14. Falling in Love with Beer

   In our very first blog we introduced ourselves and skipped over a very important part of our lives…how we discovered our love of craft beer. In this blog we want to take you back to 2003 the year that our first baby was born and the year we were introduced to real ale and a whole new world of beer flavours and styles. Charlie was born in Oxford early in the morning on the 27th of April. At the time our home was a small cottage in the village where Nick grew up just opposite our favourite pub the Plough Inn. When Charlie was just three months old a seemingly insignificant event changed the direction of our lives. The house next door sold and we had new neighbours.

    The day that Fin and Loz moved in we introduced ourselves over the garden fence. We liked them immediately. Just a few days after that first meeting we set off for a long weekend with family and friends at the Cropredy Music Festival as we had done every year since we met. Fin and Loz were also going and they had been going even longer than us. They were definitely our kind of people! That weekend we arranged to meet ‘on the ledge’ in a field with 20,000 other festival folk. We discovered that we shared a love of food and music but Fin and Loz had another passion - BEER. The Craft Beer movement started in the early 1980’s on the West coast of America and by the 1990’s had reached across the Atlantic. In 2003 we knew absolutely nothing about Craft Beer. Fin and Loz were ahead of their time in recognising the quality and variety of beers available and the value of small independent breweries. It is a popular misconception in Britain that Craft Beer did not exist before James Watt and Martin Dickie started BrewDog in 2007. Long before the BrewDog punks introduced Craft Beer to the masses Fin and Loz were collecting beer and traveling the world visiting bars, breweries, beer festivals and tastings. They knew more about beer and brewing than we could ever hope to learn. This was the start of an amazing friendship and an education that would go on to shape our lives.

    In April 2004 less than a year after we met Fin and Loz and just before our daughter Sarah was born, another significant thing happened. Our village was shaken by the news that the owners of our much loved pub had decided to close. We joined forces with other villagers in campaigning against the closure, however as it was a freehold property our hands were tied and sadly we were unable to “Save the Plough”. As homeless Plough Inn regulars we met in local pubs and shared our sadness and frustration at the loss of such an important and viable village asset. It was during one of these get-togethers that someone suggested a positive rebellion would be for the village to host a beer festival. Although this suggestion was met with great excitement we soon realised that, as none of us had even been to a beer festival, the plans should be led by Fin and Loz. Luckily we were in great hands.

     The first Merton Beer festival was held in September 2004. Local businesses sponsored barrels of beer in the Real Ale Bar, we had T-shirts, beer glasses and programmes printed. We also had a beer tent serving ‘regular’ beer, wine and spirits, children’s entertainment and craft and food stalls. In the evening five live bands played our articulated lorry stage. Buoyed by the success of the first event we made a decision to host a Winter Ales Festival the following February. For the next ten years we organised two beer festivals a year. In that time we raised money to build a new playground, completely refurbish our village hall and install a kitchen and toilet at our 14th Century church, St Swithun’s. The last summer beer festival we helped to organise was attended by more than 2,000 people and raised over £17,000 for village improvements.

     During this time we joined Fin and Loz on many of their research trips and beer adventures. We visited bars, breweries and beer festivals all over the UK and Europe. Visits to Belgium alone included long weekends in Brussels, Gent, Brugges and Antwerp. We were learning a lot about the beers we liked to drink and started to become interested in how different beers were made. We were also building a community both literally in terms of the village improvements we were able to fund and figuratively. The beer festival was a great focus for our efforts and cemented our friendship. It also brought together our families who were drafted in to help. In the week before the beer festival we built bars and erected marquees, set up electrics, sound systems and stages. We also worked them tirelessly over the two days of the festival as barmen, raffle ticket sellers, food servers and babysitters. The festival could never have happened without them. Loz’s parents, Graham and Isobel were a very important part of the beer festival team. Over the years they sold every one of the thousands of beer tokens we sold. Graham also played a part in our story. He had a saying which has been a big influence on our life JFDI - I never heard him swear but this stood for “Just F******* Do It” It was hard to leave but after ten years of sharing a fence with Fin and Loz we made the life changing decision follow our dream and move to Harris.