Travel stories: rural pubs

We all have our memories of the way we walked, possibly ran, or even cycled, in the search for a rural pub (that someone somewhere told us about). For me, one memory is of a lane, to the left of which the ethereal curves of a field of uncut grass waving in the breeze, can be seen through a self-isolating cordon of bent and twisted trees, planted several generations ago when the people who bore the name that maybe I would one day also bear worked in fields like these. In the blue sky, the sun tick-tocked its way towards the south and ahead of me, roughly in a southeasterly direction, a hippo-like hump of a hill awaited, over which the lane, its track, like the badly hidden bald patch of a low comedian, invited me to follow.

Sometimes the way to a rural pub is the actual pleasure as opposed to the pub that you have chosen finally to visit. It’s the walk through a bucolic landscape, often in a lonely place, a challenge to which you hope your boots will cope (oh how you wished you’d put some dubbin on them), that lays down the anticipation for what you hope will be the cool interior of a rural pub, where the beer is just one bitter, but what a hitter of a bitter it is. Or it might be brewed around the back, somewhere in the village, or it might just be an enticing couple of beers that will hold your attention for a couple of hours (what do you mean you want food, haven’t you brought sandwiches with you?). 

My favourite rural pubs have included the Salutation at Ham, a short walk from Berkeley, but whose views of the distant hills of the Forest of Dean and the knowledge that the River Severn continues on its slow stately progress in between sharpens the appetite for beer brewed onsite; then there was the Locks in Geldeston, down river from Beccles, an out-of-the-way pub that has grown around a lock keeper’s cottage from the 19th century and at which bargees on the River Waveney at the bottom of the garden used to stop for a pint during the time of Queen Victoria; or it could be the London Inn in the Exmoor village of Molland, to which I once walked 10 miles to and back, in July, without taking any water with me. 

I have experienced other trails to rural pubs, forgotten over time, in the company of a walk or a climb through heather or bracken, over rocky tracks or along the coast, where the blue-grey surface of the sea seems like the back of a behemoth, which is mainly hidden from view. But I have forgotten them or they are recorded in a journal that now lies gathering dust in the attic of my soul.

Let’s end on a positive note though — I am already planning my next walk to a rural pub, when freedom of movement is not a stranger — Dartmoor or the South Devon coast perhaps? But until then my memories and imagination will free me for my roaming. Oh and where was that walk to a rural pub that I started off writing about? Like Orwell’s Moon Under Water, it is a fiction, a wish and a exercise in perfection. Or is it?

Going Wild in the country

Brett the brewer talks about gerbil cages

Some of the best breweries I’ve visited sit in the middle of nowhere: Dupont, Kacov, Hook Norton and now Wild Beer Company, to where I walked for a couple of miles up and down country lanes on Saturday (home is hidden away somewhere between Castle Cary and Shepton Mallet, right on the eastern edge of Somerset, in a lovely little hamlet called Westcombe). The day was a sort of launch for the brewery, a chance to try some of their beers, to engage with their ideas, to meet up with the like-minded. Fresh was their signature pale ale, a button-popping, corset-stretching joy of a juicy, luscious beer with a bitter, dry, peppery finish. It was gorgeous. Scarlet Claw was a red ale, with Centennial in the boil and finished off with Simcoe. The malt bill is also intruging — Mild ale and Brown plus CaraAroma and CaraRed from Weyermann in Bavaria. It had a slightly creamy texture, silky almost, with lots of voluptuous grapefruit and pineapple notes, but also a delicious hint of what I can only describe as cherry-flavoured toffee. And then to the beer that Wild men Andrew and Brett descibe as ‘what we are all about’. Modus Operandi is described as an old ale that is then aged in wood and has wild yeast chucked into the mix. The earthy, chocolaty, Bretty, herbal, woody, vinous, cherry and balsamic vinegar nose just stunned me with its complexity. In the mouth it was a case of chocolate going off the rails, Brett in the train’s cabin pulling all the levers, while earthy sexiness, chocolate, cherry and soft vanilla passed through all the carriages before arriving with the sort of bitter finish that makes you realise why you like beer and want to keep drinking it. Or to put it another way, melodic and harmonic but strong willed in its character — Mahlerian perhaps. Possibly one of the best beers I’ve had this year and yet another indication of the way British craft brewers are really  starting to up their game. If you’re in the vicinity of Bristol this week, I hear some is being delivered to the Colston Yard…

You’ll find Wild Beer just right of the photo’s centre,
in that little hamlet on the side of the hill

A visit to Hook Norton

Arcadia itself. Birdsong, cows lowing in the distance, a tall late-Victorian tower brewery lifting itself to heaven in front of me, pagoda like, greenness all around, the sour-sweet smell of brewing like spindrift in the air, I could only be at Hook Norton. This has to be one of my favourite breweries in England — hidden away in a beautiful village, down Brewery Lane, past the old maltings where now a Visitor Centre dispenses packs of beer that include Double Stout, Flagship and Haymaker, as well as being home to a compact but highly effective museum about Hook Norton, both the brewery and the village. I’ve been to the National Brewery Centre thrice in the past few months and nothing has given me as much a tingle about our national drink as the one long room at Hook Norton. The cheesy, Gorgonzola like smell of old hop sacks, a shelf of books from the early decades of the 20th century, guides to the breweries of England, old photos and artefacts, a pride in family, an old wort cooler, wooden barrels — there was something about it that inspired Proustian, Madeleine cake moments reaching back into my past, bringing up the innocence that accompanied my first discoveries of beer (it wasn’t campaigning that got me into cask beer but the flavour, the pubs, the Joycean-like evocation of community, the feeling of coming home, just like the first time I cooked from Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, a time when the earth was young).

I stand there chatting with Hook Norton’s avuncular MD James Clarke, with whom I have shared several pints in the last couple of years, a great guy, a beer man who has a tremendous pride in his family’s brewing heritage (we’re due to visit some pubs later). His great-grandfather built the brewery that stands so solidly in a dip in the village. Six stories high, a place of steps, whitewashed walls, wooden floor, banisters, and brewing equipment, a landscape of puzzles and conundrums and surprises — what’s behind this door? Oh, it’s the fermenting room, with open vessels. Rare these days. I remember the smell and sight of them at Young’s in Wandsworth and — conversely — Zywiec Porter in Cieszyn on the Czech Polish border. Why open? Does it help the flavour or the production? The answer — it’s always been done this way and why not continue this way? It works for Hook Norton and why shouldn’t it continue this way? There is a sort of Constructivist/Brutualist beauty about brand new stainless steel, but I also enjoy the air of a brewery that seems to have grown organically over the years, like a city that was once a settlement beside a river. Rus in urbe.

And then the beer: I have always loved Old Hooky,  a hint of mocha coffee, bossed about by bold citrus fruitiness and ending with a biscuity, cracker-like dryness; Double Stout, chocolate-coated coffee beans and a sensuous, luscious, creamy character. For those long hot sunny days, when it hasn’t rained for a while and the smell of dried hay in a barn is a tonic of its own, there’s Haymaker: bruised gold in colour while the palate is reminiscent of the tang of tangerine kept in line with a thrusting bitter note. The brewery used to produce a beer called Haymaker towards the end of the 19th century, just for the agricultural community — a saison perhaps? Then I had Flagship, lemon, sherbert, pungent and a plunge into the hopsack. An IPA? I asked James. He nodded. It’s not new (2006/07 I think?), but this one had passed me by. I dither and take a detour when offered a lot of bottle conditioned beers but Flagship was and is a glorious exception to the rule (I drink one now and think it on a par with White Shield). And as I sit here in another glorious part of the countryside I think of how far beer is from its rural roots — even though beer starts in a field its link to the countryside is broken as soon as those precious seeds of barley leave for the malting — and take myself back to the birdsong, the lowing of the cows and above all the spindrift of brewing in the air. Et in Arcadia ego.

A beer festival in Exmoor

If you’re out and about on Exmoor this weekend why not come down to Dulverton where the Bridge is having its annual beer festival to coincide with an equally annual folk festival. Landlord Kenny has got together a small but perfectly formed beer list that I shall be making inroads into as soon as I return from a school meeting on Friday afternoon (cue asking teachers if they can hurry up as I need to get on the beer). If you’re a habitual user of the new craft beer scene in London, Manchester or Leeds then you might say so what, but this is the west country, where as Boak and Bailey noted this week here, brown beer is very much in the ascendency — anyway, if you do decide to pop over here’s what you might see: Otley 05; Moor Illusion, Merlin’s Magic, Northern Star; Bristol Beer Factory’s Bristol Stout; Thornbridge Kipling, Jaipur (last year a cask was drained in two hours); Castle Rock Harvest Ale; Skinners Porthleven along with the usual regulars. No BrewDog this year sadly — we were hoping for Hardcore, but it’s not to be. Oh and there’s Orval, Flying Dog, Brooklyn and Westmalle in the fridge. I shall be the man with the broken guitar and sawn off bongos.