A Beer in the Loire Read online

  A BEER

  IN THE LOIRE

  Tommy Barnes

  For George and Ellen Barnes

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  BEER NO. 1: Mud-Coloured IPA

  BEER NO. 2: Fat Boy IPA

  BEER NO. 3: Chicken-Flasher IPA

  BEER NO. 4: The Worst Fence in Braslou Black IPA

  BEER NO. 5: Sinister Turquoise Black IPA

  BEER NO. 6: Electrocuted Chicken Porter

  BEER NO. 7: Enslaved Elf Munich Ale

  BEER NO. 8: Mussolini Ale

  BEER NO. 9: Clifton Porter

  BEER NO. 10: Berger Blonde

  BEER GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAPS

  PLATES

  COPYRIGHT

  BEER NO. 1:

  Mud-Coloured IPA

  RECIPE

  6 kg Maris Otter malt

  500 g German pilsner malt

  40 g Nugget hops at start of boil

  20 g Citra hops after 75 minutes

  20 g Citra hops after 85 minutes

  20 g Citra hops post-boil for 10 minutes

  MISTAKES

  Lack of clearing agent (Irish moss)

  Failure to take a gravity reading post-boil

  Fermentation at wrong temperature for the yeast

  Failure to rack beer before bottling

  Getting distracted by dogs eating each other’s vomit

  Brewing in nothing but Y-fronts

  Burt leered at me – squat, beer-bellied, surly, defiant, a cigar butt protruding from the corner of his chubby, English-hating face. He had stolen my wallet, but I had cut him off in the front garden before he could escape and I was currently working out how hard I should hit him with a spade. There’ll be apologists out there saying ‘Violence doesn’t solve anything’ and ‘You shouldn’t take the law into your own hands’ and ‘He’s only a nine-week-old puppy – don’t hit him with a spade,’ but you weren’t there, guys. You were not there. This was the culmination of a week of psychological warfare and, up until now, Burt had been winning comfortably, thanks to a couple of sensational coups: two days before, he had chewed open my cigar box and hidden the cigars around the garden and today he’d stolen my wallet from my back pocket while I was bending over to get him some food. He was a raving sociopath.

  Rose, my girlfriend, called me from the upstairs landing. ‘Tommy, I think you should come and see this.’

  ‘Hold on, I’m going to hit Burt with a spade,’ I said.

  ‘He’s a nine-week-old puppy.’

  ‘People said that about Hitler.’

  ‘Nobody said that about Hitler. Leave him alone and come and see this.’

  ‘OK. Fine. I’m going to throw him as high as I can into a tree.’

  ‘Don’t throw him into a tree. Come and see this.’

  I hissed at Burt, who eyeballed me with contempt and continued chewing his cigar butt. I could still feel his eyes on the back of my head as I walked through the front door to see Damien, our French neighbour, prowling the walls of the living room with a spectacular electric drill in his hands. Before I could question him, Rose called again from upstairs: ‘Hurry up and look at this.’

  It’s probably a land prawn, I thought. That’s what Rose called the large, crustacean-like centipedes that turned up on the walls every now and then. She hadn’t quite come to terms with French countryside insects yet, but when I arrived on the landing there was no land prawn. Instead, she was standing by the window looking into the Richelieu Forest opposite our house.

  ‘I tell you what, Rose, I’m going to have that little shit deported.’

  ‘You can’t deport Burt. He’s actually French, unlike you.’

  ‘Wrong. He’s half Australian sheepdog. I’m going to get him sent back to the colonies. He’s driving me mad. Shit. I think I’m having a breakdown. The walls feel like they are shaking. Oh no, Rose. I can hear a buzzing. I’m having a stroke. This is Burt’s fault.’

  ‘You’re not having a stroke. The walls are shaking because Damien’s drilling a hole in our wall.’

  ‘He’s doing what?’

  ‘He said you’d agreed to it last night when they came round for dinner.’

  I thought back to the previous night, sitting by the fire, drinking a bottle of Cognac with Damien and Celia, our French neighbours. It was the first time we’d met them, having only bought our new house a couple of weeks previously. Damien, mid-twenties, tall and thin, a hand-rolled cigarette hanging out of his mouth and tightly curled black hair sprouting haphazardly from his head, was staring at the fireplace while I poured him another half a pint of Cognac.

  ‘You see, the problem is your fire doesn’t get enough oxygen,’ he said. Damien spoke French slowly and deliberately for our benefit. ‘If I drill a hole here, then your fire would work better.’ His finger circled clumsily before he saw through his double vision and settled on a spot on the wall next to the fireplace. I agreed instantly.

  ‘One must teach the walls who’s boss.’ I nodded to myself sagely as I guzzled my fifth brandy and dropped in and out of consciousness.

  ‘D’accord, Tommy. I will come round on Monday and drill it,’ said Damien.

  ‘Brilliant! Drilling holes. That’s living.’

  And that’s how we left it. I didn’t actually think he would do it. I always promise to do things when I am drunk but I don’t actually do them. It must be a French thing.

  ‘Hold on, Rose. But if Damien is down there drilling a giant hole in the living-room wall, then … then aren’t we going to have a giant hole in the living-room wall?’

  Before she could answer, I charged back downstairs. Damien was packing his drill back into the case. There was a hole fifteen centimetres in diameter in the wall next to our fireplace. I sat down. From the sofa I could now see our garden. Burt ran past the hole chewing my bank card.

  ‘It’s OK, I did it for free because we are neighbours,’ Damien said as he strolled out of the front door, adding, ‘maybe get a grille to stop the mice.’

  ‘Right. Good idea. Thanks, Damien,’ I said.

  Rose sat down beside me. Together we stared into the hole.

  ‘That’s just what we need. It’s winter, we can’t afford to heat the house and now we have a giant hole in the wall. Why did you call me, anyway?’ I said.

  Rose handed me a pregnancy test. I was puzzled for a moment until I zeroed in on a distinct blue line two thirds of the way up.

  ‘Oh God, no. Oh no. A baby? But we can’t afford a baby. Send it back!’ I said.

  ‘Aren’t you happy?’

  I was happy, of course I was happy, but we’d only been trying for a few weeks. I’d expected, perfectly reasonably, that if my sperm were as laissez-faire as the rest of me, it would take at least a year before they ran out of excuses for doing any work and got round to making babies, and by then we would have figured out how to make a living, and by then perhaps we’d have lost Burt to a tragic steamrolling accident.

  I shut my eyes and inhaled slowly, trying to stay calm. Instead, the image of a wood-panelled digital alarm clock appeared on the back of my eyelids. It was the old 1980s alarm clock from my nan’s flat in Bethnal Green. However, it wasn’t telling the time any more. It was counting down. The numbers were counting down so fast that they were a blur. I used to love that alarm clock as a child. Now it had become a harbinger of some terrifying unknown.

  ‘Yes, no, I am really happy. We’re going to have a baby! Oh, dear God. But we haven’t got any money, Rose. We bought a house that was twice our budget, I still can’t find anyone to publish my novel and our redundancy money has all but run out.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Tommy. You’ll get a publisher one day.
And anyway, once you get your brewery off the ground we’ll be all right.’

  ‘The brewery? Oh yes, the brewery. No, you’re quite right. Just got to get that off the ground and we’ll be OK. We’re having a baby!’ we held each other for a few moments. I shut my eyes and the wood-panelled clock sprung up again. ‘Right. I suppose I’d better pop out and brew some beer.’

  My plan to make a new life in France was multifaceted, you see. Only a fool would leave a perfectly good office job in London and move to rural France, basing their entire financial future on writing a bestselling debut comedy/crime novel. No, I had a second prong to my idiot fork. I would also start a brewery. In one of the finest wine-producing areas in France. Indeed, in an area in which, as far as I could see, the locals had absolutely no particular interest in drinking beer. Not only this, but somewhere in my meticulous planning I had overlooked the tiny detail that in order to make beer you actually needed to know how to brew beer.

  Leaving Rose bemused in the living room, a determined wind blowing through the hole in the wall, I walked into the front garden and stared accusingly at the house, cursing my surprisingly effective testicles. Then I went round to the back barn, hauled open the giant old wooden doors and circled my beer-brewing machine. I hadn’t told Rose I didn’t know how to brew beer. As far as she knew, I’d been in the barn these past few days conducting research and testing, not slumped next to a large metal cylinder with my head in my hands.

  The cylinder was called the GrainFather. I had bought it from the internet on the advice of my friend Chris, who knows about making beer. He told me to buy it because, having come to know me over a number of years, he was fully aware that I was a moron in a variety of different and ever more surprising ways, and therefore I would only be able to operate the most user-friendly equipment possible.

  ‘The GrainFather,’ he said in his email, ‘is an all-in-one beer-making machine – a revolution in home brewing that vastly simplifies the beer-making process by allowing you to mash, boil and sparge in one container.’ No, me neither.

  I read the operating instructions for the sixteenth time. Then I sat down and put my head in my hands.

  Three months passed.

  *

  Great mists engulfed the Richelieu Forest across the road from our bedroom window. Everywhere wood smoke poured from chimneys. Mice came into the house to escape both the cold and the owls that patrolled the vast, clear night skies with electric shrieks. Burt ate the mice. He was a destroyer of all things.

  The silence over the countryside was punctuated by occasional shotgun blasts as the locals went out hunting and drinking in the fog (what could possibly go wrong?). They love to hunt here. It’s not a pursuit for posh dicks as it is in England. Here, it’s a right of the ordinary people, a legacy of the revolution. They hunt to eat. I believe this is at least partly because it takes so long to master the absurdly complicated opening hours of French shops that it’s quicker just to get drunk and shoot your future dinner.

  Long nights got even longer. The village of Braslou was deserted. The town of Richelieu was deserted. People hibernate during winter over here. David, husband of Mishi, who we bought the house from, an ex-army officer and deep-sea diver, an action man carved out of flint, described the winters to us as ‘desperate’. Without entirely agreeing with him, I liked that description. ‘Desperate,’ I would repeat it to people whenever I got the chance.

  We did nothing all winter but chop wood and burn wood. The house was cold. There was no central heating, only the two fires and some weak electric heaters in the bedrooms. By day we huddled around the fires drinking coffee. At night we went to bed in as many pairs of pyjamas as we could fit. It was quite fun at the time, but already I could feel the responsibility of being a father. There was no way we could keep a baby here in these conditions. We’d have to get something done about it before next winter.

  In January, we decided we needed to find some signs of humanity and so we piled into the 1999 Renault Mégane and went to the nearby town of Chinon for the day. There was something going on in the town hall, so we thought we’d check it out. If you haven’t been to Chinon you’re a fool. It’s a marvellous place. An enormous fort stretches along a ridge above the town, which tumbles down the hill onto the banks of the Vienne. King John of Robin Hood infamy lived there till he ballsed everything up and had to make a retreat back to England. I had a lot of sympathy for him. Outside the town hall a group of people had gathered. We approached to find they were watching a man leading a pig around with a bit of string. As entertainment goes it was still better than French television.

  Inside the town hall it was going crazy. Pumped-up, rich, hostile French people charged from stall to stall staring at what appeared to be rabbit droppings. We’d been in France long enough now not to be surprised at anything. We thought we’d better join in.

  ‘You have to sniff them. I’ve seen people sniff them,’ said Rose.

  I picked up a rabbit dropping and sniffed it. It was unbearable. ‘I’ll take it!’ I announced commandingly.

  ‘That will be eighty-seven euros,’ said the woman behind the table.

  ‘I won’t take it. I refuse to pay more than fifty euros for a rabbit dropping.’

  ‘It’s a truffle,’ said the woman behind the table.

  ‘No. You’re a truffle,’ I responded, brilliantly.

  A bell rang to signify there was only ten minutes left of the truffle sale. The place went insane. It was Truffle Fever. I may one day make a novelty ’70s funk album called Truffle Fever. Caught in the moment, we identified the smallest truffle we could find and purchased it for €30 after ensuring it wasn’t a rabbit dropping.

  We kept the truffle for a month. It sat glowering at me when I opened the fridge – a constant reminder of the day I saw a pig on a string.

  As February arrived the mists cleared, exposing skeletal trees. Fields were frostbitten and barren. Log piles dwindled.

  I’d been staring at the GrainFather all winter, hoping that beer would suddenly and miraculously come pouring out, but it had produced nothing. Perhaps it’s the wrong season, I thought. Maybe it needs pollination from the bees, I thought. A couple of phone calls to Chris dispelled these theories. On his recommendation I began reading a book called How to Brew by Jon Palmer, which covered absolutely every aspect of brewing, but the more I read, the more complicated the whole thing seemed. There was science involved. Enzymes, for God’s sake. Chris had not mentioned this to me. Nothing puts one off doing things more than the involvement of enzymes. Also, it turned out there was much more equipment needed than just the GrainFather: malt, hops, yeast, fermenters, siphons, plastic tubs, metal pots, hoses, bottle fillers, bottle caps, refractometers and a bottle-capping machine, just for starters. Over the winter the only home-brewing area where I had achieved any success was in collecting empty bottles. They weren’t empty when I bought them of course – they were full of beer. I had spent three months merrily drinking beer after beer from bottles of all shapes and sizes in the name of building up stocks. I’d drunk everything France had to offer. I’d drunk so much beer I’m fairly certain I’d unsettled various international stock exchanges. By February, you couldn’t move for empty beer bottles. The place looked like it had been invaded by a rampant glass fungus.

  It was 11 February. A depression hung over the house. Burt had chewed through the wire of the electric radiator in the kitchen, making it uninhabitable for large parts of the day. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to shut the house down room by room. I was being haunted by my nan’s alarm clock and no brewing had been achieved. Rose had lost all faith in me. She was four months pregnant. That morning I was sitting morosely in front of the fire drinking my third cappuccino. Damien was right about the fire, by the way. It turns out that having a massive hole in the wall makes it burn much better. It’s to do with oxygen. It’s funny – living in big cities erodes your trust in people. For the first few days after Damien drilled the hole in the wall I was conv
inced he’d done it as part of a village-wide plan to make our lives so cold and awful that we’d move back to England. Maybe they didn’t want the boorish English moving in and ruining their perfect lifestyle with fish-and-chip shops and bottomless cynicism? I was wrong, and with the warmth the fire brought I felt shame that I hadn’t trusted Damien. I texted him a few days after he drilled the hole to say thank you. He replied: ‘No problem, Tommy. I don’t bite.’

  Rose came into the kitchen. Her gentle, round pregnancy bump was growing day on day. I rested my coffee on my gentle, round beer bump, which was growing day on day.

  ‘I’ve been offered an interview for some social-media marketing work,’ she announced. ‘If I get it I can do it remotely from here. I have to go to London this weekend for an interview.’

  ‘What? Don’t get a job. We moved here to avoid jobs. You hate that social-media rubbish. Why don’t you just concentrate on your ceramics?’

  ‘Tommy, I’m four months pregnant. We need some money. Face facts. The only money we’ve made is from me selling a few sculptures and it’s not nearly enough for us to live on, let alone bring up a baby with. You still haven’t found a publisher and you’re never going to brew anything, let alone sell anything. The money has almost run out. We need the income.’ She paused. ‘All you do is drink beer all day.’

  ‘Hey, don’t bring my drinking into it. I’m having to drink double the amount of beer to build up our bottle stocks because you aren’t contributing. If anyone isn’t pulling their weight, it’s you.’

  ‘Of course I’m not contributing – I’m pregnant, you idiot. And what’s the point of having all these empty bottles if you don’t have anything to put in them? Whenever a door slams it sounds like we’re living in a giant glass wind chime. Look, maybe you should get a normal job too?’

  ‘I’m not going back to an office, Rose. No way.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. OK, perhaps you could become a freelance graphic designer and work from home?’