Romantic

Whoever said brewing was romantic? Perhaps it’s the notion of brewing that’s romantic as opposed to the reality, in the same way we think of warfare as being ceaseless carnage where in fact those who have seen warfare suggest that it’s mainly boredom leavened with moments of pure fear and pain. And so looking at this photograph on a cold November morning in 2005, we can see Brasserie de Saint-Sylvestre, which makes one of the most memorable beers in Europe, Trois Mont, a beautiful and elegant beer that I have drank deeply of for many years. It’s a boring imagine, wet tarmac, red brick, metal tanks, steam from that morning’s boil while I suppose the sight of the local church at the end of the street does add some romance, in the sense of community. On the other hand, perhaps the snap of some of the brewing equipment does have a certain resonance in that envelope of feeling that I like to call my soul; it’s a vision of industry, a vision of intent, a vision of part of the journey that Trois Monts makes before it ends up in the glass. Some perhaps brewing is romantic after all. 

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.