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Newspapers and Magazines written for include: The Observer |
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The following article was first published in Waitrose Food Illustrated in June 1999 and can be found on waitrose.com. Seth Linder discovers a 13th-century manor house in rural Suffolk, home to a brewing enterprise which will put British bottled beers on the map. Photographs by Lisa Linder. My fascination with St Peter's beer began with the bottle - an elegant, green oval-shaped design, suggesting both tradition and individuality. According to the label, St Peter's is based in a medieval hall in Suffolk, has a handful of historic-sounding pubs and a range of 12 traditional beers to its name. I had visions of an ancient brewing lineage, a chairman with a country burr and a seat in the Lords. I couldn't have been more wrong. In reality, chairman John Murphy had no previous brewing experience when he founded the company in 1995, after selling his hugely successful international branding company, Interbrand. Speaking in his offices next to the brewery's tiny but atmospheric flagship London pub, the Jerusalem Tavern, a converted 18th-century Clerkenwell coffeehouse, Murphy explains that the leap from branding to brewing was a logical one. "I couldn't understand why England, with its unique reputation for traditional ales, didn't have a recognised brand, like Guinness in Ireland or Budweiser in the US, a beer that everyone around the world associates with us." Murphy decided that the answer lay in the 'tied' system. Unlike their overseas competitors, UK breweries control the distribution of their beers through their pub networks, so they don't need to think in terms of brands. Murphy felt he was ideally placed to seize the opportunity this shortcoming presented. "The world is interested in English beers," he continues, "but English brewers do not concern themselves with branding. I know about international branding and marketing. That is the vision behind St Peter's." Quality, innovation and tradition were to be the cornerstones of this vision, but there was a problem. How do you create tradition? It was at this point that Murphy discovered the magnificent St Peter's Hall - a moated, 13th-century manor hall in East Suffolk, with listed farm buildings that could be converted into a brewery. Fortuitously, it was for sale. The hall not only supplied Murphy with a name for his brewery but an acquired heritage, too. In addition, the company bought and restored two ancient pubs in Suffolk - the Cornwallis Arms and the De La Pole Arms - which, with the Jerusalem Tavern, have earned St Peter's the 1999 Good Pub Guide Pub Group of the Year award. The expensively refurbished hall is now the company's head office - as well as a bar and restaurant, open to the public on weekends. Installing a high-quality brewery in the listed farm buildings was more problematic, though. The need to respect the integrity of the buildings resulted in a production process that is slightly out of synch - the pasteurisation vessel is placed before the fermentation tank - but still ideally suited to producing the brewery's more intriguing but low-volume beers, such as Grapefruit Beer and Honey Porter, as well as the more popular Golden Ale and Old-Style Porter. Along with sales director George Wortley, who has a long background in pubs and hotels, and original head brewer, Richard Eyton-Jones, Murphy chose a large and innovative range of traditional beers to brew, many of which had not been seen in this country for decades. "We wanted a good range of beers, a balance between light and dark ales," Wortley says. "The recipes are all traditional. The way we produce porter, for instance - mixing two mashes, as opposed to the currently popular single mash - is the way proper porter should be made. And the fruit beers we produce haven't been made in this way for years." Unlike the more complex brewing process used in the production of Belgian beers, St Peter's fruit beers are created by adding a fresh-fruit infusion to their excellent wheat beer at the end of fermentation. It is the company's one invention, the world's only Grapefruit Beer, that has won most plaudits. Following some unsuccessful experiments - such as a delicious raspberry beer that, sadly, left its flavour indelibly on the pipes of local pubs, and an apricot beer that became disastrously unpleasant when produced in commercial quantities - it was decided to try a grapefruit beer. The result is a superb mix of fresh wheat beer and the zesty taste of the grapefruit pith, leaving a deliciously clean citrus aftertaste. The production process starts with pure water drawn from the estate's 500-year-old well. The water is unusually soft for the area, being naturally filtered through a deep layer of chalk. But, according to recently installed head brewer Mark Slater, the real flavour of the beer comes from the mix of malts, which are all supplied by a local Suffolk firm. Stored in a medieval barn, the various combinations of malts - such as Halcyon and Chocolate for the darker ales - are milled to create the grist, which is then placed into the mash tun. The grist is then mixed with water at a temperature of 80°C to create a wort, which is siphoned off into coppers. Next the hops - Challenger and Goldings, both from Kent - are added to the wort, which is boiled before being transferred to the fermentation tanks. It is here that Slater adds the yeast, which was selected from more than 350 different strains held at the National Collection of Yeast Cultures at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich. "This is real brewing," says Slater, who has previously worked for Courage and Usher's. "You have to muck in and get your feet wet, but this kind of involvement means you have a much greater effect on what goes out the door." Apart from pasteurisation, which is essential if the bottled beers are to have a long shelf life, and a filtering of the mash, St Peter's is resolutely traditional in its beer-making methods. Even the bottling and labelling are done by hand, despite more than 20,000 bottles a week being in production. Some cask ales, including best bitter and mild, are brewed for St Peter's own pubs and some other local outlets, but the company's vision is essentially bottled. Here, perhaps, was John Murphy's greatest stroke of luck. Looking for a distinctive design, he remembered a beautiful old bottle he had bought at an antique fair years before. Thus, the oval quart, produced by one Thomas Gerrard, the owner of a tidewater pub on the Delaware river near Philadelphia in 1770, became the model for today's 500ml bottle. So, which beer does Murphy think will realise his vision of an internationally branded English ale? "As most people put beer in the fridge, we wanted a product that tasted good chilled, that was light, tending towards a lager, but was still authentically English. That's why we created our Golden Ale." St Peter's is now gearing up for its next challenge - to launch in the huge US market. It is already big in Japan, France and Sweden, but Murphy feels that St Peter's is yet to fulfil its potential. But therein lies the catch. Having already raised production levels several times to keep pace with soaring demand, the brewery is nearing its capacity. However he solves that problem, John Murphy is clear on one thing: the quality and innovation that has earned St Peter's its reputation will never change. See also 'The Knowledge: Dublin' - also published in Waitrose Food Illustrated. |
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