Cornish delight
The Ring o’ Bells Brewery in Launceston was born almost by default. Nigel Huddleston reports on how it’s now flourishing
When Adrian Carter and his family moved from the north of England to Cornwall in the south west retirement was the thing uppermost on his mind.
The family settled into a cottage called Ring o’ Bells because of its proximity to the parish church at North Hill, on the edge of Bodmin Moor.
Digging around in the garden outside the house one day he found an old cider press and after some detective work found the cottage had originally been built as accommodation and an ale house for workers employed building the church.
Carter had worked as a brewer for Bass before joining the army, and kept his hand in with a small half-barrel home-brewplant.
He installed it in the outbuildings of the cottage but soon ran into significant problems. Carter takes up the story.
“I brought my little half-barrel brew-plant with me. My strain of yeast would become contaminated every time I did a brew and I didn’t understand why.
I got a fresh batch of yeast but the same thing happened again.
“Eventually I realised that the stone walls of the building were full of yeast from the old days, which meant we couldn’t do the brewing there.” Instead of giving up, Carter sent samples from the wall off to a yeast bank in an attempt to find a match W so that he could start brewing again with the original stain of yeast.
“It was mutated but we tried to pin it down to the nearest possible yeast strain that’s possible on the databanks. We then tried to hibernate that and mate it with ours, to mutate .....
To read the rest of this article you can buy this issue
or subscribe to Beers of the World to have every issue delivered direct to your door.
By Nigel Huddleston
Section : Spotlight
Page number : 30
