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The Anatomy of a Great Bar
Bragdy Gwynant
by Terry Sullivan
It cost me something in the neighborhood of a hundred and sixty bucks to taste a pint of beer last month. Awfully good pint, though—goes by the name of Cwrw Gwynant—but it’s got limited distribution. Not distributed at all, actually, except for the six-foot trip from the Bragdy Gwynant brewery to its only customer, the Tynllidiart Arms pub directly behind it. Export sales are limited to the tables outside.
This was in Wales, by the way, which you might have guessed from the creative use of Ls, Ys and Ws in the last paragraph. The Welsh, upon gazing at the alphabet and noticing the U is a vowel, concluded that W must then be two vowels. Sometimes. And that an L is an L unless there are two of them together. My Welsh phrasebook instructed me that LL is pronounced by “placing your tongue behind your front teeth and then blowing out but not saying anything.”
The result of this kind of helpful instruction is increased map-reading skills, because it’s impossible to ask directions to places you can’t pronounce. Doesn’t matter anyway, since all directions in that (remote, western) part of Wales invite you drive on the right (wrong) side of an eight-foot-wide road lined with stone walls on one side and hedges with stone walls behind them on the other, while large trucks hurtle toward you and puzzled-looking sheep stand in the middle of the road. I actually passed a sign that said “Caution—oncoming traffic in the middle of the road.” What one was supposed to do about this was unclear. It’s the price you pay for the staggeringly beautiful landscape those sheep are scattered on and under.
I was in Wales at the invitation, and expense, of the generous Visit Wales organization, doing a little light travel writing, and I happened to mention that I’d heard that the smallest commercial brewery in the world, according to the Guinness record book people, was in western Wales, and maybe a little visit was in order. Nothing to it, they said, very nice place. Touch small, of course, but then they’ve only got the one customer. Just point the rental car over Y Mynyddoedd Duon (the black mountains) and head toward Capel Bangor, just down the road from Aberystwyth, can’t miss it, and try not kill too many sheep. Pub was the “Ceredigion Pub of the Year” for 2006, they said. Lovely chips.
Lovely pub altogether, it turned out. The stone building dates to 1688 and it’s owned by Margaret and Mark Phillips, with Mark in the kitchen producing “Quality Comfort Food” and daughter Sian behind the stick, which is where she pulled my pint of Cwrw Gwynant bitter (oh, all right; “COO-Droo” more or less, for short). It was a golden butterscotch color, a rich, creamy malt start, not unlike Calder’s 80/ or a lot of Scottish cream ales, but with the traditional bitter bite at the finish. It’s the handiwork of Chris Giles, a local with a brewing background whose “proper job” is owning a real ale distributing business (Yst Wych Ale. It never gets any easier with these folks) and who lives a couple of doors down. He makes the beer in the aforementioned Bragdy Gwynant, which is a small blue building in front of the pub. Small as in five feet on a side. “Well, it used to be an outdoor men’s toilet,” Giles says “I remember using it often in my time. It’s been slightly re-fitted, of course.”
It’s right smart these days, two years after opening with those new fittings, a fresh paint job, a nice sign with the brewery name, and an extremely compact operation inside the 25-square-foot, uh, facility. “I have a nominal 40.9 liter batch-per-week production, which produces about 8-1/2 gallons of beer,” he said. Pours at 4.2% ABV. And it’s quite popular, Sian had told me. So when I sauntered back in from my self-conducted brewery tour (there being room for one, with nothing left over) for a second pint, Sian informed me that she’d just pulled the final pint for Tim Wyatt, the man on the next stool, as she turned the sign around. It’s being Thursday, she said, I’d have to wait until Monday for another, the same.
Wyatt (“That’s as in Earp,” he said) raised his glass and said cheers, with a Welsh grin. “How’s the pint?” I grumbled. “Today it’s about an 8,” he said, “but you know yourself it changes with the weather. I had a very bad pint in Avon on Tuesday, at the Green King—couldn’t drink it. But this is a good one. I’m on the way back from seeing the wife’s family, and I stopped on the way up a couple of days ago, when it was cooler—you know it changes with the weather--and that one was, I’d say, a 9-1/2. Bloody near perfect.”
If only I had the time. This could be the sole spot on the planet where, come Thursday night, the locals are wishing it would be Monday sooner. Might be cooler on Monday too, although I’d given the beer a 9.5 with a bullet in the first place, but then I’m not from around there.
I settled for a pint of Tom Wood’s Old Timber, a cidery-dry beer with apple and wood flavors, at 4.5% ABV. Good with the fish and chips, which were indeed lovely—and served with a rocket salad in these gastro-pub times—and the thickest tomato soup in the Western world.
And yes, maybe that smallest-commercial-brewery-in-the-world is a bit of a Welsh gag, a little marketing gimmick able to draw American writers through mountain and vale, roads like sidewalks, and a million sheep (“Ten times more sheep than people,” I was proudly told) but it works. And the beer turns out to be worth the trip. Mind you, try to arrive early in the week.
So what was the $160 about? One of those stone walls had contributed a large rock to the mini-road to Aberystwyth, cleverly timed to meet my left front wheel at the moment that a suicidal local loomed in the opposite three-quarters of a lane driving, I believe, a Mack truck loaded with gasoline. If it had been a sheep, it would have been lamb chops, but I wisely chose to sacrifice the tire. The hubcap is still, I’m sure, bouncing through the gorse toward Cardiff. Proof that this happens with a certain degree of regularity was supplied by a Vauxhall dealer a couple of hundred yards down the road from a super-micro-brewery in Capel Bangor. The manager said of course he had a replacement tire; this was Wales. Be happy to put it on and equally happy to zip over to the pub and pick me up when he was done.
The tire was a bit over sixty quid, about $120, and the extra $40 was what the eagle-eyed car rental people back at Heathrow charged me for the hubcap. We always make it a point to check the hubcaps on cars that have been in Wales, they said, with a grin like Tim Wyatt’s. Now if I can find a way to bury that in the expenses, we’ll see exactly how generous, and understanding, those Visit Wales people are.
Other Whisky-Related Classics:
Nice Package |
The Anatomy of a Great Bar
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