The beer that time forgot (Hook Norton)
Hook Norton in Oxfordshire is part visitor attraction, part brewery. It also makes great beer. Sally Toms went for a
look round
Mention Hook Norton to a real British beer enthusiast and watch what happens. Their eyes will mist over with fondness and they’ll stare off into the distance.
“Ahhh, Hook Norton,” they’ll murmur, smiling to themselves as if remembering a long lost love.
By all accounts, this is a rather special brewery and a place of pilgrimage beer lovers.
So it was with a great amount of excitement that I drove across England to Oxfordshire on the shortest day of the year (and possibly the foggiest, which might explain how I managed to get so horribly lost).
The area is one of contrasts: busy motorways, ugly cities, stress; then all of a sudden you’re in the Cotswolds, home of Britain’s prettiest villages. These are little stone and thatch settlements with cute names like Wigginton, Hinton-in-the-Hedges, Chipping Norton and, well, Hook Norton.
Then the brewery is upon you: a huge puffing Dickensian pile, towering out of the grey fog like the Addams family holiday-let. It is beautiful, you couldn’t imagine one more picturesque.
Hook Norton Brewery was founded by John Harris in 1849. As with many breweries, the site was first a farmhouse with maltings. It even had its own spring, so things couldn’t really have turned out any other way.
The passage of time has been kind, and the brewery has stayed in the family (now in the hands of James Clarke, John Harris’s great great grandson). Though the business was named after the village itself rather than the family name, as it was believed peo.....
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By Sally Toms
Section : Brewery Focus
Page number : 16
