit up by a handpump — it was called Elderbeer and contained honey and elderflower and was very refreshing. Of course, writing the article, in order not to upset delicate sensibilities, I skirted over the way the beer was dispensed. On Thursday I was pleased to see that the beer is still being produced and now called Elderfizz and has been brought down to 5%. And what of the beer? The recipe is 50% wheat and 50% low colour Maris Otter and it is flavoured with elderflower aqueous extract. Primary fermentation is at 18˚c for a week, and then it is chilled to 3˚c and chill proofed for a further week after the addition of auxiliary finings. Just before kegging it's krausened with Milk Street’s 5% golden beer handily named Beer that's been fermenting for 18 hours. And now one for the techies thanks to Rik: ‘the spears in the keg have been specially adapted (like the old Ushers system) so they don't go down to the bottom. It is “real ale in a keg” unfiltered & unpasteurised.’ 

So what does it taste like? Well it is a beer for a sunlit garden with lemon, elderflower cordial, sherbet and a juicy lustrous character on the nose, while the palate features lemon curd, lemon curd on brioche perhaps; I even thought of Riesling. The finish is fast and refreshing and before you can say ‘I must plant my coriander seeds’ it’s time for another sip. At at the moment you have to go to the Griffin to drink it but expect that to change. It’s the perfect lawnmower beer providing you don’t have to mow the lawn anymore. 

CAMRA newsletters

Here’s something to put the cat amongst the pigeons. CAMRA newsletters are quite useful sometimes. Yes, they feature articles that speak of ‘a good time was had by all’ and reports of visits to beer festivals are pretty good in the middle of the night when sleep won’t come. However, looking back through the ones I have saved over the past few years, they are pretty invaluable when it comes to cataloguing the changing nature of the way CAMRA people look at beer (they’re not bad for looking at local brewery history at the ground level). For a start I must declare an interest: I used to edit the Somerset one and amongst submissions on bus timetables (honest), there were reports on visits to the US, Australia, the Czech republic and lambic breweries. Looking back through them, this was the raw stuff of history, evidence of changing views towards beer. I had reports on Aussie micros, Singaporean micros and even a beer festival in the Galapagos or somewhere like that; on the other hand I remember some right stinkers: one chap said he had a report on the Boston beer scene and would I like to print it. Along came 2000 words of closely typed nonsense, which I managed to cut to 50 words; another time I printed two letters about the same pub in the beer desert that was (and presumably still is) Bridgwater. One lauded its recent beer festival, the other complained about its (unfair) pricing policy at the same festival. The pub made a fuss, kicked out its real ale pumps and closed some time ago. Yes of course the newsletters laud CAMRA, but they wouldn’t do otherwise — it would be like a copy of Radio Times telling everyone not to watch the TV (what a good idea); they are provincial, again so what. As someone who collects all sorts of beer memorabilia rubbish, I still find myself — guilt free — slipping one into my pocket when I find them in a pub somewhere out in the wilds and off they go on the second shelf right in the picture.