Making beer with love and passion
Posted: Nov 1, 15:43
EVEN a confirmed wine and whisky drinker wouldn’t turn down an invitation to sneak preview a new range of local beers, would they?
At 5.5 ABV (alcohol by volume) this is a serious tipple; red-brown with hints of caramel and faint perfumes of heather and peat.
Its creator chose peat-smoked whisky malt deliberately, to impart a flavour of autumnal moorland.
Wim van der Spek is Dutch, a master brewer trained in Bavaria. He is founder of Calderdale’s newest brewery, in the improbable setting of Turkey Lodge farm, with a fine view across the valley to Stoodley Pike.
It is a beautiful location. But the stainless steel mash tubs and brewing vessels sit in the spotless interior of what was once a pig shed. You’d never guess, except that the slurry run-off channels are still there.
Wim, a 40-year-old tall, shockheaded man, let me sample his new beers. All take their names from the area: there is Withens IPA, Cragg Vale bitter, Hebden’s Wheat, Stoodley Stout, Tod’s Blonde and the Moor Ale.
His palate is obviously more subtle than mine. His descriptions of the beers are garnished with the kind of flavour words you might expect from a wine reviewer: spice, lemon, citrus, berry and even coriander.
I defer to his superior tastebuds, honed no doubt while he studied for his Master Brewer diploma in a brewery near Munich. “I do like the German beers”, he tells me, “Bavaria has more little breweries than the whole of Britain.”
Lanky, thin as a lathe, Wim quietly exudes nervous energy. During my visit he keeps popping into the mash room to check progress on the latest brew.
I am keen to find out how he ended up living in Hebden Bridge.
A third party had already tipped me off about his passion for cycling and I had noticed his bike propped against a wall. So tell me about your trip to Tibet, I say.
With an engaging, modest reluctance, he reminisces.
In the late 90s he spent months cycling some 15,000 miles around Western and Central Asia – yes that is correct – through India, Nepal, Tibet and Pakistan before returning home. Having met Susan Cooper.
Ah, that must be the Hebden connection. Well sort of.
“I first met her in Kathmandu. She was doing VSO and planning to cycle back to the UK. I left to go on to Darjeeling and we exchanged a few e-mails.”
But they met again in a bird sanctuary in Rajasthan, didn’t they? Fate and all that?
“Cyclists on long overland journeys tend to keep bumping into one another”, says Wim.
They cycled together to the Punjab and he had to go home and thence to Bavaria while Sue, originally from Jarrow, Tyneside, cycled to Iran and, on returning to England, found herself a job in Burnley.
He wanted a brewing job in Britain but the nearest he could find to Sue was the Black Isle Brewery at Inverness.
Which made for a difficult long-distance relationship, meeting midway at her folks’ home in Jarrow.
Wim’s expertise as a brewer is palpable and the company motto – on the side of his brand new, long wheelbase van – says it all: “Beer produced with love and passion.”
He trained as a food scientist and spent several years at a veterinary institute for animal science. And though he doesn’t make a big song and dance about it, he has a definitely green-ish agenda.
Those plastic casks in the chill room are lighter, cheaper and less environmentally wasteful than aluminium or stainless steel, he tells me.
And, he has another Big Idea on his list of things to do. Every ingredient he uses is organic and when the Soil Association audit is completed in a month or two, he hopes to be able to market Little Valley beers as authentic organic.