F2F- Craft Cwrw

from FoRk to fork journeys in local food

Craft Cwrw

Beer and cider is undergoing something of a renaissance in Wales. Like wine in France, it is increasingly seen as an expression of the land that produced it. Michael Smith goes on a mystery tour, meeting the makers and sampling some of the local magic...

Words Michael Smith Photography Warren Orchard

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CRAFT CWRW

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riving down the wide sweep of the M4, gliding above the South Wales coast, rugged hills rising from the sea above the relics of heavy industry, steel towns and coal ports for the pit villages up the valleys, petering out into miles and miles of lush countryside behind them; as always, I felt a funny, familiar kinship with this magical land, a place that reminds me of my home in so many ways, but is at the same time still essentially a mystery to me.

I remembered a summer evening with friends in a field in Wales once.

“What’s Wales’ national drink?” I asked.

“Magic mushroom tea” was the cheeky reply.

Fortunately, I wasn’t here to sample that exotic and metaphysically challenging beverage on this trip. I was here to explore some far more straightforward and tasty expressions of the land – the craft beer and cider that’s been evolving at an exponential rate in Wales over the last five or ten years.

Our first stop was Tiny Rebel, housed in a small factory unit in a light-industrial estate on the edges of Newport.

A lad with a bright green mohican was scooping boiled, steaming hops out of a copper kettle. “Nice little sauna,” he joked. Tiny Rebel is the most urban ale we tried, in several ways - with its punky, graffiti’d branding and aesthetic, it feels like a beer on a mission: to introduce a younger crowd to the subtle delights of craft beer, and wean them off the blue WKD in the process.

There are ten people working for the company these days, but it started three years ago with two of them, both engineers, home brewing in a garage. “80% of the time the beer was terrible, but that was how we learned the most.” The tiny old copper and mash tun from that garage is still what they use to experiment with their new brews (20 litres are easier to make, or mess up, than 20,000).

They showed me the fridge they bought off gumtree for £20, using its insulating effect to opposite ends, sticking a

heater in it to ferment the beers. I opened the fridge door, a mad scientist mist emerged, clearing to reveal a single conical lab flask full of very cloudy beer. “Just us messing around again,” they said – but it struck me this was messing around with all the rigour of engineers.

Tiny rebel’s best seller is FUBAR, an American style pale ale; “Would you like one?”

“Have you got something a bit less full-on hoppy than an American pale?”

“Here, have a try of the Cwtch.”

“What does Cwtch mean?” I asked, trying to pronounce the impossible word on the bottle, “Cwtch is kind of untranslatable, but it roughly means a cuddle, sort of.”

They describe it as a Welsh red ale. What a lovely, three-dimensional, complete flavour it has: beneath the fresh, fruity high notes, hints of toffee, and a distinctive “roast” flavour that made me think of pork crackling, an unexpected taste that was completely new to me.

“What’s going to happen to craft beer next then?”

I wondered.

“It’s still very early on in its evolution. A lot of the people drinking it are young, so it’ll be their evolving tastes that define how it develops.”

Tiny Rebel is certainly a brewery with youth on its side the oldest partner’s 32. Judging by their lovely Cwtch, the future of beer is in safe hands; and if this is what the kids coming up in Newport are drinking these days, then there is hope for humanity yet.

Next, we drove away from the coastal conurbation into the gentle hills of Carmarthenshire, up through the most beautiful tunnel of trees, all golden and glowing in the late afternoon sun, heading for the Handmade Beer Company.

Handmade was just that: a far smaller and more eccentric proposition than Tiny Rebel, a one-man band

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Real ale’s got four ingredients: barley, hops, yeast and water. Craft beer’s got two more: Facebook and Twitter.

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in a barn. With his big fluffy beekeeper’s beard, has the air of a wise beer magus. He used to be a graphic designer in Cardiff – like the ex-engineers, a combination of the creative and the technical – before escaping up here to his farmer’s barn to brew.

He does almost everything, from brewing the beer to designing the labels and sticking them on the bottles.

47 now, he started homebrewing when he was 20 to save money, but gradually got more and more into it as an artistically fulfilling pursuit. Three years ago it became his job.

Ian’s beer is generally more traditionally British in style than the hoppy American style that kick-started the craft beer revolution, but he’s keen to experiment - with basil in a porter, and even lapsang suchong.

The small scale means this is possible, because he only has to throw away a small amount of beer if it all goes wrong. “Big companies can’t experiment.

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They’d prefer it if people just wanted the same thing all the time, like the old boys in the pub every day.”

“What’s the difference between real ale and craft beer?”

“Real ale’s got four ingredients: barley, hops, yeast and water. Craft beer’s got two more: Facebook and Twitter. It’s the same thing as far as I’m concerned.”

“Has the Welsh beer scene changed a lot recently?”

“Oh massively – there are probably ten times more small brewers than there were ten years ago. Cardiff’s becoming a mecca for the British scene, with half a dozen little producers. It’s a nice size – everyone’s connected, we all know each other, small brewers are all really helpful to each other.”

Ian sells locally at the moment, and has two barrels on tap in Y Polyn restaurant down the road, where I drank a perfect pint, his CWRW, that evening. I had no idea how to say that strange world written on the

Craft CWRW

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The yin and yang of craft beer is the creative tension between tradition and innovation. But the most important thing is that you want your beer to be drinkable.

beer pump (nor did I know it was Welsh for ‘beer’), and when I tried to repeat “kooroo” in my Vic’n’Bob North East accent, it was met with a round of laughter. I remember being struck

by CWRW’s tasty complexity, a dark, rich amber ale with mysterious depths, and a certain spicy, fruity, indefinably drinkable taste.

“What does this taste of?” I asked Y Polyn’s boss, trying to hit the nail on the head, “It tastes of beer!” he shouted at me enthusiastically.

I would like to be more specific about this taste, but unfortunately the boss, a Scottish bloke who settled in Wales after “living amongst the heathens” in London, has a penchant for vintage Old Poultney whiskey, and was keen to share the wealth, so my tasting notes are not what they should’ve been. You’ll just have to take my word for it that CWRW is delicious, and better than that, try it for yourself.

With a slightly sore head the next day, we drove west, into the hills of North Pembrokeshire. Up the side of a hill whose slate mine roofed the Houses of Parliament, we found our destination, a farm house with “SEREN BEER” written in chalk on a slate outside, next to a smaller piece of slate saying “EGGS 50p.”

We went inside to meet a bloke called Ali who took us through to his back room, full of pewter tankards hanging up on hooks, gold medals and rosettes saying 2nd or 1st, a mash tun, and a beery smell.

“Welcome to maybe Britain’s smallest brewery.”

Brewery? I thought...

“I have a wall in my house with beer taps coming out of it,” he said, as if this strange fact was a perennial source of bemused delight.

“What does that thermometer do by the door?”

“Oh, that’s for the ham.”

That’s when I noticed the leg of prosciutto on a hook, airdrying in his cupboard below the stairs.

“We keep pigs in the garden.”

“Do you sell prosciutto too?”

“Oh no, the laws round that are a nightmare – it’s just for personal use.”

The fact it was all so d.i.y., so one-man-band, made the exquisite joy that came out of the taps all the more of an epiphany. There was genius in those beers. One was a sour, smoky porter that reminded me of bacon and balsamic

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vinegar; my favorite, however, was the Factory Steam, a ‘steam beer’ made the same way as a lager, but at a higher temperature, which makes the yeast produce different flavours, much brighter and fruitier and tastier. We just started getting into the history lesson behind steam beers when a chubby bloke knocked on the door: “Hello, I’ve come for some beer... ” He’s currently struggling to keep up with increasing demand. “Friday nights are the busiest. I know when it’s the weekend once I’ve had all my regulars round. My wife says I should install a revolving door on the house.” For now it’s part-time, the day job being Professor of 20th Century Russian Politics at Aberystwyth University. He also fancies teaching a course on the history of beer – “It’ll probably be the most popular student course ever!”

“What’s the future of craft beer?” I wondered again.

“The whole thing started off in the US, and we’re still five years behind. In the US, beer’s now seen to be on a par with wine in terms of quality, and as good with food as wine. The market is also prepared to pay for it, in the same way we’ll now pay £15 instead of £5 for a bottle of wine over here.

Flavour-wise, the next frontier after hops is sour beer.”

Sour beer might initially seem weird to a palette used to bland beer – imagine a cooking apple sourness rather than the bitter dryness of hops providing the kick. He’s about to start making a rhubarb-infused sour beer as a collaboration with a food shop over in Carmarthenshire.

“The yin and yang of craft beer is the creative tension between tradition and innovation. But the most important thing is that you want your beer to be drinkable.”

“How would you define drinkability?”

“Drinkability is when you want another, but know you shouldn’t.”

“What’s it like having unlimited beer in the house?”

“I don’t go out as much as I used to.”

And why would you, if you called a place like this home? He took me to see his chickens, ducks and sheep, “lawnmowers that ultimately become lamb,” in the fields where he’d love to build a barn to brew in one day, spreading out to the reservoir over the road, which provides his water, “my most local ingredient.”

“I come from a d.i.y. ethos – brewing as a way to ‘escape from the man’ as it were. There’s a freedom in doing it for yourself.” To a city dweller like me, living in a cramped, expensive flat, completely alienated from the dinner I probably picked up in a mini-supermarket in a train station, his life seemed idyllic. Something in me wanted to stick two fingers to the man and come and cure my own ham up a hillside too.

Last up, we pootled back east up the Ebbw valley, its lush, steep hillsides soaring above us, little veins of workers’ terraces clinging precipitously to the sides like ivy. We got off the main road and climbed up an unnerving slope full of hairpin bends, huge slate quarries dug into the hillsides, and the road dropping off at the side to a certain sudden death, and magnificent sweeping views.

Craft CWRW

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We got to the farm to find the lads finishing off their Friday fish ‘n’chips, reassuringly drinking their own Hallet’s Cider in the process, which struck me as a great food and drink combination. I got passed a bottle of the ‘entry’ cider: ‘beautifully simple’ it said on the label, and it was – lovely, balanced, bright, but subtle...

Martin Hallet took us out to see where the magic happens, a farm shed with a dozen tall steel drums and a big Marshall amp blasting out Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ across the valleys.

“So how do you brew this cider then?”

“You don’t brew cider, you make cider,” “Ah, right – what, like wine?”

“Yeah, very much like wine – I’m experimenting with a few winemaking techniques at the minute as it happens, stirring the lees, like they do with white Burgundy, which gives it a more robust mouth-feel. Dunno if it’ll work yet mind... ”

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Some experiments fail spectacularly, but that's all part of the fun.

“Do you experiment a lot?”

“Oh yeah, I’m experimenting all the time. Some experiments fail spectacularly, but that’s all part of the fun,” he said, taking me to his little lab out the back, with its refractometers, microscope slides and lab equipment.

“My most important instrument’s this though,” he chuckled, holding up an empty wine glass, “this and my nose and my taste buds.”

“What are the microscope slides for?”

“Understanding the yeasts and microbes is the key to nursing and navigating the natural process of fermentation from juice to cider. It’s all about understanding the biotechnology, if you like. People do too much by rote.

We’ve got electricity and technology and steel drums these days, you don’t have to plough a field in clogs with a clay

Craft CWRW

pipe for it to be craft cider.”

“What makes it a craft cider then?”

“The difference between a craft cider and a factory cider is that a factory cider’s only tradition and provenance is that factory; it’s designed by a food technologist, it’s a form of culinary technology, using Chinese apples shipped over as a concentrate. It’s just a factory process, a standardised product, churned out the same forever.”

As he talked about these placeless factory products, I spied a pallet of what looked like mini champagne bottles gathering dust in the corner of the barn.

“What are those?”

“Oh, that’s an experiment that didn’t work out. A vintage cider that completely fermented in the bottle, like methode traditionelle champagne. Between you and me it tasted bloody horrible.”

He opened a bottle, expecting the worst, pouring it into the wine glass, a lovely, weighty amber colour. To everyone’s

delight, it had matured and fermented in the four years it’d been sitting there, becoming a delicious, delicate, biscuity luxury, almost a champagne made out of apples instead of grapes.

“They’ll never go on sale, these, mind – far too much sediment in the bottom. Glad you asked about them though, I’d forgotten they were there. Maybe I’ll stick a couple in a competition. Here, do you want to take a couple?” He said, spotting how captivated I looked. I pulled out a few from the four-year-old pallet, a forgotten experiment gathering dust, thrilled that he’d offered. I’ve still got a couple of them on the wine rack in the kitchen right now. Just writing about this rare, refreshing treat is making me want to drink some.

In fact, dear reader, I’m just going to go and stick one in the fridge. And then I shall toast all the makers of the fine beverages I tried in this green and magical Land. What a delightful array of eccentrics those blokes were. I doff the proverbial cap to them all.

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DRINK LORE & LEGENDS

FROM THE DRUIDS At least as early as the sixth century, the druidic legendary person Ceridwen is associated with cauldrons and intoxicating preparations of grain and herbs in many poems of Taliesin. This preparation, ‘Gwîn a Bragawd’, is said to have brought science, inspiration and immortality.

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CANNED PRIDE Beer is the national drink of Wales and Felinfoel Brewery was the first brewery outside the US to sell beer in cans.

JD TO YOU AND ME Joseph ‘Job’ Daniels emigrated to America in the 18th century from Aberystwyth. His grandson Jack became the creator of the ever popular Jack Daniels whiskey that people all over the world enjoy today.

MONASTIC BREW The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 852 records a distinction between fine ale and Welsh ale, known as ‘bragawd’, as somewhat between mead and modern day ale. This Saxon-period Welsh ale was a heady, strong beverage, made with spices such as cinnamon, ginger and clove as well as herbs and honey. Often prepared in monasteries, including Tintern Abbey and the Friary of Carmarthen, until Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1536.

WATERED DOWN The London Dry Gin, Bombay Sapphire, uses purified water from Lake Vyrnwy in Powys to bring the strength down to 40%.

IRISH OR WELSH Some historians claim Arthur Guinness used a Welsh recipe from Llanfairfechan near Bangor for his stout.

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We're now at our journey’s end... ...however to start your own food and drink odyssey visit www.fork2fork.wales and chose one of the hundreds of direct food locations available just a stone's throw away, be it a farmers’ market, farm shop, festival or at a farm gate.

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