Wine snobs beware. That vintage is beer.

It looks like a Burgundy or Port, but it’s a barley wine

It was a sacred place, for heaven’s sake - a shrine. Now I go to pay my respects and it has a sign saying Hotel du Vin. This is adding insult to injury; dedicating to wine a building that was previously the Brakspear’s brewery.

“Every inch of the superb brewery architecture has been converted,” purrs the website when I check.

If it was superb, why did it need converting? To what…?

Brakspear’s ales themselves are born again in an unusual and wholly admirable exercise, but I am weeping for this lovely old brewery. (“Perhaps there are other breweries as evocatively English, but none more so,” I wrote in The Independent in 1993).

I pop into a nearby sweetshop for a packet of Kleenex.

“Nice, isn’t it,” smiles the lady behind the counter, nodding toward the Hotel de Brasserie Perdu. “Yes it’s nice now.”

“Nice NOW? Not before, eh?” It must have been terrible before…having a brewery in the middle of the town.

I hear this kind of thing so often. What could be finer than to have a brewery in the middle of your town? Even a pretty average brewery is a potential source of human happiness. To have a brewery producing Brakspear’s ‘ordinary’ Bitter must surely have been a source of endless pride (as opposed to London Pride, though I would have been pretty proud of that, too).

I rate Brakspear’s Bitter as Britain’s best, and a world classic, in the most recent, but not very (year 2000) edition of my Pocket Beer Book.

I award the same accolade, in its category, to Fuller’s E.S.B.

H.....

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By Michael Jackson

Section : The Beer Hunter

Page number : 7