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http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_e6HKB6yk9c...00/brian64.jpgHello, I'm Brian Cant. *Sighs wearily*. Yes, I AM sure it's spelled with an 'A'!
This is an admission of being an old fart now I guess, but do you remember Play School? The highlight of every programme – before you were old enough to be sneery about who was hotter, Hamble or Jemima – was when they went through one of the windows to go and have a look at the world outside their pastel-toned Neverland. Would it be the square window? The arched window? Or the… the……. The ROUND window! That pause taught Chris Tarrant and Reality TV presenters everything they know.
Once safely through the appropriate window we always seemed to end up in a factory somewhere. After a while they all blurred into one, but they never failed to fascinate. In the 1970s Britain’s economy was still manufacturing-based, and there was something both soothing and compelling about watching unidentifiable bits of extruded plastic pass along a conveyor belt, through various stamping and shaping and colouring and bending and cutting machines, the duff ones being lifted from the belt by blank-faced yet somehow cool factory workers in white coats and hair nets, until at the end you recognised ranks of shiny, brand new dolls. Or cars. Or ready meals. Everything in creation seemed to come from a production line, and Play School visited every single one of them. The windows seemingly looked in on God’s own workshop.
I’m reminded of this every single time I visit a brewery, and it makes me wonder if this current generation of brewers – worldwide – somehow all saw Play School. Because while beer writers and aficionados may profess a passion for hops, or yearn to see ancient coppers still toiling away, or breathe in the fresh, fruity aroma of rocky yeast from open square fermenters, as far as the brewers themselves are concerned there is one star attraction and one only: the bottling line.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_e6HKB6yk9c...ling_plant.jpgGod moves across the face of the brewery
Brewers love their bottling lines. We often talk about the uneasy and complex relationship between the brewer and his yeast in which the microscopic organism is always the ultimate boss. But the same applies to the bottling line. It’s a cruel mistress that enslaves and fascinates them. They love it and hate it. They want to smash it with hammers on the frequent occasions when something goes wrong, and to become one with the elegant dance of its shiny, sterile perfection when it works properly.
The last brewery I visited was Hall & Woodhouse, and despite the extensive tour and the fact that we got to see the beer being mashed in, the bottling line wasn’t running and they couldn’t apologise profusely enough. To hear them, you’d think they’d got us all the way to Dorset under false pretences. They genuinely thought they’d let us down. This reaction is exactly the same whenever I visit a brewery where the bottling line isn’t running.
Many brewers seem prouder of the bottling lines than they do of their actual brewery. This is literally the case if you visit the main SABMiller brewery in Milwaukee. They show you a video of how beer is made, then take you on a tour of the bottling and packaging lines, and the distribution depot. They tell you all about how much beer they ‘truck and train’ across the US and dazzle you with statistics. Then it’s on to the tasting room. When I asked if we were going to see the actual beer being actually brewed in what was an actual brewery – in which we were partaking of a brewery tour – or if they were going to talk about how their beer is brewed or with what ingredients, I was told no, because compared to the bottling and distribution of beer, brewing itself is “pretty boring”.
Perhaps in Miller’s case that’s true. But even good breweries worship their bottling lines like Pacific Cargo Cults venerate aeroplanes.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_e6HKB6yk9c.../251817587.jpgYou're impressed, right? You sure as hell better be, boy. You don't wanna make me come over there, I'm tellin' ya.
When I visited Asahi in Tokyo we had to watch the bottling line for half an hour. We were given every single specification. They told us that the man who invented Kaiten sushi – the conveyor belt with dishes that come around to your seat – was inspired by watching this very bottling line. He probably dreamt it up in desperation, a ruse to get out of there. “Yes, it’s lovely, really it is, but I’ve got to dash – I need to, um, that’s it! I need to invent a completely new model for how restaurants work! It’s been lovely though, Bye!”
For the rest of us, paying homage to the bottling line is a sort of penitence, a sacrament that must be performed before we can proceed to the heaven of the sample room. So you stand in a strip-lit metal cavern, mute as the shrill chink of glass deafens you, and watch reverentially for about five minutes, pondering, wow, think about how much beer that is. If you drank two or three bottles every day, how long would it take you to get through that lot? Gosh, they’re a much bigger brewer than you think. And then when you run out of such reflections you turn and indicate that you’re ready to move on, and the brewer looks at you, first hurt, like you’ve said you can’t tell what his five year old son’s drawing is supposed to be of, and then angry, and he grabs you by the hair and slams you against the safety railings and twists your heads to face the conveyor, and growls, “Look at it. I SAID LOOK AT IT. WHAT? YOU’VE ALREADY LOOKED AT IT? WELL LOOK AT IT SOME MORE! AND KEEP LOOKING AT IT UNTIL I TELL YOU THAT YOU’VE LOOKED AT IT ENOUGH!”
Two hours later, hungry and scared, you see him finally turn without a word and leave through a door you’d forgotten existed, into a world you never thought you’d see again. And then you’re in the sample room tasting beers and he’s back to his old self, and everyone pretends nothing happened, and you have a great time.
I said look at it.
Bottling lines are expensive pieces of kit and they are an amazing feat of engineering, so many tiny parts all working in concert. Something has to go wrong, and when it does it must be as frustrating as it is when I spend hours working on a document and then the computer crashes and I lose it. And I know that bottling lines can transform the fortunes of a brewery, both in terms of the balance sheet via utilisation of fixed assets, and in the market place by getting your beers out to a much wider geographical footprint than before. But what I could never say to a brewer’s face is that, while we understand that to you your bottling line is unique, and beautiful, and the best one in the whole world, to us it looks like all the other bottling lines, and when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. And remember – a lot of us saw Play School when we were kids too.
But if I’m ever invited to a brewery again after writing this post, I will insist that the entire thing is a joke and in no way reflects my truly feelings, my enduring love and fascination for these wonderful, beguiling pieces of machinery.
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