Authors: Mike Ripley
‘I’ll put you through to Telesales,’ she was saying, though if she’d received an order by carrier pigeon I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I looked again at the lectern and realised that it wasn’t a lectern as it was too big, too wide and tall-backed to have ever fitted in a church or a lecture hall. I then twigged what it
was – it was a post desk, the stand-at sorting desk where a Scrooge or a Marley or a Uriah Heep would open all the post before anyone else in the firm got a look-in. Not only did the person
opening the mail get first crack at any incoming cash or cheques, they also knew exactly what was going on and were thus in a position of power.
Recognising the post desk for what it was would have got me an automatic place on the panel of experts on
The Antiques Roadshow
were it not for the give-away that there was a very tall
man standing behind it opening the morning’s post with a long, ivory-handled letter knife which was attached to the desk by a long brass-link chain.
He was hypnotised by what looked like a bank statement but he eventually noticed me standing there. It was probably the sound of my tongue swelling at the back of my parched mouth which
attracted his attention.
‘Oh, Mr Angel, do forgive me. How rude. Sorry. Welcome.’
He took a pace towards me, holding out a hand and not realising that he still held the letter-opener in the other. The brass chain ran its length and snapped before he got to me, the chain
whipping behind his left leg.
‘Ow! Dammit! Oh, not again.’
The woman on the switchboard raised her eyebrows and shook her head as she plugged into another call.
‘Seton and Nephew, Seagrave’s Seaside Ales. How can I help you?’
The tall man – and he was tall, at least six feet six if not seven – rubbed the back of his leg with his bank statement and hobbled towards me, still holding out his right hand. In
that position I was able to make eye contact with him.
‘I’m Murdo Seton,’ he said.
‘Roy Angel. Are you the Seton or the Nephew?’
I said it for the sake of making polite conversation, but he took it like a question on
Mastermind
.
‘Er . . . no . . . well, not the original one of course. The Founding Fathers were brothers, Othniel and Ezra Seton, and the firm was supposed to be called Seton Brothers but Ezra died in
a tragic accident when a vat of porter burst and flooded the cellars.’
He saw the look in my eyes and mistook it for interest.
‘He drowned. In the brewery’s test brew. Quite tragic.’
But at least he got a drink, I thought.
‘So Othniel Seton brought his brother’s son into the firm, even though he was only ten at the time. It’s been called that ever since and the present board is actually descended
from that nephew. My uncle, both cousins and myself are all from Ezra’s side of the family, not Othniel’s.’
‘They died out?’
From thirst, probably.
‘No, they were all girls.’
The woman on the switchboard was shaking her head quite violently now and looking at her watch. I had the bizarre thought that maybe she’d been working here for thirty years and still
hadn’t been offered a drink.
‘I see,’ I said, wondering how to get out of this. ‘Fascinating.’
‘Yes, it is. Or I find it so.’ He tried to reconnect the letter-opener chain to the desk but failed. He wrapped the dangling chain around it and placed it on top of the desk.
‘Yes indeed. Brewery history is a fascinating subject.’
He looked around for somewhere to put the bank statement, then screwed it into a ball and stuffed it into the pocket of his coat.
‘It’s about time for my daily tour,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘Beatrice here can hold the fort. Have you ever been round a brewery, Mr Angel?’
‘No, I never have,’ I said, brightening and totally forgetting to add:
Not legally
.
I don’t know how tall the average Victorian brewery architect was, but he was either six inches shorter than Murdo or he had a warped sense of humour. On the climb up the
brewery there were no less than eight doorways and archways which I could get through with ease, but for which Murdo should have ducked. Should have, but didn’t. Hit every one with his
forehead. Got the lot.
But it didn’t stop him talking and the second thing I learned about Victorian Tower breweries was that when they said Tower, they meant it and that involved climbing narrow staircases
until we reached the Malt Store on the top floor.
The view through two leaded windows which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a church was spectacular if you liked dark grey seascapes and weren’t worried about the fact that the
seagulls were flying below you. The state I was in, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some of them wearing oxygen masks.
‘So here we are, at the top of the Tower system and these are the three sorts of malt we use: a basic pale ale, a crystal and a chocolate.’
Murdo spun around on his heels, pointing at a platoon of dumpy sacks slumped against the walls. He wasn’t even out of breath. He might be concussed but he wasn’t out of breath.
‘Let me get this right,’ I wheezed. ‘You drag the heaviest thing you use all the way right up to the top here?’
‘We use pulleys and winches of course,’ he said, ‘and if you want to be picky, the water we use is actually the heaviest ingredient.’
‘And that,’ I pointed a finger down the spiral staircase I had struggled up, ‘is way down there under the ground, right?’
‘Well . . . yes,’ he pondered and I got the feeling that normal brewery tours didn’t give him this much trouble, ‘but the beauty of the Tower system is that from here on
gravity takes over.’
He skipped over to an ancient red metal box which looked like a giant coffee grinder – and I wasn’t far wrong.
‘This is our mill, our original mill.’
He said it with pride. I wondered if Beatrice down on the switchboard was an original fixture too.
‘Where we grind the malt into a fine powder which we call grist.’
He paused for dramatic effect.
‘As in . . .’
‘. . . grist to the mill,’ I completed.
‘Why, yes.’ He seemed genuinely crestfallen, then he recovered. ‘The grist goes down to the floor below where we mash it with hot water, which we call liquor for some reason.
Don’t ask me why.’
What did they call thirst?
‘After mashing we boil with hops – good Kentish hops, of course, we use no other – which gives the beer its bitterness.’
‘So there’s beer one floor down?’ I asked.
‘Sort of. It’s still green beer in a sense, not that I mean organic or anything. Though it probably is as we use only natural ingredients and we try and avoid pesticides and
suchlike.’
He tried to describe ‘organic’ with his long, thin hands. I’d never seen anybody do that before. Well, not anyone who actually knew what it meant.
‘But there’s no alcohol in the beer yet. We call it wort, which I’m told is a good old Anglo-Saxon word.’
I know another, I said to myself.
‘Hopped wort to be accurate,’ he went on, ‘which is cooled and run into fermentation tanks and then we add yeast and the wort ferments happily for a few days then we let it
condition itself and then we transfer it through pipes across the yard to the racking lines where it goes into casks or kegs or bottles. But I’ll show you all this.’
I had drifted away and was looking out of the window down into the yard, where Beatrice was click-clacking in her high heels towards the door marked ‘Sampling Cellar’. Two men in
brown brewery logo overalls were heading for the same place from a different angle. The ancient security guard came out of his gatehouse, rattled the gates to make sure they were locked and marched
that way too.
‘So you don’t actually get to sample the stuff except way down there?’ I had my nose virtually pressed against the window by now and found myself eyeball to glassy eyeball with
a passing seagull. He seemed to be smirking at me.
‘That’s right. And all our employees are expected to have at least three halves a day and fill in a sheet of tasting notes so that we can make sure our Head Brewer is keeping his
hand in.’
He flapped a hand at the stairway. ‘Shall we hurry along?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘ Let’s hurry.’
Thirty-eight minutes so far and still not a drop.
We eventually made it down to the brewery yard. By this time – one hour and nine minutes after crossing the threshold, but who was counting? – I was an expert on
brewing. I could spot a ‘rocky head’ on a fermentation vessel at fifty feet and I could appreciate the aromatic properties of hops. (The trick was not just to sniff them, but rub them
between the balls of your thumbs to release the full aroma. What they don’t tell you is that way the aroma stays on your hands for days.)
Across the yard someone in the Sampling Cellar had turned on a light, giving its leaded windows a warm, welcoming, orange glow like a church in autumn. I thought I could hear the tinkle of happy
laughter and I strode out towards the sound.
‘I see you take your undercover work seriously,’ Murdo Seton said behind me.
‘What?’ I stopped and turned.
He was standing admiring Armstrong, reaching out a hand, stroking a wheel arch.
‘Miss Blugden said you were one of the best undercover operatives they used and I can see why now. No one would suspect a cab driver.’
I would, I thought, but said:
‘It’s delicensed of course, but it is ideal for London. Never any problem parking and people usually get out of your way, even buses. Did Veronica really say that?’
He had his hand on the driver’s door handle now.
‘Oh yes, she did. She said undercover infiltration was the second biggest segment of their business after security and risk assessment.’
Brilliant. After all this time and within fifty feet of the Sampling Cellar, he decides to talk shop.
‘I’ve never driven one of these,’ he said dreamily. ‘What’s on the clock?’
‘130,000 miles, or that’s what it says. I wouldn’t put money on it being accurate.’ I looked at the battered Citroën Safari next to Armstrong, noting the three-inch
fringe of rust around the lower bodywork. ‘I see you go for the classic cars yourself.’
‘What? This thing?’ He was genuinely amazed. ‘This is just the old family run-around I inherited from my father. One of the doors doesn’t open any more and I put my foot
through the floor last week but she still starts up every morning. I really ought to take the old warhorse in for an overhaul. Marvellous car: one of the few you can get skis inside. Don’t
see many of them on the road these days, though.’
‘They haven’t made them for about thirty years,’ I said. ‘You don’t even see them in France much.’
‘Really? No wonder the garage charges me so much for spares, but I like the old Safari. Everyone round here knows it and when they see it coming they know it’s me.’
I’ll bet they do – see you coming, that is.
‘You should take it across to France for servicing,’ I said seriously. ‘You’d find it cheaper and you are near enough, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Cheaper, you say?’ He was thinking about it.
‘Much. And you could fill up with cheap beer on the way back,’ I added casually. ‘You could get a fair few cases in the back of that thing.’
He stared at the Citroën as if estimating its cubic capacity and I waited for it to sink in. I had fed him the words ‘France’ and ‘cheap beer’ virtually in the same
sentence. Surely the cartoon light bulb above his head would flash on sooner or later.
It did.
‘Funny you should mention that, because that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
He looked over my shoulder – over my head actually – and noticed the Sampling Cellars as if for the very first time.
‘Shall we do it over a drink?’
One hour and twenty-two minutes.
Bingo.
I warmed to young Murdo as the afternoon wore on, though to be honest after my second pint of Triple S (Seagrave’s Seaside Special) I would have struck up a conversation
with a tax inspector or hugged a traffic warden.
Murdo’s problem – if he had a problem – was that he had been a gangling youth who had left boarding school to become a gangling undergraduate at Cambridge and then had
strolled, bashing his head all the way, into the family business. Along the way, he simply hadn’t got out much.
He had probably looked forty-two since he was eighteen, may even have practised at it, but he was, he said, only twenty-seven, which was a little bit sad. He had absolutely no idea why I went
into a fit of giggles and spluttered into my beer when he said, airily:
‘It was only four years ago, when I came down from Cambridge, and I was wondering what sort of a career to follow . . .’
For goodness’ sake
, I wanted to scream,
your dad owns a brewery!
Where was the problem?
Given that he seemed to have inherited an extra clumsy gene, I could understand why the family firm might not have wanted him working too closely with hot liquids, dangerous machinery or
substances open to abuse, such as alcohol. (I didn’t think it wise to tell him that hops were related to cannabis. Information overload can be an ugly thing.) So a career in the brewery was
not actually a foregone conclusion. It had, however, given him a summer vacation job during his years as a student – starting with mucking out the stables and moving up to supervising the
bottling lines – so, when he finished his degree, it seemed sensible to ‘help out’ in the brewery until he found his vocation.
Surprise, surprise, he was made an Area Manager within a year; Tied-Trade Director (looking after the company’s own pubs) within two; and a member of the Board six months ago. And none of
this had anything to do with him being called Seton?
‘No, not really. I don’t think so,’ he had said seriously.
I had been tempted to ask how many people on the Board were
not
called Seton, but then he was behind the bar pulling the drinks.
The Sampling Cellar was not actually a cellar, it was a miniature pub with an in-built advantage: no customers. Or, at least, no
paying
customers as there were no cash registers. It had
scrubbed wooden tables and chairs, a dart board, a bar billiards table, even a shove-ha’penny board, and a long bar with two pumps of each of the brewery’s beers making sixteen
handpulls in all.