An ending and another beginning

It’s going to be a wrench but I find myself contemplating the closure of Poppyland Brewery. It has been a major part of my self-styled Northfolk Project that has at once challenged me, developed me, fulfilled me and to a large degree defined me in the gap between a career in museums and the inevitable decline and end of working. Don’t get me wrong. The brewery is flourishing in its own terms. It was never meant to be big, never meant to grow: task and finish. It is still great fun, is making money and the reputation of the Poppyland brand far exceeds its size. But I hadn’t planned to finish quite yet.

  

The lease on the building was for 7 years and I planned to retire from brewing at the age of 67, in early 2019, no later. But it looks like I shall finally hang up my apron in 2017, six-and-a-half years into the project and 5 years after selling my first beer (27 June 2012). A number of factors have conspired to bring me to this position. Firstly, I have been staving off the requests, demands even, from Stef my wife, to give up the brewery and move house. With the brewery being so small I don’t think it would be viable if I didn’t have my house and curtilage just across the street, so I have resisted as long as I could. Then there is my eye. I was diagnosed with a large naevus in August 2010, discovered at the back of my eye just before I left the Norfolk Museums Service. It was suspicious but couldn’t fulfill all the characteristics of a choroidal melanoma, so as the available treatment would most likely lead to the loss of the sight in my left eye, I elected to have it closely monitored and if it changed we would immediately go to treatment with proton beam radiation therapy. Well, in 2015 it did change and I went to the excellent Douglas cyclotron facility at Clatterbridge on the Wirral to have it done. It was all quite pleasant really; scary at first but not as actually as bad as I had feared. An operation in London to prepare the eye with inert tantalum clips as targets for the treatment, then a rehearsal at Clatterbridge and finally a second rehearsal and then the treatment, 4 doses over a week. The after-effects were not severe but I knew I ran the risk of damage to my sight after about a year, as the naevus is so close to the optic nerve. Well, sure enough, fourteen months after the treatment the sight began to get worse and now I am practically blind in my left eye. I still drive but it’s had a big psychological impact.

I am also being regularly monitored with various types of scanning for the most likely outcome if there is metastasis of the cancer: there’s an 80% likelihood it will spread to my liver when it does, although it could pop up anywhere. It won't end well.

That’s not to mention all the other things that have happened to my health since I started brewing: I have to wear hearing aids after a very loud bang next to my ear in a confined space when I levered up the shive of a cask. I also injured my spine trying to move a huge pallet-full of bottles into the brewery in 2013. Not to mention the repetitive strain injury from crown capping and driving champagne corks into 21,000 bottles. There’s more but I won’t bore you.

So, what next? Firstly I am going to brew furiously whilst simultaneously closing down. I’d be happy to sell it as a going concern, or let my son take over or end the lease and sell the equipment. Come January I shall qualify for my old age pension, so that changes the outlook too. I shall open up various other avenues of endeavour that don’t require capital investment: write that geology book that’s been much needed for 30 years; travel more and get back into art. There’s geology research to do and the website to develop and the maintenance and sale of Chesterfield Lodge, my lovely house. I also have to give a lot more attention to my wife, whose own health has taken a steep decline in recent years.

Not long before my eye began to change I released an oak tree into the wild. I grew it from an acorn and have been torturing it in a flower pot in my garden, forgetting to water it and generally maltreating it for a number of years. Fortunately oaks are as tough as old boots, which I suppose is why they are the climax vegetation of this part of the world if they are given a chance. Anyway, it is doing really well now and shot up through the last summer. It is on one of my favourite walks and so, as I pass it regularly, it is a constant reminder of the extra life that I am enjoying. I think I shall request that my ashes are scattered at its base so I can repay my debt for mal-nourishing it in its infancy. I hope I get to see it grow up into a big strong tree before that happens.

Pilot is on the runway

This is a milestone. No longer a wannabe, I am a brewer! Yes! [Punches the air in triumph]. With plenty of work still to do in the Poppyland Brewery, and licences still to be issued, not to mention more brewing equipment to make, I felt I urgently needed to get some beer to market for the summer season in Cromer. Hence I became a cuckoo brewery (well if it's good enough for Mikkeller, it's good enough for me). With much help and support from St. Brendan of the Iceni and the loan of two breweries I have brewed my first commercial beer and it is resting quietly in the back of the Poppyland Brewery now, ready for sale on 30 June 2012.

A lovely krausen from the US-05 yeast taken on Brendan's phone.

At Brendan's suggestion I made a 90 litre mash tun from an old whisky barrel and it made its debut at the Elveden Brewery where I mashed-in (twice) and boiled the wort. It fermented a week there before it was racked into a couple of 18 gallon casks (or kilderkins) and was taken to the Iceni Brewery for dry hopping and secondary fermentation under air-locks. Today, with Kathy's help (Brendan's assistant) we bottled off 200 x 660 ml bottles of Poppyland 'Pilot'. This is a big IPA based on Branthill Maris Otter malt, with a predicted abv of 5.9% and packed full of hops (Columbus, Cascade and Summit). Two thirds of the output was dry hopped with American Summit hops and one third dry-hopped with Columbus (which Mrs Brewer suggests should be called 'Co-Pilot' - nice one). This has huge aroma and grapefruit flavours and a long hoppy finish. Just the sort of thing to please the beer connoisseur on a summer's day. Enjoy. You can get some from me or The Cromer Farm and Health Shop in Tucker Street (behind the church).

Street art and graffiti

There is a difference.

Near the Centre Pompidou, Chatelet, Paris I was astonished by this incredible image:

Sorry, don't know the artist. 20 April 2012

Street art inspires romanticism, stirs patriotism, spreads revolution, even breeds anarchy.

In West Street, Cromer the spray-can anarchist evidently approved of my revolutionary new idea - the Poppyland Brewery:

1 September 2011

Not like in Colombia, where a microbrewery in Bogota received a deadly message of disapproval, delivered to one of its pubs in the form of a hand grenade.

I keep out of politics and just let the beer do the talking.

Ales Gas 'n Lager

When I noticed that the sign over the shop window was made of screwed-on plastic letters it reminded me of Fawlty Towers. I could move them around, I thought and save myself a few bob. So that's how ALLEN'S GARAGES in West Street, Cromer became ALES GAS 'N LAGER. That just about sums up the future output of my proposed POPPYLAND BREWERY. The gas of course has nothing to do with the effects of too much beer on your digestion but everything to do with the by-products of fermentation. As are real ales and lager of course.

Among beery aficionados lager has earned itself a deservedly poor reputation in Britain for the ultra-cold, insipid, gas-laden yellow liquid that spurts from keg taps the length and breadth of the country. Ubiquitous, bland and over-priced. Some people seem to like it but do they have any idea what real lager should taste like? And that there used to be black lagers and flavour-some lagers and all kinds of different lagers besides Pilsners, stored for months in cold cellars and caves before coming to perfection and being released by the proud brewer to quench the thirst of a grateful public?

When I eventually do brew beer for sale I want the drinker to think, Wow! That's extraordinary. A different drinking experience and worth every penny.

Lucky breaks

The building work on the brewery has moved on a massive step this week. We have our very own hole in the road, complete with 4-way traffic light system. Don't try this at home folks. It's very expensive but it has to be done to get drainage into the brewer and get a flue liner up the chimney. Our apologies to our neighbours, the good people of Cromer and travellers for the noise and delays.

Mackinnon Construction sent down a great team, including three Pauls-in-a-pod, all in identical orange overalls and all with shaved heads: Paul Newton, Paul Kelly and Paul Fulcher.

We have been blessed with brilliant weather, which always helps but yesterday two strokes of luck helped the project on it's way. Firstly a problem with a jackdaw's nest in a crank in the chimney prevented Swiftair from completing the new flue lining.

A frantic call to two local chimney sweeping firms found one of them busy and the other one not answering the mobile. I left a message and set about trying to find a solution to clearing the flue. A few minutes later a call came in. It was the Dean Knowles the chimney sweep from Woodburners of Gresham. He had been in Overstrand and out of signal range. But as he was coming through Cromer he found himself sitting in a queue of traffic, waiting to go through some traffic lights where the road was up. He checked his voice mails while he waited and got my desperate message. He was actually queuing at our very own traffic lights: how lucky is that? He came straight on site and in no time he and his colleague - another Dean! - had the chimney cleared of sticks and the brush poking triumphantly out of the chimney pot.

  Dean Knowles (right) and Dean Patrick his assistant. Thanks guys.

So Swiftair could get on, completed their flue lining and all was well. The second stroke of luck came when the Mackinnon digging team, having picked their way carefully around numerous buried services - power cables, phones, water main, gas pipe and old sewer - eventually found the main sewer running down the middle of the street at 2 metres depth. To everyone's astonishment they found that the Victorian constructors had provided a junction ready for us to connect straight into the sewer, so no cutting was needed. How lucky was that? Our hole had landed right on it, purely by chance, or maybe it was providence.

It just seems that this project was meant to be and that's not the first time I have said it. Someone or something seems to be guiding events and it is shaking my atheistic beliefs to the core.