Pretty Things Our Finest Regards 2011

OFR is also an ode to barley on a grand scale. Barley is an amazing plant, a small grass seed that started this whole beer brewing thing many thousands of years ago. Barley is such a magical little package: not much to look at, no sugar inside, not much flavour to speak of… our ancestors must have had real imagination to see its potential. The earliest evidence points to barley cultivation starting around 8000 BC. Within 1500 years it was grown on a much larger scale. How did they look at this humble little grain and imagine great oak tuns of liquid? When I’m standing at the brewery in Westport looking up at the 100 and 200 barrel fermenters it’s hard to imagine those twenty-something-foot tanks are filled with sugars derived from a grain that could sit three abreast on a penny. Actually if you lie three barleycorns head to toe, then you get the original “inch” from old England. I just tried laying 18 end-to-end and check it out: 6 inches! (This is the sort of thing we spend our days doing at PT HQ). Lot’s of brewers are metric these days, but I prefer knowing that I stand 230 barleycorns high.