You’ve brewed at just about every size of brewery during your career.
I started in Greene King doing a pupilage, and then an improvership―you never hear of that these days. Then I spent 20-odd years at Whitbread, which was then a national brewery, I was seconded to various places all over the U.K., and, of course, in the headquarters, Chiswell Street, which was pretty good fun. There was a brewer’s house there, which we paid virtually nothing for. We lived in the City of London, we had free food and free drink, with a maid and a cook.
It was all downhill after that…
It certainly was (laughs). Following Whitbread, I moved to Shepherd Neame in the southeast of England
…which is the oldest brewery in England?
Yes. Well, actually they’ve got the date wrong, but they don’t like to admit it. It’s not 1698, as they say, but they can’t change that now. That was a medium-sized regional brewery.
Following that, I decided to try my hand at being a publican, Big mistake. An absolute dog’s life, having to deal with totally unreasonable customers. That was near Canterbury, in a village called Stelling Minnis. Eventually, I put a little microbrewery in there and did cask beer. But we were hit at the time with breweries putting rents up, and the opening of the borders with France, which gave people the ability to go to France and drive back with a whole load of alcohol. It really hit sales. Having said that, I could sell all the beer I made in the summer, but I couldn’t sell anything in the winter. All the big brewers were discounting like crazy, and the publicans were being squeezed.
I was a member of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, and they had a newspapaer, What’s Brewing. There was an article in there that headed off with “Go west, brewers!” and it was a thinly-veiled advertisement for this job. I wrote, and here I am. I’ve been here 13 years.
What changes have there been here over the years?
When I first came here, they said, look, this is the South. People are very careful and conservative, they don’t like change, and they’d rather drink Natural Light. So we did start off making things relatively bland. But over the years, we have deliberately made everything more assertive.
It’s difficult, because there are basically two types of craft brewers; there are craft beers who have to brew beer for people to guzzle in large quantities―like us―and there are craft brewers who can make all kind of funky stuff that you couldn’t drink more than one bottle of.
But you do make specialty styles, like this imperial stout.
We don’t sell very much of those styles, but we like to do it, and we feel we need to have it there for those people who do want it.
The two most dramatic successes we’ve had here are the wit and, funnily enough, the blueberry wheat, which we’ve just taken off. There were howls of protest about it. Who would have dreamt I’d ever be putting fruit in beer?
Or brewing a Belgian style?
Yeah, but we’ve improved on it (laughs). When we first opened, the most adventurous beer was probably the IPA. We’ve brewed doubles, other strong styles. The funny thing is, the best thing we’ve ever brewed was a saison. The guys from Allagash came in here, and they said, gosh this is better than ours, and they drank a whole load of it. But the public didn’t drink much. It’s always the same, though, with a new beer: you just have to grit your teeth and keep it on for it to become popular.
One thing we haven’t done is lactic brews, And we haven’t put beer into bourbon casks, but I think we can safely wait until we have some casks of our own [from the distillery to be opened later this year]. Otherwise, we’re done pretty much everything. I know we’ve brewed about 60 different styles.
