Bingo

Here at Hilliard’s Brewery in the Ballard district of Seattle the cans are being filled, four (or was it five?), at a time, the caramel coloured beer with its flecked head of foam, before a movement of the machine forward sees the foam being flicked off, smoothed, and then a top is added and pushed down. The beer is ready to be sent over to Sweden. It’s a sunny day outside and light floods the brewery; it was once a service garage for a car dealership and there are big windows and on a day like this, being in a brewery like this, there is nowhere else I would rather be. Especially when I’m handed a glass — a jam jar I laugh, a mason I then say, and after another look, it’s a glass version of the can — of their Saison. Dupont yeast, Pilsner malt and Goldings hops and we’re away in a neverneverland of spiciness, fruitiness, dryness and a beautiful mouthfeel. I can imagine myself in the tank country of Wallonia. ‘We only do cans because it’s a better way to store beer,’ says Adam Merkl, who founded the brewery with Ryan Hilliard in 2011 (they also do draft but it’s bottles that are avoided, and the sounds of the canning line are accompanied by wheezes and huffs and puffs, rather than the tinkle of laughter that a bottle line produces). ‘Enjoying this?’ says Dustin Boast, the guy that brought me to the brewery, a former accountant who started Road Dog Brewery Tours, which does what it says and takes people on tours around Seattle breweries. I am indeed and then I get a taste of a sour in progress, an ESB with Belgian yeast. Refreshing, lemony and shapes of grapefruit being thrown. Good one. I try more beers, chat with Adam and the guy on the canning line (apologies to him for not noting down his name) and generally enjoy the ambience of this brewery that I’d not heard of before. And afterwards in the mini bus Dustin takes people around in I say that what we’ve just been doing is the most important part of beer, not just drinking the stuff but talking to the people who make it, swapping stories and telling tales. Beer’s about the people as much as what is in the glass. Dustin smiles. ‘Bingo!’ he says.

Inarticulation

What was it that stirred within me? What was the feeling that was brought to the forefront of my mind, a memory, an indication, a window sill on which I felt a brighter, sunnier time, a less stressful (or was that the filter that the brain always installs?) time, a time when my world was young, a place where it didn’t matter what went into my glass as long as it refreshed and occasionally stimulated a night out with friends. The past.

I was in the large barn-like expanse of the Fat Cat Brewery Tap, early doors, 11.30am, Saturday morning, a space that was already occupied by a brace of drinkers, their newspapers flattened in front of them, like maps, a guide to the internal landscape of their views, interests, prejudices and what they favour when it comes to switching on the TV. From the outside it looked unpromising, a youth centre from the 1960s, a slice of red brick, a short slope of roof on one side, a longer one on the other, utilitarian, an upside-down V shape with one side longer than the other.

Once inside, though, I was brought face to face with a collection of inn signs and tin plate brewery signs — Lacon’s Yarmouth Stout and Dinner Ale; Kops Stout; The Fusilier. On a chalkboard above the bar, which ran along the side of the room and behind which was the brewery, there were beers to be served from cask (both hand pump and by gravity), keg and bottle. There was cider and for those who eat there were pork pies, but it wasn’t the food that I was interested in that morning.

I wandered about the room, neck craning, looking at the signs, recognising something within me that was young, not child-like, but something going back to the 1980s perhaps, when I lived in Cambridge, Paris and London (not at the same time). I cannot articulate this feeling, cannot articulate the reason why I felt the way I did, it was like when you dream and then wake up and know that you’re dreamt but whatever it was that you dreamt about is over the horizon of known vision. If you could only concentrate enough you might know what it was you dreamt about but it is tantalisingly out of range, out of sight, out of the mainframe of everyday life.

So on that Saturday lunchtime, I tried to understand, to work out, to articulate why it was the way I felt like this, and through the prism of a couple of glasses of Fat Cat Marmalade and Beavertown’s Bloody ’Ell, I continued to consider memory and beer and pubs and inn signs and how the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the beginning and start all over again.

Water

Water, not any old water, cucumber and mint infused, home alone in a massive Kilmer jar, comfortable at the back of the bar in the Georgian Townhouse, hiding behind the serried ranks of lustrous hand pumps and gleaming taps. Craft water perhaps, fresh tasting, a zingy accompaniment to my glass of High Wire, tzatziki water perhaps, a pleasing draught of difference. Even though I drink a lot of water, I rarely order any whilst in the pub, uninteresting and expensive it is and chlorine takes its bow with tap water but this was glorious, especially as the beers in front of me were equally translucent. As well as High Wire, there were Camden Ink and Pale, Adnams Ghost Ship and something from Redwell, whose name I didn’t catch (I’d had their Bullards No 2 IPA earlier in the day, where aromatics of citra and cascade leapt sprite-like out of the glass). There’s a youthfulness and lightness about the Townhouse, that makes me want to return and study the beers and eat the food (the haddock and chips stirs the soul and stiffens the sinews of gluttony), and as I engulf myself in the High Wire I hear about ghosts and hospitals and voices in the night and the laughter of those who enjoy this pub speak about the time they went to Yarmouth Pier by way of Ipswich town.

I’m in Norwich for the most fantastic City of Ale event (whose organisers treated us to grub at the Townhouse) doing a couple of talks with Britain’s Beer Revolution co-author Roger Protz.

The Georgian Townhouse, a rather lovely place

So at 6.30 on a Thursday morning there I was at BrewDog

For how many years I have been visiting breweries I do not know. I would think that Highgate in Walsall was one of my first (Victorian gloom and low ceilings), or was it a flurry of what we called micros back in the venerable days of 1996/7? Impressed? Not really. At first, it was like the school trips to factories (I remember one to Ellesmere Port in particular, the smell of Swarfega and the strange texture of metal shavings), the noise, the smell, warm, spicy, beery, the wet floor, the trip hazard of a hose, the mystery of what malt does and how the hop has its evil way; the man in the white coat, the clip board, the age of the steam train, the cobwebbed vision, but that was then.

Things have changed and I’m at home in a certain type of brewery, whatever the size, usually one whose beer I am keen to devour (Stella left me Arctic cold last year though it was smiles all round when the brewmaster let slip that he thought the beer better dry-hopped as it used to be, a slip of the tongue he rescinded within seconds), and I have always wanted to try and see the brewery as more than a parcel of boilers and vats offering the potential to become as rich as Croesus.

So at 6.30 on a Thursday morning there I was at BrewDog.

It’s: beeps and the whirr of cogs and the deep breathing of a machine that does something or other; the lauter (or is it a mash, my notes say lauter though) tun gleams and glows, embraced in the grip of equally gleaming pipes and rods, not as squat as some I have seen, but sleek and tall, a supermodel of beer ingenuity. More sounds: the water for the mash emerging from its tank, a lapping sound, gentle, a pastoral sound at odds with the steel surrounds and the preciseness of temperature control, the latter a mathematical-like process that works with me standing still and opening sacks, the grain smashed and rolled and ready to spill its secrets into the warm water. Brewing involves waiting, is it a science, an art, a process, or an induction into a mystery? Why does this question itch away at me?

And on this early morning in BrewDog, where we wait before the pilot plant, wait for the system to start, I also think of the dignity of labour, the manhandling of sacks of grain, the graft, the industry, the collaboration between the malt and the water and briefly the senseless of an early morning start (we’d left the hotel at 6am). The water and the grain embrace, shake hands, US and Soviet soldiers meeting at Torgau in April ’45, while Nick the brewer turns the grain and the water, turns and learns and unfurls someday beer. As I stand there in the company of collaborators Matt, Brad and Jonny, I then imagine I might be in the bowels of a space ship with the hiss of steam, the hum of the engine, the clang of a tool on metal, all of which seem to occur in a strange vacuum of waiting. There seems to be a lot of waiting in brewing.

As time passes the big brewery, through a couple of doors, comes to life, the clinking parade of glass bottles in their slow serpentine crawl, down-to-earth visions of hi-viz jackets as staff check temperatures, wort flow, hop inclusion and god knows what else in this scientific theme park of a brewery. The columns of the kettles rise to the ceiling, a hi-tech, spindly version of the more rounded, variegated pillars that I recently observed in an Italian cathedral, and everywhere a labyrinthine network of pipes; how can the human mind comprehend such a maze? The canning line has an element of the fairground as cans pause on a slope for a second before rushing on their way, in a manner that suggests a big dipper. Outside we find ourselves in a forest of maturing tanks, in which an unwary traveller might get lost, more beer, a sign of BrewDog’s unyielding growth (and next door another brewery is being built).

And later on across the road, we go to a nondescript warehouse, a big garage, an unromantic looking sight, where 300 or more barrels rest with all manner of beers sleeping the sleep of the just, some ready for now while others ripe for blending. I try a snifter of Anarchist Alchemist, a 15% triple (or is that quadruple?) IPA that has been in an oak barrel since 2011: soya, salt, are you my umami, marmite, brett, farmyard, sherry, easily one of the most expressive wood-aged beers I have had for a long time.

Back at the brewery, bustling, full-pelt, the tap open, a James McAvoy lookalike with a glass of Punk, we try Born to Die, a huge, Humvee-hopped 8.5% imperial IPA, assertive, juicy, fresh, savoury and bitter, a beer to be drunk within a month or so of its inception, a complete contrast to the sleeping giants in the barrel warehouse. There are other beers, conversation, the ever-present sighs and whoops and cheers and clangs and sine waves of the brewing giant a couple of doors away and once again I can see why some choose the path that brewing and beer offers. As I have said before, beer is a part of the way one can live one’s life, a gastronomic choice, that excites me as much as food, literature, music, sport, love, fun, laughter and everything else that makes up this complex puzzle we call life.

I along with Matt, Jonny and Brad were invited to BrewDog to collude on a beer, which we hope will be ready in a couple of months; it will be a tripel-style flavoured with peach and apricot, accompanied by a gentle sourness. We have called it Peach Therapy and I am looking forward to trying it.

The long dead cohabit with the restless living and the beer list just keeps improving

Mercato di Mezzo, Bologna. It’s calm and careful, gustatory, as a Sunday evening of couples promenade with late night kids in tow, delighted as mum and dad lift a glass to toast some fortune or other (but the laughter will be stilled when the reveille is called in the morning), and then I spot a chef grilling, the word calamari pinned somewhere on the stall, followed by the fairground-tough aromatics of fried food elbowing their way through the elegant air, calamari, prawns, gloved in batter, crisp and salty and dotted with lemon juice. I order and then grab a table and look across and see the sign for Birra Baladin. I keep an eye on my food and order a glass of Super Bitter, as far from a traditional bitter as can be. The imperious wave of a conductor (Toscanini rather than the metronomic tick-tock of von Karajan thank god) brings the scent of deep, rugged, sensual orange marmalade to the nose alongside a spear thrust into the side of bitterness; almond, marzipan and sweetness on the palate start their descent to be cut off by an assertive bitterness, sticky almost, a big beer that beams in with a missile-like accuracy on the salty, citrus, crunchy, still briny impact of the seafood. As I crunch and sip, I sift through the weekend and recall the bitterness of White Dog’s American Pale Ale at Saturday’s farmers’ market, beneficially bitter, robust and yet mellow. Then I remember Friday night and the barman (and brewer) in Birra Cerqua, where at the back of the small bar there stands a kit of Italian-built stainless steel, while fermenting vessels cower behind opaque glass panels to my right (I told you it was narrow). A glass of Q-Ale, made with German malt and English hops I am told. It is pale gold, hazy, bittersweet and refreshing. ‘We brew on Sundays.’ Another result of this work is the rye beer, earthy and erudite. Back to Sunday, the day when the brewers of Cerqua are busy, the dominant vibe of Mercato di Mezzo as I look about are glasses being raised, the aromatics of fried fish, the deep undercover agents of cured meat and aged cheese and the empty, thin-sounding, TB-cough of an empty coffee carton as it rolls off on the empty floor. Later on, it’s time for Green River, another one room bar, a place that could have been a butchers’ (yet there is no smell of blood in the air), or perhaps it was a tailor’s, where each morning a mournful man washed the portico-shaded front of his shop with the dedicatory air of a penitent, or perhaps it was just another bar. Green Petrol from Brewfist, a Black IPA, smooth, robust, roastiness leashed, citrus flutters amongst the darkness, an ideal metaphor for Bologna, where the long dead cohabit with the restless living and the beer list just keeps improving.

Taste

What’s that you’ve got in your glass, I ask Magic Rock’s Stuart Ross. Salty Kiss comes the reply, with incan berries added at three weeks and then aged in Tequila barrels for about three months.

We’re at the launch of Unhuman Cannonball at Craft Beer Co in Islington and it’s good to catch up (I first met Stuart when he was at the Crown Brewery in Sheffield and we bonded over our love for Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing, which is the only home-brewing book I have ever read with the intensity I usually accord to Hemingway).

He offers me a taste. It’s vinous, delicately sour and lightly salty, there’s a background hum of sweetness and I can just about taste something Tequila-like in the background.

Later on, next day, I’m thinking about the beer and how some drinkers would taste this and say that it wasn’t beer; then I start thinking about the variety of flavours and different directions brewers are now heading in, whether it’s about making their own interpretations of Gose, adding all manner of ingredients, letting this or that yeast in, or replicating their favourite hangover cure in a sour way (when I was interviewing Beavertown’s Logan Plant last year we were talking about Lemon Phantom Sour and he told me it was based on ‘that wonderful hangover cure, Lemon Fanta!’).

If you’re of a traditionalist persuasion, whether it’s keg or cask, then these might seem non-beery flavours, a strangeness in the way brewing is being done, a wayward exclamation of the arts and crafts of brewing, the cliffs of god that need to be climbed on your knees when a nice comfortable escalator will do. Go away, you might want to say.

On the other hand, such flavours and cravings are here to stay, but immersion in the sanctuary of beer can send one off on a crass course towards thinking that everyone, just everyone, thinks the same.

At tastings I have seen people who know their own minds about Pilsner Urquell, Doom Bar, London Pride or Peroni express surprise at their first experience of Saison Dupont or Westmalle Tripel and actually rather enjoy this experience, and with this in mind it’s easy to forget that when you chat and collaborate with those of a similar ilk, that not everyone has their palate calibrated into this brave new world of flavour, for that is what it is — a brave new (rediscovered, some might say) world of flavour, a grave bold cure away from what some might recognise as beer.

And after I taste the Salty Kiss, I return to my Unhuman Cannonball (lemon-gold in colour, juicy, bracingly bitter, forward facing in its grapefruitiness), another beer that traditionalists might care to dismiss — and then I think back to the tasting I had done earlier in the day when someone had asked me what constitutes beer? There and then, aloud, I had mused that beer is an alcoholic beverage made with malted barley, hops, yeast and water but that it might include other grains, and could have spices, fruit, vegetables or meat extract within, and might not have hops or might have more hops than was thought decent, or it might be aged in wooden barrels or even within clay (as I tasted a couple of years ago in Rimini from Birra del Borgo). 

And that is what I like about what is going on in beer at the moment — brewers might not always get it right but the search for (or the rediscovery of) different flavours and aromas is a great thing. Musicians and writers and bakers and builders use traditional forms to express their soul but if they discover a new way then it’s right that they take that path. Brewers can do the same.

Diversions

…And there are times when I don’t know what words to clink together when it comes to beer (and its accompanying spheres of conflict, comfort and crumbling ideals); and there are times when I don’t know in what way words should follow each other. Should it be a pre-ordained path of understanding? Should there be understanding at all? After all, words come into the world unformed or perhaps uninformed about the path that they should follow — that understanding is the plan of the writer, or is that more the slow camera pan of the words of the writers the writer has read that form themselves into squares, at arms length, Frederick the Great’s giant guardsmen assembling, an understanding of human form. That beer in the glass there, the one that glows on the table, whose colour suggests the sun of the Mediterranean, what should I make of it, how should I approach it? How do you do? What’s your name? Shall we dance? Or should I just engulf myself in it, let it take me over and wait for the next one to pass?

Is it just a liquid in a clear glass, or is it something more amenable when it comes to understanding? The flavour, the aroma, the feel of the liquid on the tongue, the stroke on the throat, the taut line when a fish is caught, what does that mean when the beer is drank. Enjoyment for sure (unless of course it’s a beer whose only lure is a bright, fluorescent light, a clowning glory, a false story that all will be well if only the drinker picks this beer), the swell of the ocean, a mighty movement on the palate, a realisation that here is something that makes you remember why one day, long ago, you chose to add beer to that happy band of companions that shall always be at your side until the day the great ride is done (the deep well of literature, the soaring peaks of music, the deep wine-dark breadths of the sea, the earthly powers of mountains, the companionship of history, the simplicity of friendship and love, the faithful pleasure of the table, the immortality of sport, the instinctive bond with canis lupus familiaris).

And on that day beer, and all the notes that appear on its own chromatic scale coming together in as many different ways as there are days in a life (the people, the places where beer is drank and made, the parade of flavours and aromas, the nothingness with which one grapples with to understand its place in the world), became embedded in my life and yet there are times when I still don’t know what words to clink together when it comes to writing about beer.