In the mid-2000s I worked as a freelance tour guide at Fuller’s Griffin Brewery on the bank of the Thames in west London. I lived in Fulham, which, due to a big bend in the river was opposite the brewery, albeit about a mile away. When the wind blew in a certain direction it carried a hint of whatever was being brewed that day and I could always tell when it was London Porter because the roasted chocolate and coffee notes were robust enough to survive the breezy journey to my nose.
A Key To The Brewery
Being a Fuller’s tour guide was one of the most enjoyable work activities I have ever undertaken. Not only did I meet countless dedicated and amusing beer lovers; learn how to cellar and serve cask ale; was issued with a key which gave access to all areas in the brewery – a dream for beerios – but I was introduced to one of the world’s greatest beers, Vintage Ale. Vintage Ale is a limited-edition beer brewed once a year and to me it is the epitome of the idiom ‘greater than the sum of its parts’. London tap water, or to use the old-school sobriquet, corporation pop; pale and crystal malts; a blend of hops that varies year on year; and Fuller’s distinctive yeast which confers an orange marmalade aroma.
Time – The Most Significant Influence
For drinkers of fresh, light, and fruity red wine, November is a date for the diary for that is when le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé! For drinkers of rich, full-bodied fruity barley wine, September is the notable month because the new Vintage Ale is released. Unlike Beaujolais Nouveau which is the wine equivalent of Dorian Grey in that it will not improve with age, Vintage Ale reveals its most spectacular characteristics after a few years. Time has the most significant influence on how the beer develops and it works in collaboration with the malts and hops, the alcohol (8.5% ABV), and, because it is bottle conditioned for a secondary fermentation, the half a million live yeast cells continue to bestow their magic. Beers fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae as Fuller’s are derive up to 50% of their flavour from the yeast.
Liquid Time Machine
I recently had the tremendous pleasure of tasting six iterations of Vintage Ale ranging from 2007 to 2019, plus the newly issued 2023 to compare the impact of aging. Along with other beer writers I sat in an 18th century town house hidden behind Britain’s oldest wisteria which greets visitors to the Griffin Brewery. Our guide was John Keeling, Fuller’s former brewing director, who brewed the first ever Vintage Ale in 1997.
We travelled in a liquid time machine which took us from toffee and raisins for the tasting notes in the 2023 edition, to Port wine, butterscotch, and nuts in 2007, then Demerara sugar, vanilla, spice, maple syrup, red berries, candied fruits, and molasses in the intervening years. Sometimes the hops were apparent, often notes of brandy were prominent, Dundee cake and caramelised orange were always present. And there was something incorporeal which felt to me like reverence for what we were about to receive, privileged to be drinking it, and the realisation that this was an experience that could only happen once exactly as it had because if we repeated the exercise the following year, time would have passed and the beers would taste different.
A Ritual
Every encounter I have with Vintage Ale is memorable, but there are two in particular I remember. My friend Susanna Forbes, drinks writer, was moving from her home near Epsom racecourse to Herefordshire to establish the marvellous Little Pomona Cidery with her husband James. Susanna was in possession of a bottle of Vintage Ale from 1997, its inaugural year. She had always promised to share it with me for a special occasion, and her leaving the south-east to move to Ciderland was just that. By then the beer was around 18 years old and incredibly rare. Susanna lived at Tattenham Corner, so we walked onto the racecourse and stood by the commemorative plaque to Emily Wilding Davidson, the Suffragist who just over a century previously in 1913 died after being knocked over and trampled during the Derby when she attempted to attach a “Votes For Women” sash to the King’s horse. We opened the bottle, poured the beer into two tulip glasses and silently thanked Emily Wilding Davidson for campaigning for the right of women in Britain to vote. The beer was sublime, like velvet on the tongue and reminiscent of Pedro Ximenez sherry. But the most profound aspect was the intangible sense of what we were doing being a ritual, like Holy Communion.
Beer or Champagne?
And from reverential to irreverential. I was once invited by a friend for Sunday lunch at the home of a superstar TV personality. We had a pleasant time but I was never invited back, not that I wanted to be. The reason may have been the bottle of Vintage Ale I took as a gift. It had been maturing for five years and as I sat on the train heading to my destination, I wondered if he would appreciate the peerless quality of the beer, or whether I should buy a bottle of Champagne instead. I kept to my plan, thinking that surely everyone would appreciate the precious character of this extraordinary beer which looked so elegant in its box. Wrong! I handed him the gift and explained how Vintage Ale has a numbered label because it is a limited edition, that this bottle had already been aging for several years, and how perfectly it would match strong cheese, Brandy Snaps or Sticky Toffee pudding. He took it with a casual ‘Oh thanks’ then put it aside without looking at the box as he effusively thanked his other guests for the champers they brought. My mind reading skills knew he was not impressed and thought I’d given him the equivalent of an old can of Newky Brown. I often wonder what happened to that beautiful bottle of beer. Judging by the expression on his face I doubt he regifted it. Perhaps it is lurking somewhere in his huge house. Maybe the cleaner rescued it from the bin to take home and had a celestial moment when they drank it. That’s the scenario I want to imagine.
Desert Island Beer
Fuller’s Vintage Ale is one of my desert island beers, not just for its magnificent flavour profile but because each bottle comes in an individual cardboard box. A case contains 12 bottles so if I really was cast away I would remove each bottle to bury in sand at the shoreline so the waves kept them cool, then line up the empty boxes, grab a coconut and use it for 12-pin bowling, passing the days playing the game until another year had gone by and I could open a bottle and taste how it had changed since the last time.
I’d stay for 12 years then I would manage to escape, forced to act by having drunk all the beer, and return to Britain just as the new Vintage Ale was released then enter the international pin bowling championships. And if I won the world title and was ever invited onto the chat show hosted by you know who, I could ask him what happened to that incomparable gift I gave him. Or maybe I don’t want to be enlightened because its fate might be too distressing…
Jane Peyton
