Lead Review
- Book: Trouble Brewing in the Loire
- Location: Braslou (Indre-et-Loire)
- Author: Tommy Barnes
This is no. 2 in the Braslou Bière Chronicles (and if you haven’t read no. 1 – A Bière in the Loire – the author exhorts and cajoles you throughout to pick it up and buy it). Tommy and his partner Rose have settled in Central France, in a small village called Braslou. They are not the only English family dotted around this rural French community.
Tommy left the rat race in London, where he worked as a graphic designer and arrived with Rose and their young son. They are soon expecting another child, a daughter, who arrives like a bundle of energy into the world. Sleep deprivation is only one of the problems that start to beset them. His brewing enterprise starts off well but then a sourness creeps in and the sales start to plummet. The stress of lugging his beer around the autumn and christmas markets in his 1982 Peugeot J9 fireman’s van soon gets to him and he is candid about the alcohol consumption that soon starts to play a part as everything unravels. He experiments with additions to his beer like asparagus and saffron (grown nearby), he shares an enormous amount about brewing (not perhaps always of huge interest but so integral to the narrative) and you learn about the importance of labelling, cleanliness and the optimum temperature needed for process.
He has a menagerie of unruly animals and a larger than life dog, Burt, who is a force to be reckoned with. The dog eats everything and, frankly, the only way is downhill when Tommy finds himself regularly to studying the dog’s droppings to ascertain where, for example, the the button runners of his dishwasher tray may have gone. As the overall situation escalates (the lack of income, not the turd inspections) he starts to channel Princess Diana who gives him a good talking to and points him in new useful directions (he hopes).
In the wings is the fall out from brexit, an unknown entity that feels like an iceberg just waiting to crack their lives open and yet another wobbling block in the precarious Jenga construction of their life in France; as the narrative moves towards March 2020, the reader knows only too well that there is bound to be another blow in the offing with ‘confinement‘ looming.
There are times when the narrative is a little cringeworthy. He is nothing if not honest and ripe in his use of language, but there is a redemptive humour, coupled with acute observation that lends the story a fluency. Ultimately this is a heartfelt memoir of joy and despair and I really want to know what happens to Tommy and his family next!
This is a lovely part of the world, where you can find the smelliest of soft cheeses – Epoisses – which actually isn’t made IN the village which gave it its name, no artisanal cheese shops there! Perhaps the locals are “ashamed of the cheese they unleashed on the world...” You will also find where to get the best croissants!
And we do love a good map and as you open the book you can see how close Braslou is the Loire Valley
Included in the book are 12 previously unpublished beer-infused recipes – using Tommy’s beers of course – created by Tom Matthews of the Chatsworth Bakehouse in Crystal Palace.
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