Country Life
This happy brew
Peter Quince
I well remember one scorching August day of my childhood when I was travelling with my father along a remote Pennine valley. There came a moment when he suggested, in cheerful tones which broke most welcomely into the sweating silence, that we should abandon our direct route to turn down a steep lane which led to a certain village. When we arrived there he led the way directly to the small, and as I remember it, decrepit pub.
My mind filled with thoughts of lemonade and ginger beer (this was before the Coke conquest) but he had other ideas. It turned out that this was one of the few inns where home-brewed beer was still produced and sold. He asked for some of this and the innkeeper, a taciturn old man who looked as if he spent his time on the moors rather than in the bar-parlour, banged down two empty mugs on the table and filled them up from a tall enamel jug.
Although I was too young to care much for beer at the time I can remember with extreme clarity the experience of lifting that golden, fragrant drink to my parched lips. It was a magnificent tipple, cool and nutty and ripelyflavoured; if the whitewashed walls of the little pub did not quiver to the sound of celestial violins as one drank it, they came as near to doing so as made no difference. I stared at the empty mug in my hands and felt a delicious glow of well-being. My father, thinking perhaps that the landlord might belately remember that there were such things as licensing laws, or else prudently recalling that we had some miles still to walk, forbore to order a refill for me; although mere politeness required that he should dispatch at least one more pint. We Were even permitted to inspect the brewhouse where the wonderful stuff was made. The landlord spoke hardly at all but seemed to accept our fervent Praise as his due.
For years thereafter, a barrel of home-brewed beer from that pub would from time to time appear at home — whenever, I suspect, the transport could be be conveniently managed. It varied a bit in quality, as do all the productions of a great artist, but it never fell below the level of excellence. Looking back over the years at this fountain of nectar. I can see that for me it was not an altogether unalloyed stroke of good fortune. It set a standard for beer which hardly anything since has been able to attain. That department of life has been, so to speak, downhill all the way, rather as if one had imbibed freely of Chateau Latour in childhood, only to find that the nearest available eqivalent in subsequent years was a rough red plonk.
Time eases all such pains, however, and to tell the truth I had not thought about the homebrewed beer of my youth for many a year until the other day, when a hospitable neighbour led me into the kitchen of his farmhouse and poured me a glass of ale. To say that it exactly matched that brew of years ago would be to exaggerate the accuracy of my taste-buds' memory; but it is no exaggeration to say it produced much the same sensations of delight and surprise. It was, he explained, a home-brewed beer which his wife had long been producing, and which she had now brought to a noble degree of perfection. We toasted her industry and her good sense, in several more glasses.
But now I find, having had my interest in the business reawakened, that there are people all over the countryside similarly engaged with malt and yeast. Only one decade after an enlightened Chancellor exempted home-brewing from absurd excise duties, the English in their tens of thousands seem to have taken to producing their own beer. There is a shop in
our local market town which has shelves full of ingredients and utensils for the job; some buy stuff in cans and merely carry out the final processes, others begin with the barley and hops and follow the happy sequence from start to finish. I expect a lot of the beer produced is pretty awful but some of it, as I am in a position to attest, is marvellous.
In future, when I feel depressed about the prospects before the country, I shall try to remember that a nation which has taken to home-brewing with such enthusiasm must still be sound at heart. And what a happy retort it is to the big-business brewers for all the soulless and unforgivable things they have done to our national drink.
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