Beer, Glorious Beer: Touring Hook Norton

"Do not put your hands in any tubs of liquid," said Nick, our guide, as we entered the Hook Norton Brewery last week. Sensible advice anywhere, really. Putting your hands in strange tubs of liquid is a good way to lose your hand. It's also a way to get you kicked off a brewery tour. And since the whole point of a brewery tour is to get to the end of it so you can sample the beer you've just seen being made, that would be a Bad Thing.

My Lovely Wife and I toured the brewery the day after we toured the Mini factory. The effect was, quite literally, like going from the 21st century to the 19th century. If the Mini factory is all robots and laser beams, the Hook Norton Brewery is all bags of malt and tubs of liquid. Oh, there's also a steam engine: a 25-horsepower number believed to be the only one still in use for its original purpose, that original purpose being moving things--mainly water--around the brewery, since you don't really need a steam engine to make beer.



The steam engine has a seven-foot flywheel and its original 109-year-old drive belt. I don't know where you'd go if you needed a new belt. It would probably have to be custom woven from sheep intestines, kapok and gutta percha.

There were 11 of us on the tour and that was about twice as many as we actually saw working in the brewery. Occasionally as we climbed a narrow staircase or pitched up on a landing there'd be a casually-uniformed employee. A scientific-looking woman in a white lab coat was visible behind glass in one office, an array of test tubes in front of her. But otherwise, the place was almost deserted, imbued with the languid feeling you get after your third pint on a rainy day.

For a rainy day it was, absolutely pissing down. We'd taken two buses from Oxford, the first a double-decker to Chipping Norton, the second a tinier coach to Hook Norton that the driver piloted as if it were a Zodiac inflatable full of commandoes. He plowed through the narrow, twisting, flooded roads, pedal to the metal, spraying great rooster tales of foam behind us. By the time we alighted, trembling, in Hook Norton I needed a beer.

The brewery building itself looks Dickensian, and I suppose it is. They've been brewing beer in Hook Norton since 1849 and the Victorian tower brewery looked like a workhouse or asylum, steam curling up from various chimneys:
It reminded us of the building in the Japanese anime film "Spirited Away," a living, breathing thing. Inside was the best technology the Victorians had to offer: copper vats and toothed gears, sprockets and cogs and belts. It was like being inside a massive pocket watch.





Some of the cogs--as big around as dustbin lids--had wooden teeth. You never want metal against metal, Nick explained, since if the cogs seize up it's a horror to get them unstuck. If one cog has wooden teeth you can just knock them out with a hammer, pull the assembly apart and replace them. I don't know what this guy is doing, probably putting goose fat on the gudgeon ring or something:

I don't understand the chemistry of brewing beer. I have a better grasp on the consumer end of things. I believe the process involves water--called "brewer's liquor"--which at Hook Norton is pumped up from an underground well. Malt--which is roasted barley (who knew?)--is added. Hops do something important. Yeast helps things ferment. We couldn't go into the fermenting room--a stray bacterium can ruin the whole process, evidently--but Nick opened the door and swung it back and forth to waft the odors to us as we crowded outside.

"Oooh, that's lovely, that," said an older woman. "You're in the pub."

The process from start to finish at Hook Norton takes 11 days, or about as long as it takes to make 9,000 Minis.

Back in the little tasting room in the brewery's museum Nick pulled us half-pints of the various Hook Norton offerings: the malty Hooky Dark, the golden Hooky Bitter.... He opened a bottle of Cotswold Lion, a seasonal beer that tasted faintly of citrus. They were all very nice but I confess I'm partial to the beer I order whenever I'm down the pub: Old Hooky. "Beautifully balanced with a well-rounded body," is how it's described.

Like beer, like beer drinker, I say.


Can't make it to Hook Norton? Try a virtual tour instead.

Wine Not?

I think my liver has reached the perfect stasis between normalcy and cirrhosis. It's taken me a while to achieve it, and has forced me to calibrate my intake of alcohol exactly, but here I am.

See, the English drink more than the Americans do. And when in Rome.... Not that I get pissed every night. It's just that if I'm having lunch in a pub, it seems wrong--culturally, ethically--not to have a beer. And when I say beer, I mean a pint of beer, a big ol' goblet that you could resuscitate a carp in. Dinner tastes better with wine, so why not uncork a bottle of shiraz or rioja? And wouldn't it be just plain rude to drink orange juice rather than sherry at an Oxford reception?

Even five months ago, back in Silver Spring, such a regimen would have left me logy in the morning. I had lost the stamina and bounce-back-ability I had so painstakingly gained during four years in college. The problem, I think, is that before I moved to England I wasn't drinking enough. Or, rather, regularly enough. My sporadic intake of booze--a beer here, a glass of wine there--just confused my body. It never had a chance to acclimate.

That's not a problem here. My body has been forced to come to terms with it. Like a climber who has spent a six weeks at Everest base camp as his body gets used to the altitude, I'm finally ready for my assault on the summit. I imagine my liver throwing up its arms and saying, "Looks like another Boddington's ale is coming down the hatch. If you can't fight 'em, join 'em."

Of course, please drink responsibly and if you drink do not operate a motor vehicle, heavy machinery or a blog.

Strange Tablefellows
I'm afraid I haven't learned any more about wine since living here. I like drinking it, and I have a few favorite types: Barbera among the reds, Sancerre among the whites. But I don't know about grapes or regions or vintages. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I usually buy wine based on an imprecise union of two factors: how much it costs and how pretty its label is. Pathetic, isn't it?

Every newspaper and magazine here has a wine column--even, I think, the ones for children-- so I could take the time to learn. But why should I when the grocery stores try to help? Shopping at an insanely crowded Sainsbury's a few days before Christmas, I prowled the wine aisles. Being so close to Europe, the selection was great. The shelf below each bottle was labeled with a description of that wine and what foods it might accompany. You've seen this on the back labels of wine bottles: serve well-chilled with fish; a good accompaniment to steak or chicken. This label below a Portuguese red was so strangely specific that I had to take a photo:


"Try with Irish stew"? I think I'd prefer a nice Guinness. And if it wasn't only 10:30 in the morning, perhaps I'd have one.