Off-road

It was an experiment. Can I get our van (half full of beer) over Hardknott pass?

The Lake District is famous for having a large bunch of pointy hard things in the middle, with a number of large flat wet things scattered about between them. This makes for some very attractive views, but it can be a beggar to drive around. Getting past all these obstacles is troublesome - you'll use a lot of diesel and time if you stick to the good roads.

Getting from Eskdale to Langdale was the problem - and Hardknott pass could have been the answer. I've been over there in all sorts of beat-up old cars, vans and mini-buses in the past, and while it has been hairy at times, I've made it. Unfortunately, this time, quite a lot of water was running over the road surface, and one particularly smooth wet patch at one of the wicked hairpin bends proved too much for the limited traction of the (usually trusty) old rear-wheel drive van.

"Oh dear", I exclaimed (or something like that). Still, all I had to do was reverse a couple of bends and then I'd be able to do a 3-point turn and scarper. Sadly, on one of those bends, I lost it a bit and put one of the rear wheels off the road. At this point, I exclaimed something a lot more forceful, because now I was pretty much stuffed. With one of the driving wheels spinning uselessly in mid air there was no going up-hill. Equally, there was no going down - unless I wanted to career down the slope into the gill. At least I wasn't blocking the road.

A few hours later - when the tow-truck arrived - I was borderline hypothermic, really bored and running rather late. So I had to belt back down Eskdale, over Birker fell, up the Duddon and on to Wrynose. The beer did get through, and we had an answer to the question posed above: Our van won't go over Hardknott - at least not in the wet - Maybe I should try again in the dry?

On the road... and on the phone.

The plan seems to be coming together. We're managing to time all our beers so that we can get them out of the fermenters in 6 days - this means that we can brew twice a week, do the cask washing, racking, selling and cleaning - and have time to actually deliver the stuff.
How much easier it would be if (as others might say) "three days to ferment, three days to condition and on the seventh day it's ready'. What we make here is genuinely cask-conditioned beer (real-ale if you will). We know that many of our customers don't want our beer hanging about in their cellars for a week or two before they can start selling it - this means that we have to hold the casks in our store for at least a week after racking (longer for our stronger beers). But that's fine by us - we're not pretending to make real ale. This is the real thing.

Anyway, time & yeast permiting, you'll be able to see the Stringers beat-up red transit belting about the lake district full of lovely beer.

Funny thing happened to our sales team (n=1). While enquiring of the bar manager of a lakeland hotel if they'd be interested in trying some of our beer, we were informed that there were now too many breweries and that, no, they would stick to the ones they knew already. I've been sniggering (at odd intervals) about this all day. I shouldn't laugh - it's serious really. But I'm tickled by the idea of someone saying that (a) his customers have all the choice they need, thank you very much, and that (b) he has enough suppliers competing for his employers custom.

Truly, as Eldridge Cleaver may have said: if you're not part of the solution - you're part of the problem.