Beer Tourism Locally

With my son-in-law’s parents down from Edinburgh, a visit to our favourite local Brewery seemed to be in order. So, the good Mr Valance was contacted and a tour for six of us was booked.

Came the day, and the man was Gerry himself; and our tour party had increased to twelve, with another group of six from South Africa.

The tour starts in the Visitor Centre with Health & Safety advice (the stairs are steep, there can be a lot of water about, and headroom can be limited). Gerry followed this with some history about the Centre, which was originally the Maltings from which the Brewery developed. He talked about the Clarke family history as well as mentioning the Gilchrist family involvement and Percy Flick, so important to the continuance of the Brewery in the fifties.

Then we moved into the brewery proper. In Hook Norton, all seems to start with the steam engine, the motive power for the brewery. Over 100 years old, to see this historic engine performing the tasks for which it was built is a delight in itself. It lifts the water from the spring-fed well below the brewery up to the tanks on the sixth floor, where it magically becomes liquor. It also drives much of the machinery and pumps through a series of cogs and driving belts. For the record, the teeth on the various drive cogs are wooden—in fact hornbeam, a very hard wood, so that in the event of failure they will just chip, and not shatter as metal would. Also, they can be more readily replaced individually.

Our next port of call was the hopback, where the hops are extracted from the wort after the boil. From there we progressed on, under the mash tuns, where Gerry explained about the ‘taps’. These are a critical part of the process, as they control the rate of runoff from the mash to the copper, and traditionally the head brewer attends to this. Thence to the hop store to savour the wonderful aromas of the stored hops in their pockets—80kg of dried and compressed hops in a six-foot sack, all English, and the majority from Hereford & Worcester. Such is the hop market in the UK that the Brewery has to advise the hop merchant of their requirements five years in advance. I suppose the logic of the tour kicks in around here as hops are one of the four raw materials used.

The next raw material on the tour was the wondrous malted barley, which Gerry got the audience to suck, not chew, to release the maltose, and then subsequently to chew. Then to the grist mill, which naturally followed after the maltstore. From the grist mill we moved on to the open copper cooler, where Gerry was able to explain about the grist mill and cracking barley (too noisy by the grist mill). Also, the cooler was in full flow, the wort being pumped up five floors from the hopback below, to circulate around the cooler, before descending to the paraflow for its final cooling before transfer to the fermenting vessel.

From the cooler our trip took us to the highest point of the brewery and the third ingredient, the liquor tanks at the top of the tower. Since my last visit to the brewery the tanks, which have been in use for over 100 years, and from which the cold liquor is taken and boiled, have had to be covered as HSE feel there may be an outside possibility of the sunlight encouraging bacterial growth in the water. How sad! On then to the fermenting room, where the real magic takes place. Here, after the cooled wort is transferred from the paraflow to the open fermenters, and the fourth ingredient, Hook Norton’s own strain of yeast, is pitched. The wonderful little organism does its work, reproducing rapidly, feeding on the maltose, giving off CO2 and alcohol, and in 5 to 7 days, lo out comes beer.

From the fermenting room the tour moved on to the racking and cask fillers. Here again Gerry gave a graphic explanation of how the casks are washed, new keystones inserted, the casks filled and dry-hopped, and finally the shrive hammered home.

The horses were home, so we were able to go across to the stable to see the three shires, one of which is in honourable retirement.

On our return to the visitor centre we went around the museum, which is both a brewing museum and Hook Norton village museum. The brewing museum contains interesting artefacts and obscure bits of information (who could guess what a chondroscope does?), while the village museum celebrates the silver band, the local churches, and also gives an interesting view of the iron ore extraction which led to the expansion of Hook Norton. Despite some thirty years in the area I was not really aware of the significance of this extraction period. Always something to learn.

Finally, down to the bar and the mandatory tasting. Needless to say all the beers were in excellent condition, and all were tasted by at least one member of our group. When you’ve had enough, you hand in your visitor’s badge and receive a screen-printed Hook Norton Brewery half-pint mug—a nice keepsake.

Our visitors’ reaction? They loved it, not at all what they had expected, very informative, very entertaining and very pleasant. Cap this with a pleasant lunch in the Pear Tree on a fine summer’s day and you’ve had a very rewarding visit. You’ve seen real ale brewing as it should be, you’ve tasted some of the finest beers in Britain, and mixed with some of the pleasantest people in the industry—and all for £7.50.

So if you have visitors and are at a loose end, come on folks, bite the bullet, get over to Hook Norton and take the tour. I guarantee you’ll enjoy it.

 

Dick Palmer